Cowboy coding is the absolute last thing you want in these systems. Rushing out the latest bug fixes is a terrible model for software that puts life at risk. Yes, this version might be hackable and that could cause problems if someone has malicious intent. Fixing the issue without a LOT of QA and bureaucracy to make sure proper testing procedures are followed is far more likely to kill people.

init=/bin/bash still works with grub2 in Debian.

Any idea which drug store carries a tester for this big plasma tube?

I've never met anyone who built a laptop from parts, so maybe you're comparing a desktop to a laptop. Building a desktop from parts is only useful if you can afford to spend the time debugging hardware or software when it's not stable. These days I need to use my computer for work, so it's not acceptable any more to spend 10 hours figuring out which top of the line part is failing so I can return it for warranty replacement. If I ever got another PC, I'd get a Dell. They're not the fastest or cheapest, but at least I know the network card isn't interfere with the video card in some unforeseen way because they've been well tested together before purchase.

On the OS end, there wasn't really such a thing as a power user in the 80s. To do anything remotely interesting, you need to do some heavy reading of Inside Macintosh, know assembly, and how to use Macsbug. Alternately, you could install someone else's hack, but sometimes these did the near impossible and made the OS even less stable. You couldn't even select a custom paper size in the Apple Writer print dialog, you had to pick from one of 5 or so. These days, there are a number of shells and scripting languages installed out of the box and a pretty nice terminal.

Special tools were required to open the original Mac and removing the mainboard required extreme care to avoid breaking the back of the display. There were CPU accelerators available which clipped on top of the CPU. The SE/30 did have an expansion slot, so perhaps you didn't need a foot long torx wrench and case cracker to swap the SIMMs out.

The javascript you can add to the PDF through a GUI or the javascript that you can embed into hex strings when writing a PDF file? The files are a hacky mix of text and binary. Some data types define their length, others have insane rules for end markers and escaping. Hex strings were originally pretty easy, but then they decided that they'd add javascript support into the parsing so you can constants that vary conditionally on the PDF version number. On top of that, you practically have to build a run time to render the PDF because of the complexity of its nested viewport stacks and viewport modifications that can be executed at any time in the PDF.

If that wasn't enough, they made it way more complicated when they hacked in support for JetForms (now known as LiveCycle), which is an XML language with poorly thought out data types and full of rendering hints that would be really useful if the documentation said more than "ignore these if you're not Adobe". If you want to save a PDF created with LiveCycle that a reader other than Acrobat can read, it's saved in both forms, resulting in a file that's 3x the size of a PDF.

I've never had a newest model Dell server (very common) work with a distribution considered to be stable. Even the slightly older ones require very new kernels and binary drivers to support their broadcom nics, raid controllers, etc.

If they mix with other fabrics, they'll definitely end up in hell.

"Deuteronomy 22:11 Thou shalt not wear a garment of divers sorts, as of woolen and linen together."

Wouldn't that only apply to sects that believe in sola scriptura? I've only been educated in one of the religions mentioned, and the basic education had to do a lot more with tradition, ritual, and culture more than purely biblical studies.

This may drain all of the angst out of the entire school, altering youth forever.

Agreed. Flash's biggest enemy is Adobe. Until sandboxing, if you wanted any sort of stability in your web browser you had to run flashblock or just uninstall it entirely. Aside the from the instability, it also tended to take over an entire core (thankfully it couldn't scale to a second core), so your computer would slow a little, your fans would spin up, and you'd witness your battery drain very quickly. If the runtime wasn't such a piece of garbage, I think it would have seen much more usage.

And while we're making uninformed blanket statements, I'll say that "nuke lovers" have never witnessed what happens when sodium mixes with water and have no idea how corrosive steam can be. Add a bunch of plutonium into the mix (radioactivity causes metals to become brittle over time) and you've got a disaster waiting to happen. You don't want to be anywhere near one of these if the sodium/water heat exchanger in a PRISM type reactor develops a leak. And since you've probably never worked as an engineer in the nuclear field, you probably have no idea that we're still learning about the behaviors of materials under these conditions.

Disenfranchising is nothing new and definitely not limited to the Chicago machine (which Obama was only minimally a part of). Bush ran a particularly dirty campaign in 2000. For example, Rove's people called a bunch of voters suggesting that McCain had an illegitimate vietnamese child to win the primary (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll#Political_push_polls:_United_States ) Then a bunch of paid GOP staffers were responsible for starting a riot that stopped the recount in 2000: http://archive.democrats.com/images/miamirioters.jpg
This has been going on long before Obama: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression#Examples_of_voter_suppression_in_the_United_States

A small percentage compared to those that would migrate if nobody was stopping them.

Salt has a heat of fusion of 30 kJ/mol, allowing molten salt to store quite a bit of energy.