IIRC a few Australian scientists reanalyzed the "ozone hole" data awhile back, and it correlated ~100% to the output of the VOLCANO near the south pole, and did not correlate to man-made "ozone depleting" gas output well at all, indicating that industry wasted billions of dollars converting to fix a problem that didn't really exist, and converted to replacement gasses that are actually excellent greenhouse gasses in the process.

Or was this made up too?

I thought they figured out a few years ago the ozone "hole" in Antarcticas size correlated ~100% to the emissions of the volcano down there, and quite poorly with human generated CFCs emission volumes.

Perhaps too inconveinient a truth to be widely discussed...

Perhaps someday the Montreal protocol will be viewed as the tipping point that caused global warming, as the replacements for CFCs are generally hugely efficient greenhouse gasses. ;-)

Yes, slashdot has apparently DOS'd a guvmint lab.

Expect the black DHS helicopters to arrive in 3,2,1... ;-)

...Or for a tad more energy efficiency vs. using RADAR to heat up the bats skull to produce sound, put some SPEAKERS on the bloody blades.

Or air activated "deer warnings" on the blades, except ones that work for bats.
(Dangerously assuming those worked for Deer, but you get the idea)

Back in the ~70s, in the bidding stage of the shuttle program, General Dynamics had some interesting designs for a reusable--- FLYABLE---landed on its own, was piloted--- liquid fueled boost stage for a shuttle... and that proposed version of the shuttle was made of titanium mostly and had about 2X the payload, and far more range, and probably would have cost 1/4 of the final "cheaper" congressional mandated aluminum design.

Perhaps we should dust off some of the designs that lost the shuttle design-off due to congressional interference.

The shuttles concept didn't suck.
The final design did.

(My dad worked for GD back in the day, including at the cape)

I understand what you are saying, but as to the versioning--- 4.0 was essentially a clean sheet redo of KDE, right down to the foundations... so what were they going to call it? It isn't V3-anything.

The dire warnings of the devs prominently on KDEs website for all to see that this was under heavy development, do not use etc should have been more than sufficient that There Be Dragons Here.

KDE4-4.0-.1ish (and maybe even 4.2) should likely have been left as optional installs for folks to try if they dared, and more than one distro "got" this.

Very true, NOT KDE devs fault, even Mandriva had KDE4 as default for 2009.0, and it was nowhere NEAR ready.

OTOH, there were multiple choices of installers and ONE live CDs with different defaults.

KDE 3.5 was still fully supported, and worked fine.

Having said all that, 2009.1 came with KDE4.2(something) and works very nice, as well as LOOKS very nice.

I wouldn't write KDE off just yet, using Gnome still makes a lot of folks want to throw stuff.

"Taking kickbacks" is not technically controlling costs...

As has been mentioned, if you have a separate /home partition , reinstalling clean on a system / partition and updating from there will be far FASTER than updating an old distro, and less likely to have configuration weirdness after install--- I would venture a guess most of not all linux distros (hell, ANY OS) would see much the same.

Mandriva has been pretty solid as to version updates of the distro working for as long as I have been using it, but a ONE live CD can be tested on the hardware and installed in 30 minutes even on far less than modern hardware, and 10 min on a fast machine.

Updating from say 2008.0 to 2009.0 can take hours.

While the title is fascinating, a link would be nice...

Mandriva ....works?

Been using Mandriva for years/hated 2009.0 until I installed KDE3...

I've been following cooker for a few months, KDE4.2 has been working nicely for awhile... D'Ld ONE-KDE and installed it on all 3 machines here already, no unusual issues
(I have yet to be able to say that about ANY Ubuntu release)

Currently works flawlessly as far as I can tell.

The only standing "issue" I've run into is mythbackend seems to spin for some reason when started as a service, runs fine run in a shell. (PLF version, haven't worked it yet)

This is a showstopper for me and 2009.0 is staying on THAT box until fixed... likely an easy fix, just figured I'd mention it.

2009.1 still wants to turn on 3D on a Radeon Mobility 9000, which causes X to spin it's wheels/hangs machine (Xorg issue, hits ubuntu etc as well). ...Booting to runlevel 1 or 3 and running XFdrake/turning off 3d THEN telinit 5 gets you a nice installed system. (This chipset appears to have been borked on ALL distros since late 2007)

---begin troll
Installing Ubuntu always eventually makes me want to start throwing stuff due to random stuff that Just Doesn't Work, like wifi configuration.
---end troll

It would also (logically) allow for a company to have a single, standardized XP virtual machine image rolled out to all users, that would run on any machine hardwarethey happen to have.

It's the only way I'll run XP now, Virtualbox works quite well. (No, I don't play games)

Even QEMU rocks, I could boot to "you have unused items on the desktop..." in ~ 8 seconds with one particualar test image, on a lowly BE2300 setup.

Doesn't everyone use a stainless steel vacuum flask?

Paper.. plastic.. aluminum... baaaaagh. Bloody barbarians.