I think you are mixing up two different kinds of "dumbing it down". Compared to how some other OS chooses to dumb it down _and_ completely deny the user any access to the "inner mechanics", the way ubuntu (and most other distros to be fair) does it in most cases preserves the choice for manual tweaking. E.g., I never liked the Network Manager, so I simply got rid of it and went back to /etc/network, while still enjoying whatever other features that ubuntu did get right.

So does wiki, but then I don't see anybody claim wiki being "the silent Apache HTTPD killer."

(On the other hand...) yeah, sorry madam, I appreciate you trying to help, but I've got a C-cup face.

I have a feeling that the Year of the MenuetOS on Desktop is coming soon.

That better?

I keep a bottle of alcohol in my drawer too!

Don't mean to nitpick - but Mongolia was never part of the USSR (Maybe a USSR "satellite" or "protectorate", however you like to put it).

HTML 5, I await you with open arms, hope and understanding. Improve the table element (if possible) and create a solid datagrid element. Deliver me from Flash.

That all looks good on paper. My concern however is that any element that's sufficiently complex and insufficiently spec'ed will have subtle differences between render engines.

That, and a certain market dominant browser vendor's track record of arbitrarily interpreting w3c standards.

Ironically while OP has been buried by -1 Troll, people can still see the offending words you quoted in your +2 Informative reply.

All that is true, except that when the oil price gets high enough, all the conveniences will become too expensive for most of us. And the oil price _will_ get high enough, and soon enough. So we might as well start getting prepared by investing in alternate, less oil-dependent means of transportation now.

If it's already _that_ secure with SP1, how come SP2 is claimed the most secure?

What did SP1 miss?

But I have a feeling, when a tornado comes, we won't be in Kansas any more.

Where in GP did you pick that up?

Clue sticks? Why not chairs?

The result from a map.get("key") call often isn't dereferenced. Often the whole reason to make a get() call is to check the existence of a value. Some other times we simply want to put whatever we get into another collection type without actually using it.

In my mind, NULL to programming languages is like 0 to numbers. The conceptual breakthrough in the invention of 0 lies in that we realized we could use a symbol to denote the case of "nothing", and thus save ourselves a lot of trouble. For example, some early civilization used a space to represent "no value" in their _hand-written_ numbers. Imagine all the confusion that would have caused - "is that one space or two?"