And if you read TFS they are only talking about life similar to ours; there is nothing saying that in other regions life hasn't evolved to be able to handle those kinds of environments.

This is exactly why it is impossible to predict the finding of "life" in non-earth environments, there are just too many variables that we don't even know to look for. I.E. life based on something other than carbon, life than can flourish in extremes we could never dream of surviving... be it temperature, pressure, or even radiation bombardment. And that is only a tiny fraction of differences, any one of which could be overlooked, and the probability is there would be multiples of these differences all at once.

Maybe if you only want clicky clicky ways of changing things. Otherwise there is still a full terminal and BASH installed, and you can update many many system settings through the CLI. I am using a terminal right now as a matter of fact.

Then there is the questionable applescript / automator scripts you can make. I say questionable because I don't know if they can change any deep system things, but automator at least can do some pretty neat tricks... I don't know if Linux has something comparable, other than shell scripts which I can still run in OS/X.

Bullshit. Maybe, MAYBE they are not stressing the C2D / C2Q chips if they only browse the net / read and reply to emails. Otherwise stuff like watching 1080P, and to a lesser extent 720P H.264 10bit videos ( or even 8bit, without GPU acceleration ), which more and more videos are in now, pushes a C2D into the 80-90% utilization range. Then they can't do any background tasks on the CPU when watching movies.

Even if it does do everything you need, the thermal profile is horrid... I moved away from my Prescott that did everything I needed to a C2D simply because I didn't want the thermal profile of the throat of an active volcano on my motherboard anymore, or the fans that sounded like jet engines that cooled it. The benefits of less heat output and less power input by far outweighed the performance gains ( those had been only a bonus ).
No one can know if we are going to hit a thermal wall anytime soon, the next breakthrough could be happening right as we discuss. Add that to the fact that Intel is reaching ARM power profiles with similar, or higher, clocks, and that x86 / x86_64 vastly outperforms ARM on a per clock-cycle basis and Intel has nothing to fear.

And congratulations on being an AMD only shop, heaven forbid your customers have any kind of choice in the matter. AMD hasn't made anything more than an "adequate" chip since the K6. Can you name one x86 based laptop / net-top / tablet that uses AMD chips and boasts long battery life made in the last few years? I've seen quite a few Intel based ones that boast 6-7+ hours VS. the AMDs that are usually rated at ~5+.
You may think I'm "trolling" asking that, but I am actually quite serious, if there is some AMD chip out there that is really power efficient I would like to know, it's just that the only really efficient stuff I have seen recently was all Intel.

Ummm, close, but no. It was sequestered over hundreds of million years to billions of years but the bulk of the carbon from the carbon cycle is tied up in a few places, neither of which has anything to do with mass extinctions. The huge bulk of CO2 ( currently ~400PPM atmosphere, ~60*atmosphere dissolved in the oceans, and ~10,000*oceans+atmosphere is tied up in rocks ) is tied up in the carbonates, I.E. limestones and dolostones. Coals come from swamps, and oil comes from mostly shallow-ish marine bacteria that had periodic blooms and die-offs that settled into the sediments on the seafloor and got buried.

Don't forget that this also has feedbacks. The global oceans hold ~60x atmospheric levels of CO2, and warm water will hold less dissolved gasses, leading to outgassing of CO2 and leading to more ocean warming. You will also get more water vapor ( another greenhouse gas ) in the atmosphere, but that will - eventually - be countered somewhat by the albedo effect of the large scale clouds that will form.

Nope, I require science, something you don't seem to have a firm grasp of as of yet. Try taking a few classes, looking at and actually understanding the massive amounts of data available, and after that coming back in a year or three when you actually have a chance at understanding the difference between long and short term trends.

But, if you actually have data proving climate change wrong, for the love of $DIETY publish it in a peer reviewed journal, you will become famous... I won't hold my breath though.

Don't forget, if you only want a .5 megabyte terminal application you also have to install ~5+GB of xcode....

I'd love to run macports (and have in the past), but that huge chunk of space the xcode install takes up kills the SSD space I have.

I felt the same way... at least for 4.1/4.2/and early 4.3. Then I installed trinity after using KDE4.x for a while and my eyes wanted to bleed from the old jagged rendering and ugly aged looking icons. Felt great, just like an old friend, but it was fugly as hell.

Thankfully KDE4.x started to improve along the way and is just as comfortable now as 3.x was back in the day. You should check it out once again... just use the "desktop with icons" activity from the activity switcher if your distro doesn't have that as the default.

Are you talking about the open application window list? If so, just go to the taskbar settings and set it to "do not sort", in Debian at least it is set to sort "alphabetically" by default.

Other than that particular way, and it behaves as soon as you apply the settings, I haven't noticed any movement on the taskbar.

The really interesting part would be if it was the network OWNERS torrent traffic he tries to knock out.
That's potentially a denial of service attack, after all the owner of the WIFI may be distributing business related things ( doesn't really matter if it is or not - the network owner can do what they want with their connection ) and denying the use of the network to the owner is illegal.

I've had this discussion on slashdot before, mostly the one thing that keeps me from GIMP as a semi-pro photographer is the UI. I've used PhotoShop since the 7.0 debut up to CS3 and a brief poke at PS-CC, so I know the UI and where I expect to find stuff for my workflow... hell I could do the tasks I need to while asleep by now. GIMP on the other hand - and if you will excuse the graphic ( pun fully intended ) description - looks like the UI designers chowed down on all the UI elements and threw up on the screen. I've also used Linux, and GIMP, for many a year now and remember how much the GIMP devs hate listening to the users... we asked for how many years before they finally implemented single window mode?

SO the main problem isn't that GIMP is lacking features, it's that the UI is horrid to long time users of PS, leading to the "experts" not using it and thus leading to no one teaching the newbies to learn the program / UI. That's the main reason PS is taught in schools, it's what is known and used by the "experts".
For the inevitable slashdot car analogy: you can have two cars that can get from point A to point B along the same route in relatively the same timeframe, one that costs a fair bit to use but is an industry standard car like all others on the road ( PS ), or a free one that does nearly the same as the paid car but has bicycle handle bars for a steering wheel, a manual transmission with a reversed standard H shift pattern, the fuel pedal is on the handle bars and the brake is where the gas pedal usually is on normal cars, and you have to enter and exit through the trunk.... You can guess what vehicle 99% of people who have ever driven a normal vehicle will take.

Other than that, there is the non destructive editing and smart objects mentioned. I personally think the workflow for working with layers, clipping masks, and paths in PS is easier and more streamlined as well, but that is a personal opinion due to my workflow.

Wrong way. You are paying the hotel to stay there with a reasonable expectation of (semi)privacy. The Valet is not paying YOU to drive your vehicle, YOU are paying the valet ( both in tips and through their wages being rolled into purchase prices ) to drive your vehicle.

Playing devils advocate:
It's been argued here and elsewhere that employers are justified in recording employees using the employers equipment at work; the valet is just another subcontractor that you hire while he/she works for the hotel / restaurant / wherever you go. Since the valet is an employee you should be able to record them, especially seeing as there really shouldn't be a difference in recording voice versus recording text ( email / IM ) from a computer.

That said, it should be an interesting court case if it gets argued. It has the potential to affect OTR truck drivers as well since some companies record audio / video of them. Again, it will come down to employment definitions, since the employer of the truck drivers must disclose that the employee is being recorded. It may mean that even a small sign in a prominent location in / on the vehicle would be all that is needed, something like the "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear" signs on cars.

You mean it wasn't a good idea to basically make a 4chan for scientific paper review?

Who would have thought it, after all, 4chan turned out to be such an awesome, wholesome, and welcoming place... do I really need to add the huge sarcasm tag after that statement?

I haven't looked into it in quite a few years, but I believe the European roadways last ~2x as long as the American roadways but cost roughly the same to maintain over the same time period ( meaning it costs the same to repave the road twice with half the thickness as it does to pave once at 2x thickness... + maintenance over the same time periods). The main reason, at east used to be, that the European roadways where laid down in mats double the thickness of the American pavings.

So the only real advantage Euro-roads have is full deconstruction / reconstruction times are further apart, while having to do roughly the same minor repairs at maintenance times similar to American roadways. Basically cost wise it was a wash, with the American roadways having a lower initial cost layout to pave previously unpaved areas, a huge advantage when you think of the geographical areas needed to be paved per country.

Now of course things may have changed in the intervening time, but I doubt it. It was actually an interesting study to look at how similar the differences actually turned out to be in the end.

My personal setup is a frankencenter. I have everything from an old Cyrix300Mhz to a P3 733Mhz HP Netserver to random P4 / Prescotts serving up a combined total of ~12TB + 6TB for desktop / laptop backups. Some of these "machines" are not even in a physical case...

The main trick for the power hungry crap is only keeping what you really need powered on at any time. Most of the old really power hungry stuff is deep cold storage and rarely powered on except to test data integrity. That way I only need to provide cooling ( in the summer at least ) to the P4 / Prescott machines that have the bulk of my more accessed data.

So, all in all it's ugly, hackish - since it is all cobbled together from spare parts from other jobs, and works like a charm.