And just to clarify, this bug was only discovered (at least by someone willing to disclose it) in January 2010. At least Microsoft didn't brush it under the rug for 17 years, I hope...

I had to look up CGA (no, not Color Graphics Adapter). He means Column Grid Array. Essentially they turn the solder balls into solder cylinders.

Wow, very very slick.. I wish I had mod points to mod you up.

Remember that over 2/3 of the defense budget is operational costs (paying our soldiers, conducting operations).

One thing I have to point out, though, is how much we spend on defense compared to the rest of the world. When doing international budget comparisons, the only real comparisons is by percentage of GDP.
Want to guess where the US places in the rankings? 1st? 3rd?

How about 27th

Considering defense is one of the explicitly layed-out directives of the Constitution, I think we're going about it rather logically.

The reason why it's "scientifically interesting" is:

See: http://tassiedevil.com.au/disease.html

From what I remember, the Sea Shadow was actually mostly a failure, in terms of radar signature. Sure, it was damn stealthy. In fact, too stealthy. Water naturally reflects radar, so when they took Sea Shadow out, all they had to do was look for the hole where they weren't getting any reflection. :-/

In other ways it was a success. It did have a very low noise signature. The hull design did help it greatly reduce the ships wake, keeping it from turning up too much water.

No, not really windows, but more of a hardware issue. The SATA spec doesn't require manufatures support hot-swap, so, some don't fully support it. nVidia's SATAs always have had hot-swap, so thats why you would see the main hard drive in the "safely remove" list. But, for example, my Marvel and Intel controllers don't support hot-swap. My Marvel controller handles the eSATA ports, and I've tried adding a drive while it was powered up. Windows detected it and everything work, but there is no safe method to disconnect the drive (the write-cache buffers need to be cleared out before you can yank it off safely). The best solution I could come up was force the computer into S3 standby, and then pull the drive. That seems to work good enough.

How about this: hibernate the process. Take everything in memory, keep track of its open files, and write it out to disk. When the user logs in, load it back up and continue on. A notification to the user that this has occurred would be useful.

Of course, the question you're probably trying to raise is why save at all? Why do modern systems still rely on a paradigm that's over a 100 years old? Maybe someday we'll come up with something that's more efficient and better organized, but right now I don't have that answer.

I can't defend everything, so I'll just post some info. Full-scale OS updates aren't intended for its intended audience. I've had bad upgrades, but only when playing with the development branch (joyride). Activities can be updated easily with a new Sugar build. Sugar was just updated very recently. I would post a link, but the wiki is down at the moment. It has some changes, modified layout, better power management, and a control panel with a software updater. Wifi with security is a LOT better than it was. Mine syncs right up with WPA for me without any trouble. There are localized Wiki activities now available. And, these do often come specialized for the country they are being delivered to, including electronic books that they use. These are often special builds not available to the public, so you wouldn't see much of them.

One of the big concerns is the inability to provide large-scale support (hardware warranty, returns, software mishaps). The average-Joe would expect this, as a lot of them did even with the G1G1 program. Support for new schools usually came from people who were trained by the OLPC staff, and who continued support after the staff had left. It would be a logistical nightmare to try to provide support to thousands of people all over the country, something this non-profit didn't want to get involved with.

Does it come with its own fire extinguisher?