He didn't want to go to Syria at all, rather to Libya.

The crackhead who attacked Parliament was pissed off that he couldn't get a passport and leave the country or even get thrown in jail to clean himself up.

"A bad deficiency we still are having is that the mail traffic between mail exchange servers is typically unencrypted."

No, it is not a deficiency but a feature as it highlights that anything but end-to-end encryption is pure rubish (and end-to-end encryption is not so perfect considering that at least one of the two ends can be already pwned).

"The thing that you're forgetting is that you could run for office if you think you're so much better?"

Yes, someone could run for office. But would stand a chance without public visibility and media campaign funded by the powers-that-be?

"It didn't lobby the Spanish government to actually do anything"

Well, you are wrong. USA *do* lobby Spanish government: at the very least, the Monsanto, copyright, "free" commerce... cases are fully documented.

"Socialism isn't bad per se, but it has inefficiencies that reduce total wealth creation [...] Think of it as being a pie {...] In most scenarios the average person ends up with more pie"

Let's say I accept all you say. That, in fact, the ability to "produce pies" of northern-europe style socialdemocracies is in fact shorter than that of "free hands" capitalism and that in most scenarios that ends up with "less pie" for the average person.

It seems that current globablized world (and the one in the years to come) is one of those scenarios that make the exception: the average citizen ends up with less pie now, even if the pie is bigger.

Philip K Dick was right after all - 'The Empire never ended'. King Felix!

It's one thing to claim that the Theory of Gravity isn't quite right because it can't get Mercury's orbit just right, it is another to claim that gravity doesn't exist.
One is an example of skepticism, the other is an example of insanity

Think of it as evolution in action. You can stay on one planet while some disaster takes it out. We have lots of choices of disaster, don't we? The human race can continue via those "space nutters".

Sure, we should try to avoid the disaster, etc., but planets are not forever.

And yet it is right wing governments that are currently implementing the police state in the majority of the western world, usually with the libertarians cheering them on as long as they get a tax break and are allowed to socialize their losses.

"Perhaps the placement of the antenna was a design flaw?"

It doesn't look like. The antenna needs energy to work and the energy comes from the solar panels. Given such a dependency it doesn't seem wrong to make the antenna serviceable dependendant on the solar panels being deployed -with the nice side effect that the panels will somehow protect the antenna at landing.

"I guess the circuits controlling communications got screwed up, so it was assumed to be lost."

I know this is Slashdot and people is not expected to RTFA but you... guess!!!???

From the header:
"Beagle's design incorporated a series of deployable "petals," on which were mounted its solar panels. From the images, it seems that this system did not unfurl fully. "Without full deployment, there is no way we could have communicated with it as the radio frequency antenna was under the solar panels," explained Prof Mark Sims, Beagle's mission manager from Leicester University."

"Except without the public posting of them."

Except the menace of the public posting seems to be the only way for the vendor to move forward.

Is my bet that if Microsoft were doing their best effort to patch the bug and keep informed Google about it and the expected resolution time, they wouldn't have released the information.

"And that fact negates the OPs comment how?"

By stating that since Microsoft business practices equal those of Google and then more, it can't be followed that Google is any more evil than Microsoft.

Signed: Captain "So I thought" Obvious

"The only reasons I've heard for systemd that seem valid are that a system will boot faster and hibernation/sleep modes will work properly"

Add another one: init dependencies working properly.

I.e.: a raid-ed root filesystem out of iSCSI volumes. These kind of scenarios are certainly not very well managed by standard sysv and require manual ad hoc tweaking.