Yes. At 7 transactions per second, BTC is going to take over the world. Moron.

Why do you think it would be a violent homicidal kill-bot? It's far more likely that we evolve a highly moral caretaker that minimizes human suffering by putting us to sleep. It might feel really bad about it ;). It might feel obligated to end our suffering.

It's the aliens that would nuke us ;)... not because they hate us but because it is efficient, and we don't pass their primary litmus test for intelligence ... which would likely be peace within the species. And clearly we are a threat to them (by definition) if we are a threat to ourselves.

I agree that humanity should not live in fear. We should refrain from research on developing non-human intelligent life for another reason other than because we are afraid. Since when has fear ever prevented humans from doing anything stupid? We should refrain from evolving digital life because it is likely to result in life that is significantly smarter than us and overwhelmingly likely to judge us badly.

Just because you think we are a long way from developing intelligent life does not make it so. Nice way to shut down dialog. None of your assumptions about how far away we are from AI or interstellar travel hold any water. We really aren't that far from interstellar travel if we give up the idea of a round trip ... and if we give up the idea of living on planets altogether. With distributed computing, we really aren't that far away from the capability of creating the sort of artificial world in which digital life could evolve (though we might have to rethink neural network basics for practical digital neurons). My point is that we are close enough to making this "science fiction" happen to have conversations about it without people screaming "no way!" in an effort to shut down dialogue.

Well it's not stupid to assume an AI or alien would perceive humans as a threat. And it's not stupid to assume that AI, or aliens for that matter, would eliminate a threat in the most efficient manner possible.

Perhaps it's you who is a bit naive. When have humans ever been at peace? Even our sports are metaphor for war. You shut the fuck up. Until humans can achieve worldwide peace, we better hope that we don't develop AI or meet alien species ... because they will most certainly put us to sleep like dogs with rabies if we dare leave our planetary cage while we are still savages.

I'm with Linus!

XFCE does seem to be heading in the right direction. It has only one panel to rule them all. And you can create several of them. In fact, you can configure them and place them in a way such that you can simulate the general interface functionality of Gnome 2! XFCE has adopted the Gstreamer framework (good thing for browser plugins). And the file manager is very similar to Nautilus. Generally the core applications are solid. As icing on the cake, XFCE is refreshingly fast. So it feels like a lightweight Gnome 2 to me.

But XFCE does have its pitfalls. For example, it's not easy to generate application launchers on the panel by dragging from the application menu if the panel auto-hides. But that's not something you do every day. And there are slim pickings for panel applets and glaring omissions such as an applet for cpu frequency monitoring. I'm sure there are a lot more shortfalls, but I'm probably a typical Gnome 2 user (not a power user), so I don't notice.