This. So many times this.

The crux of it is multiple fold:
1) Rupert Murdoch owns the biggest cable network in Australia (Foxtel). The current governments NBN plan will give up to 100Mbit (maybe even 1GBit) to just about every home in a town above 1000 homes - Australia wide. As the US has seen with streaming services, in this environment, cable tv would be obliterated. Its just a sad fact that the same guy owns most of the media - therefore he uses his influence to protect his media assets.

2) Gina gets a load of immigrant workers. The current government is looking to restrict imported workers to a lower amount that is currently happening. This means that Gina will have to pay fair wages to more of her staff. This is of course being protested by her interests in any way possible.

3) Tony Abbott is great at grinding axes, but very poor (being kind) at content. He has spearheaded the biggest sledging campaign in Australian political history. This is the guy that outright lies (which the media doesn't expose - see point #1) to the public to destabilise the current government as much as possible.

4) Tony Abbott (with the media in tow) has made a massive issue about asylum seekers arriving in Australia via boats. Forget that fact that he calls them illegal immigrants (which they aren't) and that they are the source of Australias problems (which they aren't) and he promises that he will stop the boats (which he can't) to increase our nations security. His plans have been scoffed at by the brass in the navy as unworkable - but these details get overlooked by the media (see point #1).

In a nutshell, its a sad day for me to call myself an Australian - and its a sad day for politics in Australia that people sink so low as to put themselves before their country - but that is exactly what is happening at this point in time.

There is no real reason why Google can't do all of these things. Their core market is information. Gathering information. Processing information. Sorting and utilising information.

Once you're good at this, it isn't hard to expand into various uses for that information.

Well, the performance difference didn't seem to be huge - in fact, some stats were slower.... I don't buy for a second that it was for performance reasons.

Philosophy - maybe - however Oracle contribute quite a bit to OSS - more than a lot of companies - See: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/linux/technical-contributions-1689636.html

In a nutshell, they are working on NFS over IPv6, data integrity checks for ext3, they maintain libstdc++, they worked hard on BTRFS, If anything, they have helped open source much more than most other companies.

Again, I don't see the philosophical reasons other than 'because we can'.

Speak up sonny, its hard to hear you these days....

So reading the links etc, there is no real reason that stands out apart from "Oracle may screw MySQL".

Is there a reason for this other than ifs, buts and maybes?

It does a lot more that just that...

$ xfreerdp --help

FreeRDP - A Free Remote Desktop Protocol Client
See http://www.freerdp.com/ for more information

Usage: xfreerdp [options] server:port
    -0: connect to console session
    -a: set color depth in bit, default is 16
    -c: initial working directory
    -D: hide window decorations
    -T: window title
    -d: domain
    -f: fullscreen mode
    -g: set geometry, using format WxH or X% or 'workarea', default is 1024x768
    -h: print this help
    -k: set keyboard layout ID
    -K: do not interfere with window manager bindings
    -m: don't send mouse motion events
    -n: hostname
    -o: console audio
    -p: password
    -s: set startup-shell
    -t: alternative port number, default is 3389
    -u: username
    -x: performance flags (m[odem], b[roadband] or l[an])
    -X: embed into another window with a given XID.
    -z: enable compression
    --app: RemoteApp connection. This implies -g workarea
    --ext: load an extension
    --no-auth: disable authentication
    --no-fastpath: disable fast-path
    --gdi: graphics rendering (hw, sw)
    --no-osb: disable offscreen bitmaps
    --no-bmp-cache: disable bitmap cache
    --plugin: load a virtual channel plugin
    --rfx: enable RemoteFX
    --rfx-mode: RemoteFX operational flags (v[ideo], i[mage]), default is video
    --nsc: enable NSCodec (experimental)
    --disable-wallpaper: disables wallpaper
    --composition: enable desktop composition
    --disable-full-window-drag: disables full window drag
    --disable-menu-animations: disables menu animations
    --disable-theming: disables theming
    --no-rdp: disable Standard RDP encryption
    --no-tls: disable TLS encryption
    --no-nla: disable network level authentication
    --ntlm: force NTLM authentication protocol version (1 or 2)
    --ignore-certificate: ignore verification of logon certificate
    --sec: force protocol security (rdp, tls or nla)
    --secure-checksum: use salted checksums with Standard RDP encryption
    --version: print version information

I don't believe you need to be in combat, nor on any kind of military mission to have stress levels increase - sometimes to breaking point.

I've seen stories of relatively inexperienced first officers on 747s go crazy on an approach to an airport among thunderstorms and bad weather. My favourite one was an asian first officer who freaked out, started singing some song in korean and forced the captain to do the workload of two pilots to land. Most of the training leading up to this was in simulators.

I've seen stories of training captains throw real world scenarios to students learning to fly airliners that screw up, crash what should be a very easy recovery, go "oh well" and hit the reset button to the sim. They then continued to do other exercises while never really learning the lesson to the situation being simulated.

You can then add to the list of problems the reliance on computers in aircraft which if training is not up to scratch can really cause problems. The excellent presentation "Children of the Magenta" highlights a lot of these - and while watching the video you might think that a lot of what the presenter points out is common sense - it is at odds with most training done in airlines these days.

The procedural training in a lot of airlines is (basically): Take off -> Climb to 500ft AGL -> confirm aircraft is in a stable climb -> Engage VNAV -> confirm no sudden unexpected movements -> Engage LNAV -> Monitor instrumentation until on final to land.

Its a matter of time until all these issues cascade into an unfortunate event. Its up to the pilot individually how they choose to avoid these events and how they keep their skills in tact to work effectively.

Oh, and I forgot to include this link in my response above...

Simulator training flaws tied to airline crashes:
http://travel.usatoday.com/flights/2010-08-31-1Acockpits31_ST_N.htm

For the record, I'm a commercial pilot.

Simulators have their place - but it is certainly nowhere near the experience as a real aircraft. Speaking from a commercial background, simulators are great at two things:
1) Procedure
2) Techniques

Simulators are great in showing pilots how things work. Want to know what to expect in a fogged in approach to an airport and are learning how to use the ILS etc? A simulator is *great* in this role. You can do things in this combo that are GREAT for education. Does it come anywhere close to the real thing? Hell no.

The other thing that simulators excel at is teaching things such as instrument scans - basically train you to keep an eye on all your instruments at the same time by developing an effective scan of them. No pilot flying on instruments will use a single instrument - flying is very complex and cannot be done like this. An effective instrument scan (A/H -> Airspeed -> A/H -> Altitude -> A/H -> VSI -> A/H -> DG etc) is very hard to grasp when first starting - and it is the bread and butter that keeps pilots alive when the weather is starting to deteriorate or you start to fly faster and bigger aircraft.

Your standard 737 pilot will probably spend about 15 minutes out of every flight looking out the windows. The rest is monitoring instrumentation. I cannot understate how important this skill is - and simulators are perfect at developing those skills.

So are simulators replacement for a real aircraft though? Nowhere near. Simulators should be treated as an addition to inflight training - not as a replacement for it.

Sadly, I agree. I checked out the links you posted to see what all the hullabaloo was... I got about 45 seconds in and couldn't bear to listen to the 'covers' of it. Its... just painful o_O

And this is why Alan Cox is a legend. I've dealt with him a few times and EVERY time I have he has been a pure joy to talk to.

He has a great way of telling things how they are and even takes the time to help relative newbies into improving their skills and contributions.

So, three cheers to Alan and I hope we see him back in the future.

With a note that it doesn't always work:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=869903

Why the hell is there a chat client in a mail program to start with? I saw this new 'feature' and died a little inside. It is a classic sign on developers losing their direction.

My bug list with Thunderbird (Current as of 17.0).

1) A single new email received over a compressed IMAP connection (using Dovecot, imap-zlib plugin) shows stupidly high new message counts - ie You have 37845 new messages.

2) Randomly Thunderbird refuses to exit. This happens on linux as well as Windows. The GUI will disappear but thunderbird.exe / thunderbird-bin is still running. Only plugins are Lightning + Google Calendar connector.

Fix these two up and I'd be a much happier person...