The state is, and has always been, the main way humans self-organise and coordinate on a large scale. Modern civilisation has its advantages, but one drawback is that the rules are too numerous, can only really be understood by experts and is open to abuse by vested interests. The state also has these shortcomings, but is generally much simpler in nature. We have a few thousand years of political history to study how that part of human psychology works, and it is not surprising to see political behaviour emerging naturally in many aspects of life. (Fans following a football team are probably an excellent source of examples here.)

You forgot to mention Judaism 1.1, rebranded as Islam. Although mutually compatible with Judaism 1.0 and Christianity, its users vehemently deny this compatibility. It runs on almost any platform, but disables any other of Judaism found there ( it is pertinently *not* usable in a multi-boot environment ). All attempts to run Judaism 1.1 as a virtualized OS have also failed, until now.

Give us this time slice our system load, and forgive us for having threads in waiting state as we also wait for other users' threads. And lead our processes not into the page file but deliver us from seg faults.

Hm, interesting point. Yet there are quite recent protestant churches that are of Calvinist inspiration, e.g. numerous evangelical branches in the US. Sure, it does not please me to be possibly associated with US evangelicals, but that is what the metaphor brings. Where is IRIX in this metaphor, BTW ?

It maps quite well to my own path: I started out with Solaris, but seeing how much such Unices dabbled in simony and venality, I "went protestant", and am a hardcore Linux-Calvinist now ( Slackware, Fuduntu, xfce et al. being the grounds of my daily toil.

Nation-states will be history, soon enough, I guess ( or fear ).

Humankind will learn a lot more from a Mars One failure, even now, in this early stage, than from all of us remaining seated on our butts. In the unlikely case that Mars One does not fail, we'll collectively learn even more. Where is the problem ?

Dude, normally you GET PAID in sexual favours... that's the goal, at least. You wanna PAY in sexual favours ??!?

Last week, there was news that, although economic growth is picking up nearly everywhere in the EU ( the 2008 crisis seems finally over ), France is lagging behind, and we hear more and more often the epithet "sick man of Europe". I studied and worked in France, hence I know that society pretty well. The problem has always seemed, to me, that the average Frenchman expects the French state to provide him with anything he needs: health, safety, a job, a pension, vacation. Add to this the curious "cultural exception" France has always demanded for itself to be made within Europe and, indeed, the entire world; add to this its isolationism, and its lack of true opening to what is now the modern world - and you have the recipe for driving an entire country to insignificance. France, indeed and as a culture, is no more.

Ever heard of hard radiation ? Any consumer-grede device would only survive for minutes up there.

cough Ahem. i>cough Are you serious about that ? End of 2013 ? After Snowden, Afghanifuckingstan, the Iraq botch-up, the ridiculous "war on terror", twice dubya Bush ? Are you serious, dude ?

You, Sir, deserve a landslide of mod points. Up, that is.

Excuse me. You use an abbreviation I have never seen or heard of. What does "QLEB" mean ?

I normally do not deign to reply to cowardly and anonymous posters. But this your reaction begs and screams for answer. You, Sir, are so gross toward this courageous person that, if you had an account here, you would have instantaneously merited to have that account closed down. This is SO MUCH below any level of decency and respect that I find no words for it.