>>... destroying my business by losing access to all data on a critical business laptop ...

You should backup.
And also do experiments on a test computer.

>>Do they have any skills or products other than maintain Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 legacy systems?

Linux.
The answer to every question is the universe was 42. Now it's becoming Linux. Linux is the new 42.

>> BSD doesn't force anything on you, but it DOES give you the FREEDOM to release closed source binary distributions

Yep, shure. But that is clearly contra-productive for the whole community, and also for the poor users of your software. it benefits only to you.

"Frankly the way Apple has acted since Jobs came back..."
The prophet came back to earth ???

"Frankly the way Apple has acted since Jesus came back..."
Corrected that for you.

>> It is also too left wing by European standards.

Only for a minority of people here.

You will get new versions of a car :
- Home basic car : will only start 10 times, until you get an upgrade. Can only take a single passenger
- Home premium car : start always, but there are no brakes
- Profesionnal car : has brakes, but they break often
- Enterprise car : has reliable brakes, but lacks a radio
- Ultimate car : you get the radio for 5000 Euro extra.

I have to put the obligatory GM-Microsoft :
http://mistupid.com/jokes/msvg...

>> What could possibly go wrong?
Nothing. There are hardly any firewalls between ECUs. Firewalls do not exist on CAN.
The article is written by someone with no insight in car architecture :

>> First, however, carmakers must deploy more open OS platforms
Nothing to do with the reflashing

>> remove hardened firewalls between vehicle ECUs
There aren't any firewalls

>> and deploy networking topologies such as Ethernet, with proven security.
Ethernet is already widely deployed in cars for data hungry applications ( infotainment) For other uses, ethernet is absolutely not suitable ( price, power, wiring constraints, EMC, safety, .....)

Yep. If systemd lacks a good init system and emacs lacks a good editor, just integrate emacs in systemd.

By the way, in french, "systeme D" means bricolage ( making something work by slapping together the things you have lying around)

>>Technically the US does since we landed people on it first

Technically North America is owned by the american natives ( also called Indians)
So if the USA is owned by the indians, and the moon is owned by the USA,

then the moon is owned by the Indians.

I never said it would make a nuclear explosion. But we would all inhale it the stuff when dispersed in the athmosphere.

>> uranium (or plutonium!)
makes quite a difference. at least from the chemical side of the lethality when inhaling it.

"NASA Looking At Nuclear Thermal Rockets To Explode the Solar System"

Thunderbolt is basically an incompatible security risk

>> , an NTP rocket could generate 200 kWt of power using a single kilogram of uranium for a period of 13 years
That is wrong. A single kilogramm of Uranium can not do much. The critcal mass is 56 kg.
And that's for a perfect sphere of highly enriched U235. With this configuration it's also a nuke bomb, not really an effective means of travel in one piece.

For a nuke reactor operating reasonably, you need 500 kg/ many tons of uranium.
And that's a risk to the whole mankind to put that in a rocket. A launch failure with a ton of fissile material would realistically kill everyone on earth.

That's the signe reason why this was not done in the first place.

>> OpenSource, even if not generally publicly available.
You mean it's close sourced then....

Cat exists under Linux.
You can do that natively :

make a box :

if (( RANDOM % 2 )); then echo "Cat is dead">/tmp/Box; else echo "Cat is alive">/tmp/Box; fi

open the box :

cat /tmp/Box