My house has been sitting in Kansas since 1964. It has never received tornado damage. It was never built to survive a tornado either. The bio-defense facility is going to be a modern and more-or-less tornado proof building. Simple construction techniques can make buildings pretty much indestructible. An earth wall with a 3-4 foot high concrete wall on top of that with a total height the same as the facility would be enough to protect the facility from even the most powerful tornadoes. I just don't see this as a problem.

And to solidify everything that is wrong with Linux: I updated through the GUI, selected the default options, and now Ubuntu wont boot. It crashes into the shell with an error that it can't find my HDD. I'm reminded every single time I use it why I stopped using Linux.

If you have a CD mounted and you drag files/folders from the CD to the desktop and then try to delete that file from the UI either by dragging and dropping into the trash or right-click and select move to trash it wont delete because of permission errors. I assume its because it maintained the RO permissions from the CD but to be honest I didn't look, I just did a sudo rm -rf. This was on 8.04.1. Yes, you should expect there to be interface differences but why would a file on my desktop have permissions that wouldn't allow me to delete it? It makes no sense and a novice user wouldn't get it. That was my point. A novice user shouldn't be expected to learn about file permissions. If there was an issue the OS should have asked for a username/password to override the permissions then deleted it. Instead what it did was give me a warning that the folder couldn't be moved to the trash and asked if I wanted to delete it immediately. I selected "yes" and nothing happened. The folder stayed on my desktop with no explanation. Terrible, simple usability issues.

I meant to correct that - it's not ready for novice-user's desktop use. Nobody that "uses" a computer would ever want to use it. Anybody that tinkers/enjoys computers might be able to use it.

It doesn't work as a user-friendly desktop OS. I've used Linux for a long time, I'm not a novice user. I put Ubuntu in a VM and it installed fine, everything worked great. Then I went to delete a folder off the desktop by dragging it into the trash. It wouldn't let me. Didn't tell me why, didn't give me the ability to authenticate to delete it, nothing. I had to drop to the terminal to delete the file. Would a new-to-Linux user know that he has to drop to terminal to delete a file sitting on his desktop? Who would expect that dragging a file from a CD onto the desktop then trying to delete it would require a sudo command to delete? Linux is not even remotely close to ready for the desktop.

My neighbors acorn tree dropped a ton of acorns last year but not a single one this year. I know the plural of anecdote isn't data - but it's still very strange.