I have to say, I'm not entirely sure you've read this proposal. Or maybe there is something that could be more clear? The audience here is really Fedora developers, so it's likely that some things aren't immediately apparent if you're more removed from that. Overall, this is a proposal for significantly less baggage.

Well, Fedora isn't ever going to be that completely safe kind of boring. For that, we have our downstream distributions, which are awesomely boring in all the way you describe. Fedora isn't supposed to be that, and is supposed to be in place where we are generating excitement, whether that's at the OS core or further out. But in general, the idea here is to separate out that "no frills" core from the language stacks and other areas where "be up to date" and "make available the exact things we need" are the demands. Then, we can address these needs differently.

If you're just interested in the base, awesome: we will put that together for you in a well-defined way and let you do whatever you want on top of that.

Having the separate ring 1 lets us focus on making that a coherent base which can be enhanced in an cohesive way which doesn't break everything for users as we go from release to release.

Good, because those two things are exactly what this is all about.

(the other error being that laser pulses move slow enough to be seen)

What, you mean like the blasters in Star Wars? Those aren't laser pulses, they're charged particles. They travel at a fairly slow speed.

...right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system.

FTFA:

In a move eerily reminiscent of the Cold War, the US and Russia have set up a hotline to avoid an accidental or catastrophic cyber war, after two years of discussing how best to collaborate on online threats.

The two companies want to “reduce the possibility that a misunderstood cyber incident could create instability or a crisis in our bilateral relationship”, according to a fact sheet from the White House.

Both Russia and the US are hotbeds of cyber criminal activity, and both are thought to be throwing much funding into military efforts in cyber too.

Emphasis mine.

WTF?

...all Borg.

I do that as well — for very short-term insertions of debugging code.

Of course, it's imperative to remove it or, at the very least, properly indent it, before checking it in.

As a side note, every source code version control system should have a customizable pass/no-pass filter that can reject the checking in of improperly formatted code.

In space, no one can hear you Whoosh.

In Soviet Russia, space wooshes you!

Sometimes (but not always) a bad photo is better than no photo.

Ah yes. Missed that. Damn.

It's not exactly what I'd call "high resolution" (it's 1366x768 horizontal, 768x1366 vertical), but it is USB-powered and portable (15.6" diagonal, 3.4 pounds):

http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/07/hp-u160-usb-monitor/

The new MacBook Pro Retina may have 2880 x 1800 resolution, but for software enginers it isn't much better than a 1440x900 screen because it doesn't fit more text (at a readable size) than this smaller resolution.

I disagree. The rMBP runs very nicely in "more space" mode, which is the equivalent of 1920x1200 mode. It's quite usable for smaller and still readable text.

A MacBook Air in typical use uses 10 to 20 Watts, but let's say for the sake of discussion that it uses the full 45 Watts of its power adapter. If you left it plugged in 24x7 for a month, drawing that much electricity, you would use about 33 kilowatts, or about $0.50 in electricity. So your figure of "If it saves you $50 in electricity per month" is off by a factor of 100 to 300.

Actually, you need both. If you're doing angular acceleration, say, a ship that's firing thrusters to rotate around its center of gravity, then you have to keep the orientation of the ship as an angle (in radians, say), and also its angular velocity, and you apply its angular acceleration to that angular velocity. That part simply can't be done as pure Cartesian vectors. Then, when you fire forward thrusters, you take the angular orientation and convert that to a Cartesian vector which you use when applying the thrust force to obtain a Cartesian acceleration vector.

So most of the time (like 99%) you can simply use Cartesian vectors for everything. But you still need trig functions for some stuff. It's inescapable.

3 {(Die) show} repeat