Begs the question: Why would anyone who claims to be a "PC Pro" use Windows 8? Or even Windows 7. Or god forbid, Vista.

TFA is an anti-advertisement for "PC Pro", whatever it is, website or pulp.

XPSP3 was the end of the line for Windows. It is the most secure and least intrusive Windows OS for anyone who knows what they are doing.

Just my 2 cents, based on using and maintaining more than a dozen Windows laptops.

Fwiw, I have accounts on both Hotmail and Gmail, from near the inception of each, and neither of them have ever been hacked.

He has majority voting rights over the company, plus he's working "in the trenches" as CEO, plus he already has more money than he can spend.

So no, he doesn't NEED to work on investor relations at all. Unless he wants to add another zero to his already astronomical net worth.

At this point in his life, I'm guessing he doesn't care so much about that next zero. Which makes Facebook a bad stock bet imho.

Douche, perhaps.
Clueless, unlikely.
Hipster, absolutely not.

Fixed that for you.

Zuck doesn't hold a majority of shares. But he holds class B shares, so he ends up having majority voting rights. IIRC, 57% of the vote. The CEO part is of course irrelevant, in terms of who controls the overall direction of the company.

re: "The doubly-encrypted phone, dubbed Fishbowl"

A strange combination of clever and ironic.
Fishbowl is an anagram of Blowfish, though I dunno if they use that cipher.
However to most folks, a fishbowl is something in clear view, under close observation.
Quirky.

Clearly you've never interacted with astronauts and potential astronauts.

The ones who go up there are absolutely not the "best & brightest". In the beginning, they were good test pilots. Now, they are politically connected. In either case, peak intelligence is not a factor.

Think about it. Why would risk their life riding a rocket to orbit?

If you want to see earth from space, there are plenty of orbital cameras with better resolution than your eyes.

If you want to experience free-fall, you can go skydiving pretty much anywhere, any day of the week, with orders of magnitude smaller risk.

If you want to run free-fall experiments, you can send them up with the robots.

That leaves what? Bragging rights, and a significant risk of death. The smartest folks don't care about the former, and they avoid the latter. So they stay on the planet.

But the big problem is that we send humans at all. It's a terrible waste of resources. Anything a human can do in earth orbit, can be done much more safely and cheaply and efficiently by a human on the ground, via remote control.

Nah. Macs are perceived as more secure because Apple ~advertises~ them that way.

PCs are perceived as less secure because the mainstream (Windows/PC) software ecosystem, including FUD miscreants like Symantec, McAfee, and Trend Micro, market their products and maintain their control via scare tactics. They make malware sound more pervasive and damaging than it is. Ironically, most of the damage comes from their products.

The reality is that Macs and PCs are of approximately equal value to malware authors. PCs, because there are more of them. Macs, because they are generally higher-value targets.

Don't kid yourself based on the advertising and marketing.

fwiw I supported hundreds of Macs in the late 80s/early 90s, and viruses were a huge issue even then. We spent almost as much time removing viruses, as we did recovering files from corrupted floppies. :)

This just reinforces what a waste of time and money the current space program is. Yeah, it is somewhat inspirational to have humans up there at all. But terribly impractical.

In the 20th century, humans were the most compact computers & manipulators for these missions. But that is no longer the case.

It's ironic that we send people up for near-earth-orbit missions (which could be controlled from the ground with sub-second latency), while we send robots on the long missions (which would benefit most from a short-latency human controller in the vehicle).

We should put our resources into manned long missions (asteroid or mars) instead of the ISS boondoggle. And give those astronauts practical round straws, not funky knife-edged cups, for their drinks.

TFV shows the cup being filled. Looks pretty easy.

But it's no real achievement. He replaced sucking liquid from a comfortable round straw, with sucking liquid from a knife-edged container. The straw is much more practical and usable.

This article just reinforces the fact that today's human astronauts are a terrible waste of time and money.

We never have the ~really~ smart guys up there, because the smart ones run the numbers and don't like a 1% chance of dying on a rocket ride (actually the space shuttle had an even worse fatality rate). So the guys we send right now are highly programmed robots. Let's just send mechanical robots, until we can make it safer and cheaper.

FTFY.

Never confuse reading a few books about a historical event, with first-hand knowledge of that event.

If you want to learn about a historical event more than 80 years ago, you have to read at least four historians: two at opposite extremes, and two in the middle. And even then, you're just reading some educated guesses.

If you care to learn about a historical event in the last 80 years, try to find several people who actually participated in that event, and talk to them in person. The people who really know what happened, pretty much never write about it. But many of them would be very happy to talk to someone about it.

Antenna? No issue whatsoever with my iphone 4. None of my friends and family had problems with their iphones, either.

Some folks have suggested that the "issue" raised after each iphone release, is in fact raised by Apple.

With the iphone 4, the "issue" was the antenna.

With the iphone 4s, the "issue" is battery life.

It sounds crazy on the surface, but when you think about it, problems with the antenna and battery on a product selling TENS OF MILLIONS of units would be even crazier.

Planting a fake "issue" allows Apple to tweak customer demand to better match their supply, during the first few weeks/months of a new release. And then - surprise! - the issue disappears entirely, never to be heard of again except from a handful of folks who read some article, but never bought the product, and never experienced the issue that they complain about.

Oh wait. You're that person? Sorry.

Many people have a larger email store than you.

It is not a sign of status.

More likely, it is a sign of your incompetence to filter and save relevant data.

Congratulations.

Now back to the OP, who perhaps is smarter than you, since he has has just 500MB of email to back up.

The heart of downtown Edmonton might just barely qualify as part of the "urbanized western world".

One hour outside Edmonton, you are clearly and definitely in extreme-climate rural territory.

Your comments on the Edmonton plowing are interesting. I understand why eg NYC has this problem. Manhattan rarely gets a large snow fall, so they don't maintain the equipment and staff for massive snow removal.

But I would have thought that a high-latitude city would have the sense to design their streets with snow-clearing in mind.

Anyway...to reiterate...Aptera was selling their initial vehicle to only to California residents who never have snow or ice on their commutes. Never. Not even 1mm. So snow and ice were irrelevant.

This post makes very little sense.

1) Were you drunk when you posted this?
2) Where do you live?
3) Do you have any clue about the costs of aboveground vs underground lines in rural vs urban, wet vs dry, warm vs freezing, etc, environments?

I'm guessing the answers are:

1) Yes.
2) In a nameless US suburb where you are completely uninvolved with the infrastructure development.
3) No.

Feel free to correct me.

I do own an iPhone, and several iPods, and an iPad.

I have also used dozens of handheld computers, music players, and smartphones over the years. See my other posts on this thread regarding handhelds and mp3 players. As for smartphones, in the last 8 years I have used the leading models from Nokia, Treo, Samsung, LG, HTC, and Motorola...running Maemo, PalmOS/WebOS, and Android. No Blackberries, sorry, so I might have missed something there.

The iPhone has its share of problems, but based on my experience, it is the closest to perfect at meeting the current technical and market constraints.

There is no such thing as "perfect" in the real world, but there is such a thing as "maximally optimized for current real world constraints".

If you re-read it, my post was simply about the success of these ego-driven perfectionist products, over other products that are "good enough" for the mainstream. A very large counterexample to the GP's post.

This is just my opinion, based on more than 3 decades of using various small computing devices. If you have more experience, I'd love to hear about it.