(The driver support on Linux is a bit crappier though, since very few vendors spend time or money on linux drivers for their consumer-class stuff, especially l

The driver support is usually *better* on Linux because you aren't reliant on some stupid hardware vendor who doesn't feel like updating their driver for a new OS release. This happens on Windows all the time. Driver quality is usually better too; manufacturers are notorious for making shoddy and bloated driver packages with all kinds of extra crapware included.

The main problem where Linux drivers have problems is with video drivers, but most people seem to do just fine with Nvidia's proprietary drivers these days (no, they're not Free/open-source, but they do work and modern distros seem to manage them well enough by most accounts), and if your video needs aren't as high, Intel's drivers work great and are FOSS. A lot of people still seem to complain about AMD stuff though, so I'd avoid that.

Desktop pretends to be (or maybe they actually believe that's what they are creating) a product for end users but is a product for admins and developers who are familiar and comfortable with the UNIX-like environment to use on their personal computers.

This is total BS. Lots of people who aren't computer experts use Linux desktops every day. My wife is one of them. I never have to do anything much with that computer, besides regular backups of course. Back when she was running Windows, I had no end of problems with it. I'm sure plenty of people here can attest to similar stories, of switching their spouses or parents to Linux and no longer needing to spend any time being their unpaid tech support.

What desktop Linux is, is a very good product for people who don't need to run any Windows (or OSX) applications. For home users who just surf the web, use Facebook, and do basic PC tasks like some basic word processing or whatever, Linux works extremely well. For people who just *have* to run Photoshop or whatever, obviously that's a problem, but not everyone is like that.

The Linux desktop community is a mess of hundreds of different distributions, various different protocols for doing things (how many freaking sound subsystems do you need?! ALSA, PulseAudio, FFADO, Jack, OSS, etc...) and all kinds of different UI paradigms, frameworks and toolkits.

You're completely overblowing things. Most modern Linux distros have settled on ALSA and PulseAudio (ALSA is the kernel-level drivers; PulseAudio is a userspace layer on top of that) and it works fine. No one uses OSS on Linux any more, and Jack is only used by a small number of people doing high-performance audio stuff. Different UIs aren't a big problem; people get along just fine choosing a desktop environment like KDE or Cinnamon and sticking with that. Different toolkits don't matter if you aren't developing software; you can run software written in one just fine in a DE written in another.

The problem with that is that the vast majority of computer uses do not want to choose every different option for every different part of the operating system

And they don't need to. Just download a copy of Ubuntu or Mint and be done with it. That's what everyone else does. This choice is generally made by the person who's computer-savvy, and the user doesn't question it. My wife uses KDE because I chose that for her since I prefer it and it works similarly to Windows, and she's never had a problem with it. She doesn't know or ask about Unity, Gnome3, Cinnamon, MATE, Xcfe, etc. People have zillions of choices when they buy a car too, but regular, everyday people don't have a problem there. They pick something they like and stop worrying about it. It may be a car their friend had, or they may have just stopped at a dealership and checked out a few things based on a salesman's advice. No one checks out every single model of car before making a decision.

yes i know you set it up for your grandma and she likes it -- represents falls outside the vast majority).

No, actually it doesn't (BTW, your sentence doesn't parse here). Most home users don't do anything terribly complicated with their computers, and these days they really don't do anything besides use it for web-surfing. This is why tablets have become so popular: people are sick of Windows problems, and tablets work just fine for using Facebook. Linux works fine here too, and better than tablets (since you get a real monitor, a real keyboard, real storage space, etc.). For the things most home users do, Linux does them extremely well. It can even play a lot of games now too, though that still works better on Windows because many games still don't support Linux (including anything that isn't on Steam) of course. No, it doesn't do TurboTax, but who cares: everyone's moving to web-based stuff for that. No, it doesn't run Pro/E, but how many home users do that. I've never heard of someone's grandma running engineering software. No, it doesn't run [random Windows software], but neither does Mac OSX, but I never hear of anyone saying Macbooks aren't viable alternatives.

The real problem is, in an infinite, probabilistic universe, even the smallest chance that God exists is a certainty.

Not any god that a christian would accept. Their god is outside the universe, and created it.

No, that's what you get for anyone on your network running windows.

Not a problem on my home network. Besides, that's only if you actually set your system up so that Windows has access to the NAS box.

My friend lived in a low budget rental with 4 random roommates (former roommate was the thief,

That sounds like a good lesson in choosing your roommates more carefully, or better yet not having any (and certainly not 4).

For $100 + a few minutes every weekend doing incremental backups, I'll go the external harddisk over a NAS anyday. Though realistically I went for both a NAS and an external offsite backup.

Personally I prefer the external HD and incremental backups strategy too, but the downside with this compared to the NAS strategy is that you don't get automatic, regular backups: you have to be diligent in actually doing the backups, and you're only going to do them so often (once per week in your case), whereas with a NAS you can schedule them to be far more frequent, daily or even hourly.

I believe the other poster even suggested having two NAS boxes: one in active use doing hourly backups, and the other in off-site storage. Swap them out every month or week so your off-site is never that far behind, and then if something happens to your on-site systems you still have a fairly recent backup set. This is somewhat pricey, but seems like a robust strategy to me.

Comparing the hits of any Linux distro to iOS/OSX or Windows is an apples-and-oranges comparison, and makes little sense. Everyone knows that desktop Linux has a tiny marketshare. It might make some sense to compare to OSX perhaps, but certainly not Windows, and definitely not a mobile OS like iOS.

What you should be comparing is how popular it is in relation to Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Fedora, Arch, OpenSUSE, and Slackware.

That's true - olympic medals are only required to contain a minimum of 6 grams of gold, and at least 92% silver. Even still, it's a an incredible price

$9.4 billion for a 28 mile road. And we're not talking through an urban area, just simple new constuction. 4 lines. 28 miles. 45000 meters long with an actual driving width of... oh, let's say 3,5 meters per lane? Not sure what's typical. So about 157500 square meters. $60k per square meter. I mean, seriously, just think about that. You could stack $1000 Louie Vitton handbags 5 layers deep across the whole road for that money. $9.4 billion for 28 miles? You could pay Russians $3 an hour to carry passengers on their shoulder at 3 miles per hour and carry 50 thousand passengers per day every day and it wouldn't cost as much as the road for nearly 20 years.

3) Any user who chooses to blow a hardware "fuse" can install any software he wants to without permission from the auto-maker, BUT prior to driving the vehicle on the public road he must register his car as an "experimental vehicle"

This is idiotic. I'm quite sure that no cars actually tie the airbags (or engine ECU, or ABS, etc.) into the infotainment computer.

1) Programmers who do not require password to be changed,

Hey, don't blame the programmers. Most likely, someone did suggest requiring the password to be changed, and management said no for some dumb reason.

Really? That's your example of something comparable to Roscosmos embezzling 10% of its annual budget? Operation Lightning Strike which turned out to be a big entrapment op that spent years trying to convince non-key players to commit crimes that they never would have otherwise, and a link that's anything but an endictment of NASA?

never mind having responsibility for a few hundred tons of freight/passengers barrelling down the lines upwards of 60 mph.

Not disagreeing, but the Amtrak train that wrecked goes up to 125mph on the DC-NYC route. I've been on it myself and clocked it with a GPS speedometer app. And that's the regular train; Amtrak's Acela Express goes faster than that (I think up to 150, I'm not sure). And trains don't surround you with airbags and lock you in your seat with seat belts the way cars do, and cars only go up to 75-80mph on normal highways.

Maybe an hour of each person gets viewed once a week or so

Why would it ever be viewed at all, unless something happened? Who wants to waste their time watching drivers pick their noses?

you can assume that a train isn't going to be jumping off the tracks 500 feet into a field to the left so that does make the job a little easier.

Too bad Google Maps doesn't make that kind of assumption.

The USPS *is* a government entity. It's wholly owned by the US Government, therefore it's a government entity. It's largely run like a private company, but not entirely; Congress actually has a lot of say in its operations. The USPS isn't allowed to change the days they deliver mail, for instance, without Congressional approval. (They tried to eliminate delivery for one day a week not long ago and Congress refused.)

I'd like to know why no one ever talks about the other, fairly cheap and easy method of preventing train-driver error: hiring a second driver.

Every single passenger-carrying airplane in the US has two pilots, a pilot and a co-pilot. If the pilot screws up badly, or becomes incapacitated (people do have seizures and blackouts sometimes, you never know), or just needs to go to the bathroom badly because of some shitty Mexican food he ate earlier, then the co-pilot is there to take over.

Why do trains not have co-engineers? These aren't taxis with a handful of passengers, or even buses with up to ~50 passengers, these are trains with hundreds of passengers, just like large airliners.

We can talk about PTC (I think that's the acronym, positive train control) systems, and how effective they are, but a simple fix to this problem is to simply put a second engineer in the cabin.

No, cameras are never a bad idea for public-service employees. A good example of this is bus drivers. All the public buses I've taken in recent years had cameras on board, showing both the drivers and the passengers, along with signs warning that assaulting a bus driver carries a stiff prison sentence. The cameras are ostensibly to protect the drivers from bad passengers, but they obviously can also be used to see what the driver was doing in case of a crash, which is a good thing.

There isn't much difference between a train driver and a bus driver, except that the train driver doesn't have to interact with the public/passengers. There's no good reason at all to not have their activities recorded on camera while they're working.