It's not like they have little nanites with cameras crawling around there. Fine, the main thrusters aren't working, but how did they manage to specifically blame it on a piece of rag in a fuel line? Aren't there a lot of ways a thruster can fail to fire?

Ah, sounds like you've been working with lower level stuff then. Any consumer GPS module these days consists of a module smaller than one square cm with serial output that you simply have to parse (plus stuff like a 1 pulse-per-second output pin).

NMEA-0183 is the ASCII protocol used by most marine equipment. GPSes also have a binary protocol which is quite a bit richer. Anyway, among other things they barf out your lat/lon and the date/time in UTC once per second.

By "the GPS protocol" I meant what is sent OTA from the satellites, which does indeed include UTC correction. In other words, there is no excuse for a GPS module to not provide a means of giving UTC. And any GPS that produces NMEA-0183 output has no choice but give corrected UTC time.

The binary SiRF protocol also provides UTC.

And yes the time will be off until you get a fix, but of course you're not supposed to use the timing data until the unit does have a lock.

The leap second is at the end of June 30th. From the IERS bulletin:

2012 June 30, 23h 59m 59s
2012 June 30, 23h 59m 60s
2012 July 1, 0h 0m 0s

So be sure to enjoy your extra long Saturday.

The $GPRMC sentence is required by NMEA-0183 to report UTC.

What brand module did you find that did not do this? I'd like to be sure to avoid it...

The GPS protocol includes the UTC offset, so all GPS units report UTC time.

On 5, 10, 15 or 20 MHz: at 00:00Z you will hear minute consisting of 61 seconds.

If you happen to have a radio controlled timepiece, this will also be your chance to see if they handle the leap second conversion or took the lazy way out and just rely on the next time sync fix the time.

00:00UTC June 30th 2012 is a Saturday evening in North America. What better way to celebrate a Saturday night?

That is complete and utter nonsense. And I say this as an embedded systems developer; we currently have a product that is almost 100% python based. It even runs a webserver in python and the performance is fine. It's a pretty complicated multi-threaded app.

I'm not the only one, either. Only a few months back I was investigating an embedded system, and tons of stuff in it was written in python.

Furthermore, my Symbian S60 smartphone runs python. It actually has some very impressive 3D apps written entirely in python

Python's speed is comparable to any other typical interpreted language.

Linux can be compiled using the Intel C compiler

See include/linux/compiler*.h in your kernel source

Crusade: 1706, respelling of croisade (1570s), from M.Fr. croisade (16c.), Sp. cruzada, both from M.L. cruciata, pp. of cruciare "to mark with a cross," from L. crux (gen. crucis) "cross."

The crusades were Christian. Even the name says so. Don't pretend it wasn't.

Gulags were part of Stalinism. So was building dams, rocketry, idiotic agricultural policies, atheism and many other things. Stalin could have been a devout Catholic and still have had Gulags. What is hard to understand about this?

Wish I had mod points. Finally something informative from an actual pilot instead of a bunch of blowhards.

Hell, I only fly simulators (XPlane) and even there it's clear that automatic landings are last-choice affair. They can't deal with the unexpected (gusts, incursions) at all.

What's behind this? What's non-free about Ubuntu?

Alas, no. The reason stuff like satellites burn up on reentry is that they are moving at least 28000 km/hr (about mach 24) when they reach the atmosphere. They had to be going that fast to be orbiting to begin with.

A very high altitude drop from initial zero speed will reach a pretty high terminal velocity where the air is thin (even mach 1), but it's nowhere near enough to cause a burn up.

Canon EOS cameras can do just that (See OSK-E3). Unfortunately it's been cracked so it is no longer very useful.

What you and others keep missing here is that the Linux kernel devs maintain the Linux kernel, not virtualbox. Virtualbox is not part of the Linux kernel. Distros like Ubuntu will include it for your convenience, but the Linux kernel team has absolutely nothing to do with it. It's not their project.

Do you expect the Mozilla team to fix bugs in third party Firefox plugins? Especially plugins they don't even personally use?

In this case they are simply flagging that a third party driver known to have bugs is loaded. When the virtualbox crew, or perhaps somebody who actually uses it and has dev skills to fix it straighten it out, they'll remove the flag.