Unfortunately the Burroughs refused to run mainframe software with such bugs. Burroughs died.
IBMs ran such software without complaint. IBM survived.
Since the programs certainly had some design errors, it really becomes a question of which erroneous behaviors are silliest. Often the "most correct" are the silliest.

Methinks that atheism is effectively just another religion and that overzealousness and exclusiveness in all of them is a problem.

Sure.

However, the Texans won't fall for it. They take a moment to add up all the money they get from the "evil" federal government, and suddenly they're not so interested in leaving.

Actually, I hope you're off on your percentages -- I was hoping it was more like 20% right-wing fanatics pushing their religion vs 20% of the left-wing fanatics wanting a godless, socialized state with the rest of the 60% of us reasoning people in the middle. Meanwhile, a very small percentage of jihadist-wing Islamic whackos are trying to kill us all. I very much sympathize with AZ - it's our worthless, spineless government over the last 20 years who have ignored the basics of the original constitution. Yes, our government is a mess, the alternatives suck even more. What IS the answer?

While you're right that both of the major parties are nealy identical, it's silly to describe them as "pro-free-market". They both advocate, and drool over, their own control over the market. Claiming that "The free market has failed" when it hasn't seen the light of day is ignorant.

Anyone else notice that BP's attempts to fix their mess all involve recovering the oil, and they've not tried anything that involves sealing off the well? Are they trying to prevent environmental disaster or are they trying to maximize profits?

Since when is being "pro-america" a bad thing for Americans?

>MS products are good in firms that have the resources to insure all machines are homogeneous and up to date, firms that require a high level of collaborations of complex non-technical documents

Including both customers' and vendors' computers. (regardless of how or how not technical) ;-)
Actually you need to make exactly the same errors in the same way that your big customers/vendors do.
Esperanto is a better language for everybody to use rather than English/French/Spanish/German.etc-etc, BUT

It is always useful to be able to blame your own mistakes on somebody else's version/configuration/whatever of software.
With Microsoft this is much easier than if using software that actually works correctly.

"Whatever happens, we have got the Gatling gun and they have not..."

And that doesn't prove the contrary.

Perhaps you could come up with an example where there is no correlation, but there is causation?

For many results that otherwise appear quite simple, an incredibly technical process was required to gather and analyse the information to formulate a conclusion.

So, unless you happen to have an in-depth education in an appropriate field of study, chances are you won't be able to make a validly informed determination of merit. Well, not beyond anything that isn't already obvious.

So competition is a bad thing?

Fleet of large expensive vehicles have these already, expensive proprietary systems too I bet. This could be cheap enough for small vehicles (like the volt) or even smaller like a fork lift or lawn maintenance equipment.

Man hours plus parts.

There are free servers out there, but the majority of them are text only.
Google provides one of the largest [Ranked #10 overall (source, top1000.org)] free services - text only, however.

Here's why:
1. Bandwidth is not free. Storage is not free.
2. Usenet necessitates having a huge amount of both to provide even a sub-standard to average service.

Some numbers: there is an average of ~5.4TB of post data peered daily [source: altopica.com]
The industry leader, GigaNews.com provides 622 days of binary retention - that means they have AT LEAST 3.2Petabytes of local storage, and the same in the AMS/IX farm.
They also provide most large ISPs with outsourced usenet, and their clients as well - so they're easily pushing 50 - 100TB of bandwidth a day [source: 2:30AM maths]

And that's pretty much why.

One nice is experience I had with xoops is that I was able to install the exact same module version (it hasn't been updated) I used back in 2005 on the latest release of Xoops. It still worked fine, many revisions later.

That won't work in joomla, trying to upgrade your site from 1.0 to 1.5. I bought a car rental app for joomla for $75. It came encrypted! I had no way to add a different make of car.. they didn't have Chevy, because the developer was French. After all the hassle, explaining to the customer, "no you can't do that" I would have been better off just writing it from scratch.

Other things I like about xoops is its "block" concept. Where you can create a new html block and specify what pages it appears on. For example, a disclaimer at the bottom of the site for a lawyer. But, say you need a different footer on the "pay your bill" page. Just create a new block.

It's not perfect. I would love to see a little more fine grained access restrictions such as a system of "locks and keys". I'm also a little bothered that they chose to take a joomla-esq approach of separating admin tasks. It used to be that you clicked on a module in admin, and you could edit all the functions related to that module. Now, in the admin screen there's a menu for modules and a menu for preferences. So, you edit everything for the module by clicking the modules menu, except the "preferences".

However, the cool thing is that because of the abstracted object-oriented design of xoops, the same module that worked on the old system still works on the new version of xoops. "Preferences" are just in a different place now.