The whole quote should be this:

"On 10 January, Derham logged -12 ÂC, the lowest temperature he had ever measured. In France, the temperature dipped lower still. In Paris, it sank to -15 C on 14 January and stayed there for 11 days. After a brief thaw at the end of that month the cold returned with a vengeance and stayed until mid-March."

Which means that it stayed at these low temperatures for 11 days, it thawed for 6 days, and then it froze again for 1 and a half month. So it mostly froze hard for a _long_ time, and this means that in that time the freeze has time to really set in. Hence exploding trees.

"We're at a significantly lower latitude than France", New York and Madrid are at the same latitude and don't have the same climate. You really cannot compare like that.

Because with OSS you release early and often. That way people get to test and find bugs. So now you probably'll say that everybody could see that KDE4.0 was buggy. Sure, but there's a difference between knowing it's buggy, and getting bug reports and identifying the most serious problems (called bug triaging). So why did the KDE4 devs call it 4.0? Because the software was mostly feature complete, as in: most of the underlying functionality was there (of course much of the software didn't use it, yet some did). Aaron Seigo did warn that the software "ate your children", however.
But let's forget all that, why are you comparing the products and conduct of a 73 billion dollars worth company and a rag-tag group of open source developers? That just doesn't make any sense, unless you like to keep-and-keep blaming the KDE developers.

I totaly understood your point, but if you'd read the article _you_ would have understood my reply to your point. It is true that running one application from one DE is uneconomic memorywise. However, if you i.e. like to run konqueror it is smart to also use the kate editor and kwallet (for your pasword management). That way KDE3.5 turns out to be really memory efficient (compared to other DE's). The article also nicely shows why running firefox will have _big_ impact on memory use if you also like to run KDE. It should be noted that this was firefox2 and 3 is much better, but also KDE4 is||will-be doing this better than 3.5 did.

"KDE is a bloated environment, which is why although there are nice KDE apps out there, I will never run them in my gnome or windowmaker environments. No thanks."
One hears this often here. Here's someone who decided to test this common Slashdot wisdom: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-linux-memory.html?ca=dgr-lnxw07LinuxMemory

From my perspective, running the whole thing makes that I _don't_ have to wait for all those things to load. Because there already loaded. Your desktop probably is faster to initialize but I really don't care about a lightning fast starting desktop, I want a complete desktop with all the bells and whistles.

"He just plain gets it"
Sorry no, you're projecting.

"The mantra seems to be that it will all come together in KDE 5." I think you totally made this up. Or else you really shouldn't be reading other peoples jokes.

"Bullshit. My time is not free."
So who's paying you to be trolling about KDE a frigging year after it came out?

"Because that's not what a .0 release is."
Uhm, it is what the developers say it is. Besides all that: Microsoft said Vista is ready, the KDE developers said KDE4.0 isn't ready for daily use. Next time, take a clue there.

I'm all for wired, but also really appreciate using wireless for my notebook. And I would like to use this notebook everywhere in my house and garden. So I'm interested in some answers here.

Ah, ok :)

Of course, now we're talking of all kinds of different forms of adaptation: social, behaverial, evolutionairy, and genetic change. To point out some of the difficulties, instinct is not-learned behaviour so it's genetically fixed and mostly beneficiary to the species (but not always as evolution is supposed to do). In other words: don't ask me, I only post here.

I do know one thing, every species adapts all the time. So no, the first historical record of an adaptation won't describe the first adaptation.

On a side note: wouldn't a perfect human be a the perfect prick and bore? ;)