It is even worse than that: They were refilled in Utah. That means for refilling, they had to be transported overland for huge distances - twice!

They are concerned about it because it gives them a reason for existence.

Imagine the USA if it went isolationist before WWI: Almost no crime, no terrorism, no military-industrial complex, no welfare-state, no military bases all over the world... and politicians would have almost no power compared to what they have today. That would be a nightmare for any politician, "social reformer" and social worker. They would practicably be out of their collective jobs.

Is that the same XBox that lost billions in the first versions, barely broke even in the second version and is now again losing billions in the third version?

You luddite! Next you will tell me you want different interfaces for your refrigerator and your car!

Microsoft marketing has a way to forget the past.

I remember how they were so proud of Windows-Phone (~2% marketshare) because it was so much more "successful" than the old Windows-Mobile (~10% marketshare).

Or look at the XBox: First they proclaimed that they would just sink a couple of billion to "build the platform" - and look how that worked for XBone. Of course it doesn't make any sense when you break compatibility with every new version: Any XBox version is a incompatible to any other version, so they are different platforms.

I guess that kind of incompetence and stupidity is a consequence of having just too much money flowing in from over 20 year old products (Windows and Office).

Basically Microsoft could just sit back and release Windows with a new wallpaper and small updates - but they even screwed that up with Windows 8.

A couple of thousand - which is not a lot given the fact that Linux is used on millions of webservers.

From all the alarmism, let's not forget that only RedHat is remotely vulnerable (all the other major distros use dash instead of bash for /bin/sh) and only when you use a seriously outdated CGI-setup.

No, Windows is a tool that is incompatible to everything else, that is the point.

Because somebody on Slashdot told them?

That would be a valid point if the two orbiters were exactly the same. They're not. India is much closer to the equator than Florida, so launch costs are significantly reduced.

That is nonsense. You want to launch as far away from Earth's axis that is true, but Earth is a sphere and therefore it doesn't make much of a difference once you get away from the poles. Florida is already at 88% of the distance from the axis compared to the equator, that is not that much of a difference.

The problem is that NASA is not allowed to pay too much for an engineer and have to hire scores of affirmative action candidates instead: http://odeo.hq.nasa.gov/

Especially in an environment like NASA one single capable engineer can easily outperform ten mediocre hires. Of course NASA would have to do strict qualification tests to get these engineers - and those tests are illegal in the US.

India may be corrupt and all, but after you pay the bribe at least you can do the job. You are not forced to hire deadwood in India.
There is no ODEO in the Indian space program.

Since when has failure been an argument against government layouts?

The US had the best (or maybe second-best after England) education system in the world before the government got involved. Now it is the laughing-stock of the world.

The solution? More government involvement, of course! Let's implement Common Core and see how low we can go.

You should research on "common core" which was pushed by Bill Gates.

It is pure evil:

- dumbs down everything and doesn't let anybody ahead
- goes back to roman math (seriously, according to common core, the way to add 62 + 36 is to draw 9 squares and 8 lines and then add them. If you don't draw your squares you fail, BTW)
- introduces political propaganda into the curriculum
- introduces spying and questions like "do you like your parents"?
- establishes a monopoly for textbooks

Good starting point:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Nonsense.

In fact I had to deinstall pulseaudio to make Skype work - on several different distributions. That was the only way because pulseaudio just didn't work. For a long time the audio-quality was also bad (had a lot of hickups and cracks). I also know (you obviously don't) that the pulseaudio-team refused to work on many problems because the drivers (which worked perfectly with ALSA) were somehow flawed. Now maybe they were flawed, but they worked with ALSA and if they don't work with pulseaudio then ALSA is still better no matter how many features pulseaudio may offer.

The distributions *should* be the advocates of the users. But they are not. They are advocates of the developers who obviously always want the latest/greatest.

When your mother tells you that she has cracking in the sound that makes it unusable, do you tell her "hey, just uninstall pulseaudio and enable ALSA"? Is that user-friendly? Or do you tell her "You are the reason that there will never be the year of the Linux desktop, the cracks are a product of your imagination"?

You quite obviously have no idea what you are talking about. Especially about Skype which took forever to work with pulseaudio. Especially Skype. God I remember hours of getting Skype to work with (or in fact without because uninstalling did the job) pulseaudio.

As I said, the way to go would have been to include pulseaudio and let those that need the advanced features use it. And then, after it became stable, then make it the default.

But that didn't happen. They just jumped on pulseaudio years before it was ready.

And that is the problem: You and all the other upgrade-fanatics consider the users just worthless beta-testers without any rights whatsoever.

Because Linux distributions always screw it up at their first try?
Because nobody can know everything and the obscure systemd tool may be there but not be found?
Also systemd is by itself much more complicated than simple ASCII files.

Exactly! And that means that it is:

- tested
- stable
- understood (hey I know cat and grep by heart, I don't even know any systemd commands)

Which means that the chances are very high that at least that will work when something breaks. And by that statement I include the human factor: The admin who has worked with ASCII files for the last 30 years will be able to work with them in an emergency. Especially in an emergency I don't want to be forced to learn the "new paradigma".

You are contradicting yourself.

When you said that ASCII is an old standard I thought that you got it, but you didn't.

Being old, stable and tested makes ALL THE DIFFERENCE.

Systemd may be great and maybe it is - but please let it mature first, let the bugs get worked out first. In other words: Let it become a "old standard" before forcing it down the user's throats.

You are using a "special tool" when you use vim or cat to parse a log file.

No, because something similar is available on pretty much every desktop computer system for the last 20 years. I'm pretty sure that I can read ASCII files on an Amiga, MacOS9 or BeOS or any other exotic system.

With systemd, I don't expect any support from even the latest/greatest MacOSX or Windows variants.