We are currently orbiting the galactic core at 220 km/s and around the sun at 30 km/s and yet you can catch a baseball tossed to you, unless you're a total klutz, right? If you are riding in a bus, walking toward the back, and a passenger in the back throws a cellphone to you, you can catch it, right? Even though if the bus is traveling at 65mph relative to the street, and the cellphone 35mph relative to the bus floor (or 100mph relative to the street)

Motion is relative. Speed is relative.

The satellite will not be motionless relative to the junk.

Think about it.

Oh, the one time I wish slashdot had a facebook-style "Like" button!!!!

"the stuff that stars and planets and people are made of"

I think we have a word for it: "matter."

With Mandriva dying, they will probably take Scalix down with them.

By that argument, music could be sold differently depending on the bitrate.

It's been done (by MP3.com if I recall correctly) for tiered pricing. and you know. it's actually a great model. Cheapskates can buy their inferior distortion-riddled music, and audiophiles can buy fairly good quality MP3s.

Unfortunately the vendors who did this are not around any more - it seems they failed to negotiate distribution rights and were engaging in copyright infringement (or in the case of MP3.com, the MAFIAA hired goons in Russia to crack down even though it wasn't illegal there). You know, actual "piracy" or "theft." It wasn't a matter of you or I making a mix CD/tape/track for a friend, it was a matter of willfully infringing upon others' distribution rights (either by legal or ethical or moral standards) and profiting from it. Current vendors (Amazon, Sprawl*Mart, Apple, etc) offer what they offer, and that's it. No bitrate choices or anything like that.

It would still be a great model. I have a kickass audio system at home, and yet, there are some pop tunes I'd buy if they weren't $.99, at a lower bitrate. For progressive rock, classical, and the like? I want lossless formats (preferably physical, as in CD or DVD or Blu-ray), but I'd settle for nothing less than 320kbps if mp3 format. For highly-compressed mainstream pop, I'd take 128kbps or even lower bitrates, if I could buy it at an appropriate discounted price. Since it's not offered, I'll look on Rhapsody for streaming instead, or simply not bother at all.

Wait a sec - I seem to recall your complaints starting on the day of release - for the past few releases. One thing I learned in late 90s was never, ever install a network-updatable Linux distro on the day of release. The few times I've done so it's bitten me with various glitches. I always give it at least a couple of weeks so that any packages that the release engineer or maintainer might have slipped in without their having been tested by the sponsor's QA team or by the public during beta are found and patched in an update.

I think you're doing something wrong, or your hardware is seriously fucked.

Reason: I am running OpenSUSE on a Mac Pro at the office, and on a Dell Precision M6400 Mobile Workstation. Both work perfectly and are stable out of the box. Everything on the notebook works (well, I haven't tested the webcam since installing OpenSUSE 12.1, but it worked in previous versions): bluetooth, audio, wifi, the automatic brightness adjuster for the screen, keyboard backlighting, eSATA, USB, integrated cardreader, and so on. The systems are stable, as well.

So, I've got two difficult-to-support machines running OpenSUSE 12.1 perfectly with no hand tweaking required. In fact, getting Bluetooth to work perfectly on the M6400 in Windows is a royal pain in the ass, whereas on Linux, It Just Works(TM). Heck, I haven't even installed NVidia's proprietary driver for the Quadro Mobile video card; the open source driver is running the "3D" desktop just fine.

Your hardware is messed up - it could be just one bad DIMM (memtest86+ is your friend there), or something else is flaking out.

No big loss. After all, its inhabitants concern themselves entirely too much about the movement of green paper, and still think that digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

They're not "exactly the same" when you consider higher resolution or greater color depth that dual link DVI allows thanks to the additional TDMS lines.

Don't forget that in the past SCOTUS has ruled that The united States of America is a Christian nation - which is a serious infringement of the First Amendment.

Sometimes SCOTUS gets things wrong.