In the case of Game of Thrones, there's another reason: money and convenience.

Game of Thrones is mostly being filmed in Belfast due to good facilities, tax breaks and partial funding from Northern Ireland Screen. During casting they specifically looked for local actors. There are a few exceptions such as Sean Bean and Peter Dinklage, but most of the other actors (especially the children) are British. One of the most important reasons is availability: when you're planning a multiple-year series you don't want to engage actors that are likely to drop out due to other jobs. Actors already living in Britain will be far more likely to be available for subsequent seasons than actors based in Hollywood.

FTFY

No. Anyone who works with Linux, develops for Linux, is a Linux sysadmin or just happens to be interested should do it at least once. Then there's us who prefer distros of the more automated type (I'd rather avoid terms like "beginner-friendly", "user-friendly" or "bloated" but you probably know what I mean). People who use some flavour of Linux simply because it fits our needs. We shouldn't go anywhere near LFS.

Cars now may be junk, but at least they're safe junk. You get airbags, deformation zones, traction control, ABS and so on. Even small cars today are much better than the large ones of old. Plus you get a mileage that old cars couldn't dream of.

A study from the recruiting firm Manpower was recently published in Swedish newspapers. It listed HR manager as the number 1 job people want. "Nobody ever wants to do it" seems like quite an incorrect statement.

Source (translated): http://translate.google.se/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.manpower.se%2FMPNet3%2FContent.asp%3FNodeRef%3D58911%26Ref%3DSWEDEN_NORDIC%26LangID%3Dse&act=url

I strongly recommend reading the abstract, it's very descriptive and easy to understand I wish more abstracts were like that.

By the way, what's the deal with describing them simply as "astronomers"? Better than the all-too-often-used "scientists" I suppose, but wouldn't it be even nicer to write "a team of astronomers led by Saul Rappaport from M.I.T."? Scientists are people with names, and the more we use them the more we raise the status of pursuing a scientific career. Science needs more superstars!

I see a lot of comments bashing the overhead costs of different charity organisations. Granted, some of it might be unnecessary, but not all of it. The logistics needed for a relief operation in a catastrophe site is a huge and difficult challenge, and only a sufficiently large and professional organisation can handle it. You need materials, food, shelter, trucks, people with different skill sets, lawyers and diplomats to ensure the cooperation of the local government, and so on. It can be quite chaotic, and of course it's going to be inefficient form time to time - but it helps. Without the people who are handling the economics and the logistics, there would be no food or shelter for the workers in the field to hand out.

No, but I can add a place where people have been equally unhappy without their government: Belgium.

Five years ago Linux was sort of cool to use, required a bit of hacking, and provided a desktop full of eye-candy. The cons were that Wine didn't work so well if you wanted to use Windows programs, there weren't any good drivers for the latest hardware and you often ended up with some non-functioning parts (suspend/hibernate, peripherals, printers, 3D graphics...).

Nowadays the exact same things are still true. Wine still doesn't work reliably. There still aren't drivers for the newest hardware. There are very few Linux games compared to Windows games. Photoshop, MS Office and Outlook still aren't available for Linux.

It's an uphill struggle to keep Linux up-to-date. I'm starting to think it's probably never going to get there - and life is too short to keep tinkering with my own computer. It's not fun any longer when you're still facing the same problems year after year. And I know most of these problems aren't Linux' fault per se but rather lack of third-party support, but that doesn't matter - I'm the one who has to deal with it anyway.

That, and the fact that Windows doesn't suck anymore.

I agree to this. Make a distribution that works like Windows 7 except:

1) Free (as in speech and beer)
2) Huge loads of great free software available
3) Super easy software installation via GUI interface or command line
4) Faster and lighter on resources
5) More possibilities to customize everything
6) Rotating 3D cube! Yay!
7) Command line still available for advanced users
8) Nice online community of friendly people eager to help

Ubuntu used to be this distribution. Which distro comes closest now?

Which is unfortunately nearly every single time.

Be sure to check out Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. It's like Nineteen Eighty-Four but with a private industry spin, foreseeing things like flatscreens, reality shows, censorship... Great stuff.

If services start using Facebook as sole login credential - which Answers.com apparently hasn't done, but Spotify, for instance, has - what's there to prevent millions of users to register accounts like bjsjfo88803 or e93u9f39f for the sole purpose of logging in to other sites? I already do this for Youtube.

Thing is, oil will very soon be prohibitively expensive (we're talking a few decades, tops) and even coal will start to become scarce within a relatively short time span of only a few hundred years. Short I say? Yes. The earth's been around for some 4 billion years and we've been using up its stored resources in a miniscule amount of time.

And when that time comes, well, we'd damn well better have the techontopian future you're talking about or the problem is going to solve itself, likely in a very unpleasant way (starvation, war etc). We don't have a choice - no matter how inferior the renewable energy sources seem compared to fossil fuels, they're our only hope in the long run. The faster we can make the transition, the better.

"He'd always been frightened of ending up as one of those child prodigies that never amounted to anything and spent the rest of their lives boasting about how cool they'd been at age ten. But then most adult geniuses never amounted to anything either. There were probably like a thousand people as intelligent as Einstein for every actual Einstein in history. Because they hadn't gotten their hands on the one thing you absolutely needed to achieve greatness. They'd never found an important problem."

From Harry Potter and the methods of rationality by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky