There won't be thousands new packages for every release.
They'd just use linux (their own distro) everyday ...

Balancing conservative and progressive approaches in ditributions is not as easy task at all.
You can jump up a version or two of a package/project (firefox, gcc, kdebase?) and you end up collecting complaints.
You can miss a version upgrade(linux, postgresql, xorg?) and you and up collecting even more complaints.
Whoever talks about "major version bumps" and ".0 versions" is missing the real point: the need to care about features, reliability and effectiveness.
Version numbers and names are just that: numbers and names. A v0.13 of a package can provide better overall results than a v4.2 of a competitor. And the step from 1.2 to 1.3 can provide much more advances than a 8.10 to 9.04!
Distribution managers should thoroughly test in first person the forthcoming releases (alphas, betas, RCs ...). The people who use Linux for fun a hour or two a day have different feelings and needs than those who chose Linux for work 6 to 10 hours a day!

Can you find some thing that can retain data for, say, 40+ years and be still able to restore them?
Everything comes to a cost. If the tapes are too expensive, then just buy the same storage you are using now and make just a second copy. But that would not be a backup. Just a second copy as unreliable as the original.

That a remote stack-based buffer-overflow can be triggered to compromise FF.
But why on earth those friendly developers don't design, implement a damned solution to be used everywhere in the code???
Fix once, fix forever (until next smarter exploit).

What will happen when all buildings in a certain area will be "cloaked" to earthquakes?
Will mechanical waves skip the entire area?
What if all buildings in a certain large area will be made that way?
I fear that the "solution" is good only when a few of them are made that way. The other ones will need to collapse.

Much fewer than Kademlia/Ed2K or any music related torrent tracker.
Not to question the price.

I never used FAT16, but only FAT32, which is on all my DOS formatted USB media.
Because it was not mentioned anywhere in my laptop documentation.

ASUS laptop, not MB.

Now in the Americas they should all speak Danish and not Italian!

Not ASUS. A USB floppy is the only way.

BIOS and firmware upgrades that only work from Windows ... or from a USB floppy disk!
Ask ASUS (but I'm sure it's not the only manufacturer)!

It's simple!

I would also mind about features! An engine with skinny features will very likely show better performances ...

I would say that when you release something to the public (especially with large "marketing battage") it is for the public, unless stated differently.
And then, what about all subsequent releases untill now? Are all of them "not for the end user"?

I only hope they will follow a different path than KDE team.
They rushed to release 4.0 and since then I'm still struggling to have all the features I used to have in KDE v3.5.
And, more important, I hope that Ubuntu people won't trash GNOME v2 from night to day like they did with KDE v3.5.