My most recent vehicle purchase was a Toyota Tacoma. Because I needed a truck, and I wanted a stick shift. The truck has no optional features at all. The nice thing is, there is almost nothing that needs fiddling with. Simple gauges. A nice but easy to control radio. No funny collections of buttons. Not even electric door locks or window controls.

Also no cruise control, but it seems like a small price to pay for having a truck that is otherwise simple, reliable and doesn't suck fuel like a three year old with a big gulp.

Amen to that. A Makerbot is a huge maintenance load. They need a lot of fiddling and constant maintenance and replacement parts that a school teacher isn't going to have time or money to do. These machines will sit in a corner collecting dust and frustration. Much like the one we have here, in an office full of engineers.

I'd be fine with a shop class full of nothing but hand tools. Cheaper for the school, lower liability costs, and the students will learn the same set of problem solving and building skills. Johnathan Starr published an excellent book back in the 1970s about the program he ran.

Dell's taking the blame, but the cat still isn't trustworthy. First the mouse is gone, then the track pad smells like wee.

I am very familiar with who he is. I also hold a degree in Physics. At the same time, I recognize the difference between a film made for entertainment purposes, and a film made for educational purposes. Gravity was the former, and I choose to evaluate it for what it is. Likewise, I don't criticize my cat because she can't repair a motorcycle, and hopefully she doesn't criticize me because I'm bad at catching mice.

Having actually had to calculate intercept orbits without benefit of a computer to do the heavy lifting, I assure you that it would not have improved the movie. Takes about half an hour, assuming that all of your information is accurate.

This is why nobody ever invites Neil deGrasse Tyson to the movies. It was a great movie. If your biggest quibble is that they made navigation line of sight to avoid tedious scenes full of calculating orbital mechanics, you're a killjoy.

It's cute that the Assemblyman thinks he's getting that Djin back in the bottle. Sadly, he has failed entirely to understand how distributed information systems work.

You do know, don't you, that Canonical and the KDE/Gnome teams are separate entities, right? This isn't a case of Ubuntu cramming software down anybody's throat. Two window managers did things you didn't like. Blaming it on a third party doesn't seem like a reasonable conclusion. I'd also point out that there are other, equally easy to install window managers available.

Not seeing your point here. Installing new software is trivially easy, especially under Ubuntu. Switching between desktop managers is likewise trivially easy. That's not ramming it down somebody's throat. That's giving people and choice and making it easy to exercise that choice. Pretty sure that's what is wanted.

It's selectable at the login screen. The login screen remembers whatever your last chosen desktop was and uses that as the default. It's really very nice and well thought out.

What restriction of choice has there been so far? Without having to jump through any hoops other than installing them through the app center, I can log in to Unity, KDE, Fluxbox and XBMC on my laptop. All of them are fully functional desktops (or in the case of XBMC, functional for its specific narrow usage). That looks like more choice to me, not less.

Did you try one of the obvious solutions, like installing KDE (which has worked flawlessly for me), or another desktop? Fluxbox was a brain dead simple install for me. I don't use it that often, but on a netbook it really made my machine a lot zippier.

KDE installed on ubuntu is quite nice, and is definitely not a second class citizen. I still have all of the easy GUI config tools, and I have the desktop that I prefer. So Right On, Brother! After all, it's Linux. If you don't like the desktop, it's trivial to install another one.

It doesn't seem like an unreasonable hunch though. Certainly the structure of a military or monastic life would provide a safer environment for people with social anxieties, which is what this sounds like from the article.