That's a bit unfair...

After the fall of the USSR, the Russians had to rethink their future in space along with ginormous budget cuts. What they came up with was a program that centred around commercializing space. As the first and biggest provider of trips to space for tourist, it is no wonder that a new space station is on their minds for the time after the ISS has made its last burning trip. Besides that, OPSEK isn't that ambitious.

They seek to consolidate their position as a cheap and reliable launcher of commercial satellites in the same way, with the advent of the Angara rocket family.

This section of Wikipedia is a interesting read for those who are interested in Roskosmos.

The Russians are thinking about a 2.0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_Piloted_Assembly_and_Experiment_Complex

Just wait for the "concerned" special interest groups to claim that it's unnatural and that selling the resulting product should be banned.

Nginx. Seriously.

Ah, of course! I was confusing it with tracking a specific release, to get security fixes. Besides those, there are of course just two interesting branches: STABLE and CURRENT.

That is correct.

The official website states 7.2-PRERELEASE, but the press release says 7.1-STABLE. Depending on how you track and merge FreeBSD, both may be correct (tracking 7.1-STABLE and backporting functionality from 7.2 would do the trick).

Since it is in FreeBSD, it will be in PC-BSD.

I believe ZFS has been in FreeBSD since 7.0. A quick google teaches me that PC-BSD is enjoying it since then too.

That is definitely a version above 7.0. You are looking at the X Server, which is part of X.org. Seeing that it is released in October 2008, and judging by the version (1.5), I'd say it is either 7.3 or 7.4. My guess is the latter.

You want to follow the procedure for 7.0 and above.

A more decent way to check is by looking which packages are installed. Also, since you are using Ubuntu, you can check which release of X was about two months before the release of Ubuntu, that one will probably be in the distro by then.

That is heard quite often: "even with science, you can't..."

You know, some day we just might. Maybe not today, maybe never, but please, when someone who knows more than you about a certain topic warns you, listen!

According to the TFA, the red grid marks the event horizon as the "falling" observer would see it. Later on, you see a white grid, which marks the event horizon as distant observers see it.

Please elaborate, because I fail to see the point.

If you mean it should be given to another, separate, international entity, you are absolutely right. But I get the feeling that you'd rather maintain the status quo, and I can't see how that would help in matters like these...

"Fast" being somewhat of a vague notion here. If you look purely at clock frequency, you are probably right (especially when we forget about speciality CPU's). If you look at FLOPS, you are wrong (consider the different GPUs on the market today). But processing speed and processing power are more than that.

I have absolutely no doubt at all that IBM can roll out a wild roaring beast of a POWER chip pretty soon after Microsoft announces plans to do a full fledged (not XBox-fledged) port of Windows for the things. Also, ponder what would happen when Microsoft goes to nVidia with a nice proposal.

Oh God! What if Ballmer has a productive game of golf with Schwarz?!?

The resolution is not the problem. Due to the fact that we are measuring nature, small changes do happen. This is the reason that leap seconds aren't scheduled decades in advance.

See here.

I'd like the metric system to take over our measurement of time, but, disregarding other problems, it won't solve the leap second issue all by itself.