FYI, Raytheon doesn't just make missiles and weapons. Generally they are defense oriented (war facilitators sounds better), but they've been involved with some NASA and MIL projects in the past. Space based Radar for example (which has non-military uses).

Its entirely plausible this guy was working on studying black holes. They used to have an 'intro' to black holes thing here:

http://itss.raytheon.com/cafe/qadir/abholes.html

But seems to have been taken down a few years ago.

Other (mostly military related) space stuff can be found here: http://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/space/

When you violate someone's constitutional rights, that's a crime worse than murder.

Please explain how murdering someone does not take away all their natural and constitutional rights.

Missing. The. Point.

Violating someone's Constitutional rights is worse than murder. Why? Because it does not just affect that one person. You let precedence get set that violating X Constitutional right is okay, or not that bad, or whatever and you diminish the rights of every citizen.

If you murder someone, that one person is dead. The family will mourn and it will still be a horrible tragedy. At the same time, it doesn't immediately diminish the rights of every citizen.

In any event both are terrible, but I would value the rights in the Constitution for everyone over my life any day.

Who marked this troll? That seems a bit excessive and unnecessary. Actually, the post is almost helpful and talks up some of the boons of the Linux community.

How is this sarcasm? It doesn't even seem sarcastic. It just seems like an attempt to troll to be honest. Or to insult a segment of the population on Slashdot.

You need to work on your humor mate. Your post wasn't even remotely amusing.

Does make me wonder though, what causes fundamentalism in people. Doesn't matter if its religion or fanboyism, its damned annoying.

DELL can figure what out? Their support is a complete joke compared to HP's. I deal with both on a daily basis.

DELL: Tries to squirm its way out of honoring the next business day warranty for every computer that has issues. Their support specialists are script following drones and the scripts are badly written. Even better, they usually 'forget' to overnight equipment and their third party technicians that they dispatch have no quality control and frequently lie about repairs (I've had this happen in US states in the south east and on the eastern seaboard, as well as in Canada).

HP: Will try to troubleshoot and solve the problem with you intelligently. if you already tried something they don't ask you to do it 3 more times. No hassle once its clear its a hardware failure, parts are shipped overnight and techs go onsite and they do what they're supposed to.

I've been dealing with DELL professionally for 5 years and HP for 2 duing hardware RMAs. DELL is worthless. They started out strong, outsourced to India and were fine, then didn't like the deal with their had and went with a crappy helpdesk. Their printer support is still based out of Oklahoma City and is top notch,but for workstation issues forget about it!

In a book series by David & Leigh Eddings there was an interesting solution to that:

Anyone who is elected to office has their property and assets seized by the government. Heirlooms and the like get stored, but the money basically goes into an account held in trust by the government. If the economy does well while they are in office, they'll do well personally as well. If the economy doesn't do so well, they'll lose money proportionately.

The idea was to make it so everyone in power had a personal stake in the country doing well. Keeps them motivated. Of course, it lead to people not wanting to be elected but they weren't really given a choice.

I'll likewise not use my mod points just because I disagree with you. I've been using Windows 7 professionally and personally since its release so maybe it is just me, but I have no idea what you are talking about. Windows 7 is the most newbie friendly Windows OS to date (warning: my evidence being anecdotal). Its not really that much different than XP, and the bits that are are usually changed for good reason (not always, but usually). Its stability is also amazingly better than XP for the most part. Really the only issue I've ever come across is a tendency in a non-domain environment for user profiles to load into a temporary profile, but this seems to be the fault of the anti-virus and is easily fixed. I've seen the occasional Win7 hate on Slashdot but to be honest I'm a bit confused by it. It seems the only complaints are very obscure and a bit of a stretch.

260 horsepower == 0.00019388 gigawatts

Definitely not enough on its own for time travel :/

I'm curious, do you really have problems with their software?

Perhaps I'm strange since I only use it as an alternative to Ventrilo, but aside from it wanting to "always run" the sound quality is fantastic and it allows free conference calls. I've only been using it for a few days but I can see why my friends started using it while my computer was down for a few months.

My complaints are, if anything, very minor. Nothing functionally, just "I wouldn't do it that way" sort of things.

How exactly does that make him a bad guy? I don't know the tone of the conversation but if they're fairly compensated then everyone wins. Gates keeps control of the way "his" company is growing and the family gets money. I don't see it as a bad conversation in of itself.