Most modern diesels give clouds of smoke only when the particulate filter is regenerating in the absence of proper fuel additives. Diesel particulate filters burn the particles during regeneration. The burning temperature is 600 Centigrade, which is not easily attainable in a filter unless you have some sort of a fuel burner in the exhaust. If you use proper Euro 5 diesel fuel in your car, it already contains the proper catalysts and the burn temperature drops to 300-400 centigrade, which is something that you would see in the exhaust system. If you see a modern BMW, VW or Mercedes giving occasional black smoke clouds it means that the driver is going for the cheap diesel fuel instead of the one recommended by the manufacturer. Euro5 diesel fuel is supposed to be mandatory soon enough so we are getting rid of this problem.
Regarding the smell, I have some serious doubts. You either have an inhuman smell or you forgot to wash your hands while leaving the petrol station. Modern diesels don't smell! Ever!

I do remember reading somewhere in the manual of my car that depending on the temperature, if you don't have winter diesel fuel available, for a diesel engine you should add Kerosene. IIRC at -40 Centigrade it suggested that you should use 80% Kerosene and 20% diesel fuel. Here's the question: you can't get Winter Diesel at your local pump in winter? In Germany, Austria, France, Hungary and Romania I am quite sure that you can at all gas stations. Winter diesel has a lower oceanic number (48 instead of 52) however it doesn't loose freeze and it keeps it's viscosity down to -40 Centigrade. If it's less than -40 in Europe, it's a bad idea to get out of the house anyway.

Oh, you poor thing... One can only dream. I do applaud your child-like innocence. Who knows, sometimes south dreams might come true. Four of the hundreds of kids that 40 years ago dreamed to be astronauts, are now in orbit, so maybe, just maybe, your dream can come to life.
</sarcasm>
I'm sure that NASA would have decent funding if it wasn't for the Middle-East conflicts.

s/AVC/AAC/

And I've almost finished my 6h recording of NasaTV for this historical day for a total of 2.9GBytes. I wasn't alive to witness the first launch of the space shuttle, but I was alive to catch and save this one. I would also like to thank Apple for it's HTTP Live Streaming protocol. It takes only a few lines of Bash to dump the the complete 3Mbps MPEG Transport Stream (H.264+AVC) to the hard-drive. I want to be able to watch this again.

And lack of hardware accelerated encryption and hardware assisted virtualization (LDOMs) doesn't impact your dev/sandbox/test environment? In ours, moving to a T series with the same otherwise cpu specs (8x 1,4GHz) made a huge difference that we couldn't account for until we noticed the hardware encryption engine.

Virtualizing old installs is quite easy actually, you can migrate to branded zones in Solaris 10. As such, regarding your prediction, I can only recommend that you don't go bet your savings at race track. Itanium is dead and PPC is going only in consoles. There's no incentive to run Linux on PPC, and AIX is moribund, going the way of Ultrix, Tru64, Unixware and HP-UX, unlike Solaris that is still kicking arse.

There's nothing wrong with SPARC. Solaris/SPARC is still powerful, innovative, scalable and secure. AIX/Power would of been a good match, but Big Blue doesn't invest in AIX. Solaris had more new features added in the past 5 years than AIX in the past 15. SPARC is still going strong because Sun realized that it's not the GHz but the 6,8,16 cores/die that are the requirements for a server and because Solaris is still going strong. The Sun Fire T1000 is still unbeatable in cost/performance even if it's 5 years old.
All the Linux vendors (HP, Dell, IBM) keep trying to migrate users from Solaris to Linux claiming that it's dead. Yet, they are wrong. HP-UX, Unixware, AIX, Tru64 are however dead or dying.
Think about Solaris the following way: Oracle Exadata 2. Still nothing on the face of earth like it, because of Solaris and Sun hardware. SPARC is going to do even better once Oracle ports it's Linux distribution to it. Since Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle Solaris are eventually going to be the only operating systems certified for Oracle Software, you're going to see a lot of them, especially on SPARC. Oracle, after the acquisition of Sun is slowly changing into an appliance vendor, and I can't blame them for it.

File management is what we have an OS for! Apple doesn't have a common file open and save dialog box on iOS. Anyone who wants to use DAV (iDisk or others) needs to write quite a lot of code for that.