Was unclear to you...

Perhaps you have missed it, but in our last release we released a preview release on FreeBSD?

I had missed it. That's good to hear, to be honest. Excellent news, in fact. In that case, I withdraw my criticism over that.

I'm still very un-fond of some behaviour of the file dialog box. If you're around to listen, I'll happily elaborate.

All the astronauts combined managed to cover an area smaller than Manhattan Island. For anyone to declare that we know all about the moon is absurd, but that won't stop the anti-space nutters. They're convinced that we'll never get off this planet because there is absolutely nothing else in the entire Universe that could possible be of interest. I suspect that my ancestors' neighbors said something similar when they left the farm in Cornwall for the wilds of the Vermont frontier.

I was enormously disappointed when Mir was deorbited. I always thought that it should have been boosted into a higher orbit and left as a museum, but I suspect that the Kremlin had more say in its ultimate fate than Baikonur did.

Flying cars are technically possible.

Flying cars however are not desirable for everyday drivers: they have a hard enough time managing 2 dimensions, we don't need them to occupy a third. So unless they're fully automatic in flight mode (with manual control disabled), flying cars can only be flown by trained pilot.

The market for pilots who want a plane that turns into a car is very small. That's why flying cars won't happen - not enough money in it.

The morons in Congress almost didn't let the Russians be part of the project, even though they were the only country in the world that actually had experience building and maintaining a space station.

putting 100% of our efforts into robotics and AI so that radiation-hardened machines can do whatever it is that's still worthwhile to do in space.

Robots can't colonize an asteroid or moon, and that's one of the truly worthwhile things to do in space. They can prepare the site to a certain extent, but it's not really a colony until Earth life is resident. You're right that sending people to LEO is pretty much worthless, but that's NOT where we should be limiting ourselves to. To our knowledge, the universe is ours for the taking, and only the shortsightness of politicians and businessmen is keeping it from us.

I'm not trying to dimiss people "who hate change".

Well, that's actually fair enough: some people are going to hate change no matter how beneficial. The problem is dismissing people who have thoughtfully rejected some of the recent changes as merely hating change in general.

I find myself in the latter camp, but often dismissed as hating changin.

But you can see how GNOME discussions have transitioned to Systemd,

Well, yes. systemd has been greeted with suspicion. I'm not surprised: there's a lot of FUD on both sides. One would expect it from the proponents of the system being displaced but there's been plenty of pro systemd FUD. There are also some parts of the design many people find rather dubious. I don't know. My new systems have it and I can't see any real difference, but I've not looked in detail.

The thing that has annoyed people about GNOME is that they've pretty much forced the issue on systemd. Since it's a dependency of GNOME and GNOME is the most popular environment, most distros have switched pretty much without regard to the merits. It seems odd that a desktop environment needs such deep vertical integration as KDE, LXDE and XFCE do not and are still featureful.

What I think is that people deeply resent GNOME essentially forcing them to adopt another system they dislike.

But ultimately, people are upset because we aren't adhering to status quo.

No, I think you're very fundementally misunderstanding what people are objecting to. Many people aren't objecting that the status quo is changing, they're objecting that it's changing in ways they don't like. It's very, very easy to dismiss those people simply as "hating change". I think that's a mistake to do so.

If you've been arguing like this and I'm tlaking about everyone from kernel developer to random people on the internet, you can start seeing the patterns.

Indeed, but if you've been around long enough you also start to recognise the cascade of attention defecit teenagers model. That involves generally change for the sake of it by people who don't understand the original system enough to avoid the mistakes it made and the mistakes it didn't make.

TL;DR don't confuse people disliking your changes as people disliking change in general.

Sometimes, we have to make compromises. I'm willing to have a radio chip that I don't control inside my phone so long as I can turn that little fucker off when I want to. Ultimately, if I want to repurpose my phone I am free to eliminate the GSM antenna.

What would be genuinely cool, on the other hand, would be a board which went with it which included a SID socket and which implemented all the hardware interfaces, and which attached to the GPIO.

You can begin your introduction to the back and forth here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... :)

Tell me about it. I'm East Coast as well and I am trying to remember the last time we had good weather to see such an event.

I do remember we had good weather just long enough to see the transit of Mercury, but aside from that, I'm at a loss.

And people try their best to ignore the two most probable extinction scenarios, a nuclear exchange or an escaped/launched bioweapon.

They don't need a Saturn 5 equivalent for a moon base, and in fact it would probably be counterproductive to build one for that mission. Multiple smaller launches should be staged and assembled in LEO, then boosted onto the Lunar trajectory. That was actually one of the configurations contemplated for the Apollo missions, but was rejected early on because the docking techniques had not yet been developed. If the "end of the decade" deadline had not been looming NASA would probably have gone that route and ended up with a much better mission profile.