Why is this planetary system more confirmed than e.g. HD 10180 ?

Cool. I'll be happy to help. Let me just shoot up a couple of sattelites for you to take some millions of images. And while I'm at it, I can also setup a server farm so people can download the stuff. I should have the bandwidth left from my local DSL contract...

Your post pretty much proves Dijkstra's point. You did not manage to lay off your old thinking habits. You do not bother to think how an object oriented compiler works and to me it sounds that you are stuck in 80's style programming. For your information, object orientation does not mix up data and code. It merely gives the programmer a paradigm to access data. Code is related to classes, data is related to objects.

Who says that "!" is acceptable. Language is very powerful and any moderately skilled writer should be able to draw the readers' attention by choice of words or sentence structure rather than by throwing in exclamation marks or emoticons. Overuse of exclamation marks, ellipsis, bold or underline (or different fonts) are imho just as bad as using emoticons. They all indicate, the author lacking command of the language or him underestimating the intelligence of his readers. Take sarcasm for example. Writers have been using it for centuries. But it is only our generation that feels, every use of sarcasm must be pointed out as such to the reader, may it be by using sarcasm tags or by including emoticons. This is to some extend acceptable in blog posts, where there is often a lack of sufficient context to clearly understand the author, but most people just don't want to think too long about what words to chose to express their thoughts or don't want people to have to think too long about what they read. Acceptable in blogs, unacceptable in universtiy papers.

> SAP's attitude to open source is important; and yet it is hard to tell whether it is really free software's friend The article publisher does not seem to know enough to tell open source and free software apart. There are very few comanies that endorse free software but many that endorse open source. So, what is the article about? Please call RMS to have the difference between open source and free software explained to you.

Hmm, but many people asked for a special key on your keyboard between your left ctrl and alt key that takes focus away from your application and brings up the start menu. Right.

If it wasn't a popular feature, why does every other operating system have it? Why since Windows 3.1 there have been 3rd-party products to supply this feature? Why does Microsoft supply a virtual desktop tool as part of the PowerToys for Windows XP? It can't be that unpopular, can it?

On a sidenote, I've recently had my wife use Linux for some tasks (as the XP partition was broken) and showed her to how to use virtual desktops. Her reaction after using it for 10 minutes was "That's really practical, can I have that in Windows, too?"