The organisation I work for just migrated all staff computers to a new red-orange-green support system. This included complete re-installs of computers.... With clean installs XP. When asked why they didn't install W7 and not have to worry about upgrading all computers next year and inconvenience thousands of users again, they simply said "one step at a time".

A doctorate in literature made sense back in the days when there were people who were actually "famous literary reviewers" like F.R. Leavis. The only literature-based doctorate worth getting is a D.Lit (Hon), and even those are doled out like assault rifles at a Deep South US Supermarket.

All my previous study pals who got an MA in literature ended up jobless or somewhere completely outside of their field of study.

As the French have had nukes since at least the early 60s, it's a bit too late for embargoes.

What happens if someone crashed a plane into a working reactor? Probably a lot of damage but nothing very dangerous as power plants have been designed to withstand catastrophes like these (but strangely enough, not for floods taking down backup power like in Japan).

I'm still on the original release, I think I missed 12 new versions of Rise of the Triad....

Science is a human endeavor, and prone to all the failings that humans possess. Stuff does fall through the cracks because it isn't perfect. It just happens to be the best system we've got that, in general and over the course of years, stumbles along towards progress.

Noted and agreed.

If you have a better alternative, please don't keep it a secret.

Passive-aggressive much?

I'll also note that all the counterexamples you list were, eventually, found out through the scientific process and repudiated by their original publishers

Eventually, yes. How many are still out there unrepudiated....? It took The Lancet years to finally retract Wakefield's criminally fraudulent paper. I know some of my colleagues that have tried to get papers down for several reasons, but most attempts just bogged down in an epistolary war of attrition with editors lasting sometimes years.

If the SWAT team tried to get in, they would have had more than enough probable cause to round up and detain everyone working for Cyberbunker. Since the only guys actually talking about the raid are the CB guys themselves, I call hoax. The Netherlands is boring enough for a real raid to be picked up by any amateur sleuth or local news agency.

I just read the Wikipedia article, and apparently the sticking point was "that the MathWorld content was to remain in print only". If that's the contract Weisstein signed, he could have known he would get into trouble. Don't get me wrong, the academic publishing business is very seriously broken in many ways, but if this is really just a breach of contract, Weisstein should've known better.

Unfortunately, it sometimes doesn't work. Ask Alan Sokal (troll), Andrew Wakefield (liar and murderer by proxy), Diederik Stapel (liar), Jan Hendrik Schön (liar) or the other trolls, pranksters and liars that got through peer review without so much as a raised eyebrow from the reviewers or the editors.

The Google takeout .zip file has a starred.json file, incidentally. Not sure if you could make that work with Thunderbird.

The XML file has all the original RSS feeds like "http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot"; so I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

In winter Diesel has added anti-gelling/clouding agents. Not sure how much of the cost is actually caused by that.

You mean; did the export/import retain them in Thunderbird? Not sure, I never star items, I bookmark interesting stuff I want to keep around, or I webcite really, really interesting stuff I want to keep. YMMV.

So the actual problem is not the (lack of) repairability, it's how much time/money/effort you're willing to put into it. Then don't complain about repairability, complain about the additional time/effort/money to repair a Mac.

It's like saying natural gas cars are badly designed because there's CNG fuel station near you.

I think the very few people interested in saving these machines would be leaning toward another OS altogether to keep them going - lots of Powermacs have been repurposed as home servers, for example. But it's a spectacular waste to see a well-built, very expensive machine collect dust :-(