Though I agree with most of what you write, I disagree with the using Microsoft as an example. It isn't the same as a movie.

OSes have network affects. My life is somewhat easier if you have the same OS as me. My life is a bit easier still if you have the same apps as me. If everyone around me has Windows, maybe I buck up and pay for Windows myself. Also, Microsoft has both Apps and OS divisions. Piracy in OS may be tolerated (it was early on) if it leads to more app sales. Movies have some sense of group culture if you and your friends have seem them, but no where near the network effects as OSes.

One thing we all miss is not the Piracy fight really is a fight against technology. It's not the fight against pirates as much as the fight against digital distribution.

In the old days (pre 2000's) the business model for a record label was as a gatekeeper and a Venture Capitalist for bands. You're a band, you'd get signed, you'd get an advance, which was expected to be earned back by product. The advance would pay for your studio time, your mastering, your distribution. That, and rock stars generally are not that careful with money with what's left over, so they'd be in debt quickly. Well, now because of the advance, you're essentially in a state of indentured servitude until you pay it off. The studio owns the masters, owns the copyright, you get by on touring. The studios were vertical, they owned the CD pressers, and they'd charge you for each CD they made (even though that business ran a profit on its own).

In a digital model, the studio is cheaper (iPad + garageband? joking, but probably not too far off), pressing fees go away, and distribution fees go away. So, now the studio doesn't have financial hooks in you. You don't owe them anymore. Their business model is now gone. If they said "poor us, our business model where we get bands into debt so badly that they are stuck with us for essentially life is gone" they'd not get much sympathy. Piracy? yeah, claim that and you might get some action.

Taiwan has had these for years. Not only do the pedestrian walk signals have timers, so do both the green and red lights. They'd have to adjust for density though.... if you think driving in the states is hard, try driving in Taipei where every lane has scooters on both sides of you.

Personally, I like and use the pedestrian counters as part of my driving. As part of my judgment i check those if available, whether to push through the light or not.

Get off the damn phone, both drivers and pedestrians.

I agree totally with criticizing him for the alternative treatments. But you do have to remember that Pancreatic Cancer is tough, and Jobs had a particularly bad version of it. Yeah, he futzed away valuable time, once he decided on normal treatment he spent a metric-sh*t-ton of money on his treatment. I do wonder if he'd only started earlier what would have happened.

Look at Patrick Swayze for another example. Swayze was not a poor man, yet he succumbed to Pancreatic Cancer pretty quickly. Its a tough tough disease. Anything that fiercely attacks your ability to get energy and nutrients from food will get you fast.

I think you forgot the NSA, how they went after Snowden, NOT going after the bankers, and drone strikes against American citizens.

I think we're all a bit disillusioned with the Obama Presidency. (Though I am VERY glad we didn't elect either McCain nor Romney, IMHO they'd be much much worse based on what they campaigned on).

I think there a few sources for this disconnect. The first, Obama campaigned a lot farther left than how he's governing. You can blame him leading false impressions, or you can blame us for inserting what we believed into Obama. What does "Yes We Can" tell you about Copyrights? We were all viewing Obama as a Rorschach. If you're liberal you'd expect him to be the Anti-Republican, but he's not. If you listen to Fox, you think he's both Socialist and Communist (though they don't mean the same thing). After years of hearing he's the Socialist un-American, both Atheist and Russian and Kenyan Muslim, you're kind of disappointed he's not as left wing as you want.

The other thing is remember Obama is engaged in some sort of daily government battle. I think if Obama tried to pass a resolution that the Sky Is Blue, he'd have a filibuster in the house for 48 hours declaring that the Democrat [sic] Party is ruining the sky for Good Ole Americans. His achievements must be balanced against a somewhat antagonistic House and less so but still against him Supreme Court.

Guantanamo Bay must be weighed against realism too.. if we did the "right" thing and freed any prisoners, and any of those guys did anything, he'd be the guy on the hook. See: Willie Horton, Michael Dukakis. Even if the guy was innocent going in, if we freed him and he got so pissed off at the USA for being locked up for no reason for years, Obama's the guy that let him go. As much as I hate the drone strikes (and I think they should stop), even I can see this is related to the Guantanamo problem. If we picked up someone today, where would we put them? US prison? Think any domestic prison wants that mess? Add someone to Guantanamo and grow the prison instead of shrink it? Try to explain that one.

Sometimes I think the best way to undermine a philosophy is to let it govern. Once you need to make real world trade-offs, you become the villain.

Not to be part of a flame war, but a minor correction. The ACA giveaway is somewhat to the Insurance industry. Instead of doing a Single Payer Government Run payment scheme (which would be cheaper) the "socialist" Obama forced people to pay private corporations. There's a tradeoff here, where they can not exclude on pre-existing conditions and all. Call it Obama realizing that single payer would never pass, call it a giveaway to corporations (as he did in financial crisis) but had nothing to do with pharma.

The pharmaceutical giveaway was under GW Bush #43. Medicare Part D gave away all leverage the US Government had to negotiate with drug companies. Drug prices rose.

It's Odd Windows versions, Even Star Trek Movie Versions....

I guess this is why it's going away... if even Brasil is not using Orkut anymore, then no one is.

A side conversation.... and Apple really isn't even in the conversation at this point. At least Google has a social network or two to shut down. Apple had what, Ping? Because of lawsuits iMessage isn't going to spread much past iOS/MacOSX. Though I don't like the explosion of places im supposed to lose my privacy to... it's like Oprah Winfrey "You get a social network! You get a social network!..." the big guys need one.

Boa tarde....

Not dead, it was actually pretty big in Brazil (therefore the tchau reference, which is how they say "ciao" in Brazilian Portuguese). Big in Brazil, not so much anywhere else.

Or a Hurd desktop.

I'd make a Duke Nukem Forever joke here, but that actually got released.

I was writing on my notepad when I put the baby in the playpen to calm her down. Then I discovered the pen was not working.

Natural language can be pretty vague. Talk to a programmer who takes down a ISP router with a misplaced semicolon on how strict they can be. Computers are not smart enough yet to do true natural language. When Watson can answer every single question, maybe.

as others have said, i'd call bs until i heard a model associated with this. Did you buy it new? off Ebay?
my wife's iPhone 4 is close to 4 years old, can run iOS7 (though never get ios8) and gets security updates.

Apple sees value in the software ecosystem. They want everyone on the latest OS so you can buy more apps from the Apple store. Google wants to sell you ads. The difference in perspective is why I lean iOS,

As may times DOS/Windows has been burned by bad design (Explorer hiding extension yet action dependent on extension being a big one) the lack of functionality helps it here. The * is not interpreted by the shell, but by the app. It sees a *, and does a library call to do the glob. So there's no chance of it being interpreted as a flag. My guess is that DOS was so restricted in memory, that executing a glob may have blown the stack, much like we use xargs on UNIX when a fileglob is too much.

I did some web stuff in the year 2000, back when PayPal was nothing but a Palm Pilot app. Even back then, as the rules were still being written (Javascript was relatively new), you "program convenince on the client, validate everything no matter on the server".

Seems they never learned that.

I'm a programmer. I've written GUI code, I've written a device driver that shipped in a commercial UNIX kernel. I've used Windows since 3.1 days (WindowsForWorkgroupsForTheWin!). I've even debugged and configured Windows Vista in Chinese even though I can't read it - I was able to get someone to translate the occasional dialog box.

I can not understand Win8. When my sister asks me to help configure something on her Win8 laptop, I struggle with the UI as if I'm some rookie coming from some stoneage tribe.

I hate hate hate hate Windows 8.

They'll do anything to pick them up cheaply, even trade some unwanted Surface 3's for some!

Jokes aside (and please don't mod for flamebait, it's sarcasm above, downmod for a bad joke if anything) ...

I don't think will go much. You're assuming that someone values their $1000+ dollar MacBook Air at $650 and values the Surface at something worth the discount. Considering the amount of work you'd have to do to migrate (either Windows to Mac, or Mac to Windows) you have to think about 200-300 realistically for swapping costs. Makes good headlines (as we see here) but won't help much.