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return. Loss of radio contact cannot be attributed to this by fluke accident as was the case back in 1997. Oh no, it's a bona fide "tiny computerised brain" screw-up. The latest in a long history of failures, the Linux operating system has flushed half of a US$820 million project out of the crapper hole on the side of the space shuttle. It seems that somebody came up with the bright idea of running the Mars rover on an Apple Macintosh "Supercomputer" controlled by Linux.

Oh, I suppose that that extra license fee for an actual quality operating system would have broken that $410M dollar budget. There's no way they could have afforded an embedded operating system that isn't cheap communist software. They could have gone with QNX RTOS, VxWorks or any number of other quality and time-tested real-time operating systems for the Mars rover, from a reputable company. But NOOOOO, they went with bullshit free-as-in-fix-everything-yourself Linux. Some long-haired balding fat Linux zealot, sucking up oodles of tax money with his blob-like presence in the NASA "engineering corps", with a certain penchant for cheap software, came up with the brilliant idea of running embedded Linux on an Apple Macintosh of all things. Of all the idiotic things that have happened under the current administration, this by far makes me most ashamed.