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There's plenty of evidence for liquid water on Mars today, most notably the cloud pillars of Arabia, which are the result of water evaporation on the surface. Most of the liquid water is under the surface, of course. NASA is taking a strong stance of "no liquid water on Mars today", this is however strongly contradicted by the available evidence from NASA's own missions.

There's plenty of evidence for liquid water on Mars today, most notably the cloud pillars of Arabia, which are the result of water evaporation on the surface. Most of the liquid water is under the surface, of course. NASA is taking a strong stance of "no liquid water on Mars today", this is however strongly contradicted by the available evidence from NASA's own missions.

And for those who wonder what that looks like, here's a PDF generated from the above style.

1) nVidia's drivers cannot be bundled by Red Hat for licensing reasons. If you want them to be bundled and auto-installed, petition nVidia to release their drivers as free software.

2) New hardware isn't exactly an advantage when using Linux, because support for it is often provided by volunteers and needs time to get mature. If you want official Linux drivers, petition the manufacturer. This is not a problem of Linux, it's a problem of any OS that wants to compete with a monopoly OS. A Linux-preinstalled machine does obviously not have this problem, but MS has so far prevented dual boot Windows/Linux machine sales through OEM pressure.

3) Users who want to install the latest software from source or CVS should expect this to be a non-trivial procedure, regardless of the OS being Linux or Windows (the latter of which comes with QBASIC and VBScript as its only development tools, the better one, QBASIC, is no longer part of recent releases). If you want to install software that immediately runs, use your distribution's packaging and installation system. In the Red Hat case, this is called up2date and is commercial. You can also spend time instead of money and install something like apt4rpm to make package installation simpler. You can also use Ximian's Red Carpet for free (but it is primarily geared towards GNOME applications). Other distributions like Debian (which you can try out using the fantastic Knoppix) provide even more sophisticated mechanisms.

4) I have used OpenOffice Impress. It's somewhat unstable but imports PowerPoint presentations reasonably well and has most of PowerPoint's features (and some of its own). I have found the script-based MagicPoint more satisfying in getting quick and pretty results (example pres I did about Mono). If you get over the fact that it isn't yet another PowerPoint clone but actually a different way to do things, it's pretty cool.

KPresenter may eventually bcome the best graphical presentation tool, but is not there yet. You can run PowerPoint nicely under Linux using Crossover Office and, probably, with some tweaking, under the free WINE.

5) Homemade karaoke VCDs: Exotic end user stuff like that usually takes extra effort on Linux because too few people care about it to develop free, easy to use apps, and desktop Linux is not yet sufficiently wide-spread to be commercially targeted for such applications. Obviously, the best way to change this is to stop using the monopoly OS and to use Linux instead, or to fund development efforts.

6) 3D speed: I don't play FPS, so I can't comment much on that. Last time I tried 3D stuff under Linux, it worked as intended, so I didn't check the FPS. DirectX is obviously a quite sophisticated API and the Win32 drivers are highly optimized, though, so until Linux game companies start targeting Linux as a major platform, I wouldn't be surprised by about 10-20% speed differences.

In conclusion, your problems resulted from you doing stuff that basic users shouldn't do unless willing to spend the effort (trying to install software from source), not using one of the free or commercial software installation tools, and not checking hardware compatibility properly. Many of the problems are not problems of Linux as an OS but problems of a market dominated by a monopolist. Therefore, your attitude that you hope that Linux will "fix" these problems is somewhat naive, the way to fix them is to support Linux so there is no longer a monopolist who imposes market conditions under which much of the software you miss so dearly (drivers, Karaoke, games) can be developer.

Obviously, you can also continue to use Windows. It's sufficient for basic desktop stuff, and Microsoft has some very interesting and powerful features coming up, like "trusted computing". But while you continue to buy their software, you are part of the problems you criticize.

The idea to combine wikis and weblogs is very promising. The sequential nature of weblogs is great for news, but not for acting on these news in a sustained fashion. If Slashdot writes about some political issue, if actions are taken they are usually short-lived, or move to other mailing lists. Similarly, wikis can combine sites which host both a lot of persistent knowledge (e.g. papers, essays) with the dynamic, community-creating nature of a weblog. I plan to eventually run violence.de as a wiki-weblog, with the wiki (access-restricted) storing the papers, film pages etc., and the weblog reporting about current issues (sexual repression, censorship, new studies etc.) -- mail me if you want to help.

Wikis, when properly deployed, are the missing component to make weblogs truly useful. With properly deployed, I mean that typical wiki idiosyncrasies need to be avoided: Nobody really wants to use WikiStyleLinks, they make text harder to read and are difficult to get rid of once you have decided to use them. Choose E2 or Wikipedia style links instead. Also, access restrictions are necessary in many contexts. See the article for some further design details.

Dmitry Sklyarov wasn't arrested for finding a security flaw or "doing PhD work in computer security" or "tak[ing] things apart to see how they work". He was arrested because he held the copyright on a product that was for sale that allows people to, among other things, pirate copyrighted works.

This in itself is frightening enough - it doesn't do any good to obfuscate the facts.

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