You fail to understand what I said.

We had the capability to go to the Moon more than 40 years ago. That capability did not atrophy through lack of use. The Saturn and Apollo programs were cancelled and defunded by Congress with the approval of President Nixon. That was a conscious political decision to eliminate that capability.

Ditto the Shuttle program: The program was cancelled and defunded.

We never, obviously, developed a Mars capability. NASA, however, had post-Apollo plans for Mars that were not funded.

The director of NASA does not wake up in the morning and decide, unilaterally, to start a program to put people in orbit, on the Moon, or anyplace else. The decisions to do those things come from the White House and the enabling legislation and the money comes from Congress.

We currently lack Government-operated manned space capability because the government does not want to do it, not because the nation lacks the capability.

That's got nothing to do with NASA's technical or engineering capabilities. It's solely the result of political decisions, as are all major decisions about NASA's human missions and objectives. They've all existed at the behest of the White House, and they all ended when the White House pulled the plug. Those are major decisions and NASA doesn't get to make them on its own.

It's about money. There's all kind of pushback when even marginal boosts to NASA's budget are mooted. A lot of that is cynical politics playing to ill-informed people.

We've had the capability to support a space station, a lunar base, and exploration of Mars since the Apollo era. We haven't done so because we chose not to do so.

Stallman is very much more concerned with how his software is made than what it can do. That's an attitude that's the mirror image of pretty much the rest of the human race. He has constructed an elitist pedestal of pseudo-morailty around software development and placed himself on top of it. Free software has obvious advantages in terms of spreading technique, etc., but Stallman's trashings of anyone who does not adhere to his gospel is demagoguery at its finest.

I'm much more offended by the clutter and annoyance of Ubuntu's lens feature than I am by the supposed offense of the product's becoming one of millions of Amazon Associates. Ubuntu is trying to make a bit of cash, and that seems to offend a lot of people much more than any perceived violation of the Stallman Code.

Running 4.9.3 on Slackware. I've always run away from KDE. But, I turned off almost all of the desktop effects, spent some time finding a theme I like and tweaking things, add the Infinality font code, and I find myself very happily surprised. It's fast, easy, reliable, etc., etc. And, yeah, tweakable. Loaded openbox expecting to see big reductions in memory use. Didn't happen. I saw marginal changes. Besides, I get a menu when I right click on this KDE desktop. Why would I use openbox that does the same thing and little else?

I'd be happy to use Gnome 3 if I could control what goes in the panel and if that pseudo-dock behaved like a real dock. But, they seem fixated on sticking to One Very Narrow True Path. Too bad.

The truth is that both early versions of KDE 4 and Gnome 3 were releasesd months before they should have been. We all get to play guinea pigs for software that should have stayed in house for more development iterations, if the resources were there. They aren't.

People who are really professional coders ought to resist this kind of silliness because it is rooted in the notion that anyone can create professional quality code. If that's true, why pay the real coders?

It isn't true, of course, no more than is the notion that if you can stick a frozen pizza in the microwave you should be preparing food in a restaurant.

No, it wouldn't. Apple isn't trying to convince people to do anything other than buy Apple products. Apple doesn't care what its customers believe. FOSS, RMS, et al, insist on touting the benefits of adhering to their belief system. They are seeking converts. That takes precedence over the quality and innovativeness of FOSS software. They won't even use the word "customers". They insist on attempting to get people to use FOSS products by first converting them to a belief in the virtues of FOSS. We are told we should use FOSS because it is morally superior to do so.

Besides, let's pretend that Apple does it, too. So what? Because someone else is also doing something stupid, is that a defense for your own stupidity?

Bogus. FOSS or whatever you wanna call it keeps trying to persuade people to believe in something so they then go out and use FOSS software. That's nuts.

You're stil trying to convert people to your religion so they will use the software you like. People don't care. Stop playing missionaries and start marketing software that's either better than Windows/Apple or does something people want to do that they can't do with Windows/Apple.

A rare bit of reality here. The web is public. Twitter is public, Slashdot is public. What we post on the web is public. The only reason we're talking about Twitter turning over anything is because Twitter only keeps content online for about 5 minutes, then it rolls over.

Tweeting is as public as shouting at the top of your lungs on a busy street.

The best way to get more people to use desktop Linux is to ignore anything said on Slashdot, including this.

I don't read de Icaza's post as being about competition from OS X. I read it as pointing out a rather obvious truth: OS X is thriving because it sustains a large and vibrant community of commercial independent developers. Linux on the desktop is stagnant because it lacks a similar community of developers, and it lacks that community for reasons that are specific to Linux culture and ideology.

If you believe a desktop platform succeeds in large measure because independent commercial developers write for it, then lack of a such a community means something for desktop Linux.

When was the last time someone told you they wanted to move from Windows or Mac to Linux because they found a Linux application that just could not do without?

The truth is that, thanks to open source, any desktop application that runs on Linux very likely can be made to run on Windows or OS X.

"Susceptibility to weather delays" is a problem for many things, like high school baseball games, outdoor weddings, parades, the morning run, fastidious hair styles. That's especially true when, you know, a hurricane is in the neighborhood.

Here's the thing: Real space travel needs to begin and end in space. Low Earth orbit is the equivalent of tooling around the harbor.

Battery life isn't an issue for me. I'd rather have a stable system that defaulted to one or the other GPU than a flaky one that tried to do the automatic switch.

That can happen in any environment, private or public, that maintains a list of preferred treatments, which seems both inevitable and useful. Even if you se a completely independent doctor and pay for everything out of pocket, that doctor will have his or her own preferred list. It may be an honest list, or it may be a lits that reflects the size of corporate payments.

My critically-ill mother was booted out of her hospital some years ago, against the explicit advice of all her attending physicians, because an insurance company bureaucrat two thousand miles away, on the phone, who had never been anywhere near my mother, the hospital, or the physicians, said so. If my life is going to be in the hands of bureaucrats, I'd at least prefer that the bureaucrats work for people I can vote for or against, not for anonymous wealthy corporate managers who incentivize their employees to cut costs.

Isn't the biggest video hassle with Linux on MacBooks the hybrid graphics?

Rather than being able to switch back and forth, I'd prefer just disabling use of the onboard Intel graphics altogether, assuming fan control was well in hand.