NetworkManager, PulseAudio and systemd were internal Red Hat projects run by a guy called Lennart who will tell you that they are all far better than linux itself, which he would apparently have done himself only far better if he was only a little bit older. Red Hat didn't pick them from a list, they did them and were stuck with them.
The others were surrounded by the most noise.

you keep mistaking my popping your pie in the sky bubbles for ranting

Considering that I don't give a shit either way about rocket labs and have barely heard of them there is clearly no mistake. Are you going to keep on attempting pathetic bullying or are you going to back up or abandon your words above? Let's hear something that actually justifies your rubbishing of my mostly forgotten classes in orbital mechanics. Are you going to answer or do I just file you under clueless windbag who knows fuckall about the topic and just likes to verbally attack strangers?

So your mention of Argentina was a setup for your current avoidance tactic, so little trap in some game or something? How weird.
As should be obvious by now I'm only on this thread to get some clarification of this statement:

The claimed advantages of launching "deep in the Southern Hemisphere" are bunk.

You've given me nothing to support that. I didn't mention the RL's Electron - you did as an avoidance tactic.

Are you someone who is prepared to back up their statements or are you just a fool shouting into the darkness attacking anyone who asks the meaning of what you are shouting about?

"the only bit of the question that actually matters"

Since I'm the one that asked the question what is wrong with that? I'm not dragging you away from some sort of prepared script, I'm asking you what you meant by the quoted words above.

Well that is the very rare ideal situation of enough memory for the system in all cases and turning the machine off before it has cached much so I really don't get why you are mentioning it. What is your point exactly? That you've completely forgotten that cached stuff sometimes ends up in swap unless you take steps to make sure it does not?
If the system knows it has swap it will eventually use it unless you tell it not to.

The really sad thing is that is both cases, more so with the one that robbed it's flock blind than the other, there was plenty of community opposition but they had friends in high places until the end.
After the fact one was called a "cult". The other still has some sort of functioning assembly of people now the monster than founded it is dead so not yet.

(linux's swap partition is bonkers).

It's so you can put it on a different hard disk than the one you want quick access to.
And a swap file is very easy and has even been an option on install with most distros for close to a decade. Fedora Core 1 had that option FFS, now we are up to Fedora 20+.

That enables swap - it doesn't mean it'll ever be used

Then you remove the other swap.

What obviously happened is that you got your panties in a bunch when you saw that metro screen and weird start button

And then found the controls were hidden off the side of a screen on a touchscreen - yes - unbearable and I had to hand it back before the urge to smash it took over.

why NASA is relying on private companies to build the next-generation spacecraft

Politics. Same reason Skylab was thrown away when there were enough working bits of Saturn V to keep it up there. The people who didn't want the ISS in the first place are calling the shots.

Evangelicals in a very Christian country are bound to be a bit weird for the sake of product differentiation.
Forgive my cynicism since a founder of one very large group of that type near me has been revealed as being a pedophile on an industrial scale, setting up his group is such a way that he could get away with it on hundreds of occasions, and another group concentrated all of the wealth of it's members into the hands of one of the founders before they ended up in jail for it. Sometimes it's just about money and power with no room for Jesus.

Let's have a reality based answer as to why "The claimed advantages of launching "deep in the Southern Hemisphere" are bunk."
As I repeatedly have been asking, since you've made a broad technical assertion lets have a broad technical answer without hiding behind likes, dislikes, nationalities or restricting to specific types of rockets a company (which I haven't even heard of before) has used in the past when neither of us have a clue what they are going to be using in the future. They may be completely and utterly fucking useless but the site choice may have been recommended by someone who is not - so why not such a site?
If you can't do anything more than emotional waffling and a one-dimensional model with nothing but equatorial orbits, that's fine, we'll know where we stand and I'll know I should stop being lazy and dig out the old course notes and look up half remembered stuff about Baykonur instead of listening to you.
If you can't answer it will explain why you got so fucking aggressive and evasive when I asked a simple question expecting a simple answer or an admission that you didn't know either. What's it to be? More stupid bullying bullshit I'm not going to fall for or some reality? I don't "win" if you don't know because I don't know either so there is nothing to lose by being truthful, I'm not playing some childish game here. Can you please try to act in a way so you can say the same?

That's rich coming from someone attempting to justify NZ as a launch site

Asking a question "why N.Z.?" pondering possibilities and asking if it makes sense is NOT "attempting to justify".
Please calm down and do something more practical than an emotional rant and attempting to pick a fight.

Sit down, imagine that RL was an Argentinian company

OK then, if they were an Argentinian company, sitting on a lot of cash for some reason, with a big rocket, let's say a Russian one proven to actually work, and you had no reason to pick a fight over them would launching from that far south make sense? Is that playing your game enough for you to stop avoiding the only bit of the question that actually matters?

If you don't have a clue please just admit it.

Fair enough, but from the outside of the group it does look Anti-Christian to ban Christmas even in that way.
I suppose a better example is a video clip I saw of some visiting US fundamentalists disrupting an Easter procession in St. Petersberg Russia - blocking the way of people carrying statues of Jesus and yelling "turn to Jesus" as if they didn't know it was an Easter procession - how insane is that? It was probably about idols which is where we come full circle back to the Moslem extremists demolishing old Islamic art.

Currency is utterly worthless without trust due to it's very nature.