If Apple suddenly disappeared, people could easily get equivalent products from other manufacturers, since other companies sell equivalent phones, MP3 players and computers. While they don't have the Apple brand and may not be as polished in some aspects, they do essentially the same things.

On the other hand, the reason Microsoft has so much overhead is that they provide infinite backwards compatibility for their corporate clients. People love bashing Microsoft, but they forget that MS must provide binary compatibility for their clients who unconditionally have to run really old apps, because their businesses depend on it. Windows must run on a huge variety of hardware combinations, and must be supported over 10+ year lifespans. For example, Windows XP licenses were sold from 2002 to early 2009, and Microsoft will support this platform for many years into the future.

Apple products and Linux distributions often break compatibility between revisions, for legitimate technical reasons. But Microsoft can't do that even when they want to, because their hundreds of thousands of corporate clients can't be expected to update all their software accordingly. The thousands of hardware manufacturers won't all update their drivers either. Regardless, Microsoft tried doing that and Vista happened. It took several years for manufacturers and Microsoft itself to catch up, and we got Windows 7, which works quite well.

So if Microsoft is reluctant to leave the past, it's because it has contractual obligations to support its clients. Apple makes no such commitments and sells primarily to end users. Thus, it can afford to make more aggressive changes.

Why is western society obsessed with mathematics, deluded into thinking it's useful in general, and why are people so stressed over learning this useless and dryly-presented subject?

Essentially because:

1) Everyone should learn logic and disciplined thought. Otherwise you'll end up with adults who can't read instruction manuals, have an attention span of 5 year olds and can't see their own mistakes and contradictions due to disorganized thought processes and hubris. Math can have a humbling effect on people.

2) Proper mathematics is used constantly by good electrical engineers, physicists and mathematicians. If you want a good engineer, you have to teach him math from childhood. And since you can't have a grade school for scientists and another one for everyone else, everyone has to learn math.

3) Math greatly contributes to keep idiots out of the sciences, med school and other important professions.

It surprises me that you even discussed the option of having confidential documents stored on a system that makes little guarantees about security or privacy, and that by design distributes your data around the world.

Really? Honestly I haven't ever had any real issues with Flash since I've been running the 64bit release of about a year ago.

I also haven't had any issues with the 64-bit prerelease under Fedora 11 and 12. That said, the lack of hardware acceleration is very annoying and several years overdue.

Adobe Reader is fine as long as I don't install the plugin. Every time I click on a PDF, it completely downloads the file and launches the Adobe Reader binary. When I used the plugin, it tried to load the file incrementally (even when I explicitly configured it not to), which very often locked the browser.

Apple can't have Android inside Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field.

But instead, Google went off into a corner, created their own solution behind closed doors that nobody in the kernel community likes and now it can't go upstream.

No one in their right mind is going to start a lengthy debate with kernel developers when they have a deadline to meet and a product to ship.

In the industry, getting things done on time is priority #1. Google's implementation may not have been ideal, but it was delivered.

Personally, I find it interesting that you specifically name electricians and plumbers as examples of "people with little or no formal training". It might be different in Brazil, but in the USA there is an appreciable amount of training, and sometimes certification, expected before you can name yourself as a practitioner of either of those disciplines. Of course this isn't consider "higher education", but it still is regarded as "technical training" that requires either study and/or on-the-job training beyond what you learn in school. So in the USA reading and mathematics skills correlate somewhat more to the ability to get a job as an electrician or plumber than they would a manual laborer. However, it doesn't really the change applicability of your main points.

Electrician wasn't a good example, because nowadays in Brazil a person that calls himself an electrician is expected to have a certificate from a technical school (even though many don't in poor areas). But plumbers and bricklayers typically aren't certified, and even when they are certified, they can't be compared to a contractor in the US.

I don't know what a teacher educator is, but I can tell you what my experience was in Brazilian public schools.

While getting my bachelor's in math, I used the opportunity to get a teaching license. To fulfill my internship hours I worked as an unpaid substitute teacher in public schools. It's completely obvious to me that most parents transfer the full responsibility of educating their children to the school. Every student in the top 5% of my class had at least one parent who was interested in his child's education, and held him (and not the teacher) accountable for studying and getting good grades.

Many (although not all) of these parents were electricians, plumbers, brick layers -- people with little or no formal training, but who would do their best to assist their child, while deferring to the teacher when it came to academic instruction. Without exception, these children were well mannered (in sharp contrast to the criminal behavior of the kids in the other end of the curve).

My favorite is that many in education believe there to be a causal link between parental involvement and student performance.

That's because there is a causal link, although I wouldn't call the determining factor "parental involvement". I don't care if the parent shows up at PTA meetings or at school events. I want the parent teach his child the basic concepts of accountability, honesty, politeness and discipline, and to lead by example. But that's too much to ask, because most people -- parents or not -- are lazy assholes with a sense of entitlement.

What's that graph supposed to represent without an y axis?

This is marketing disguised as an objective quality metric. Without showing the numbers, they've admitted to nothing, and promised nothing.

Now, you speak about 'Morally acceptable', but those that fly(actually ride) these vehicle KNOW THE SCORE. THEY ARE ALL VOLUNTEERS. These are ppl that are not going into this in a stupid fashion. They know what can and can not go wrong. Heck, If I can get a free ride on the shuttle, I will gladly take it right now. Why? Because I, like many ppl througout the world as well as all the astronauts, find it plenty safe and most certainly 'morally acceptable'.

They're volunteers who don't want to die. The fact that they volunteered doesn't mean they are willing to be test pilots for half-baked ideas. NASA's astronauts implicitly trust that engineers in charge of design are doing the best they can to keep them safe.

And here's a shocker: as an engineer, I don't care if you, the astronaut, have a death wish. I will not cut corners and knowingly make my design less safe just because you're willing to accept the risk, because if my rocket explodes on the launch pad due to a design flaw, I'll be the one responsible for the screwup that killed you.

Likewise, Wall Street brokers say "if you haven't been sued yet, it's because you haven't been trying hard enough".

It's great to push the envelope in science and technology, but one shouldn't cut corners at the expense of human lives. It is possible to do responsible engineering -- it definitely is more expensive and slower, but it's the only option I find morally acceptable.

And besides, it has always been painfully obvious that one can only go so far using chemical rockets, and that there's only so much one can gain by improving this technology. It will require a more elegant solution to make space flight affordable and safe.

When I was in the US I used my Nokia 5800 with T-Mobile with full functionality, including GPRS data. The 5800 is not a "T-Mobile phone", but they had no problem selling me a plan without a contract. Everything worked fine, other than the fact that I couldn't get 3G service (since I have the European 5800, which doesn't support T-Mobile's 3G band).

Here's the deal: be realistic. No company's going to offer you a "fully open" cell phone simply because there aren't any fully open operating systems for smart phones out there, and rushing something similar to the market would end up in a support nightmare. Nokia's come a long way with Maemo running on the N900, but the user impressions I've read wrt to the N900 make it clear that the software is beta at best, and is lacking features one would consider standard in a smartphone.

Here's my unsolicited advice: buy an unlocked GSM phone from overseas. My GSM Nokia 5800 can sync over USB or bluetooth, connect me to the Internet over bluetooth using Nokia's Ovi Suite (for Windows) and comes with all the cables you'll need, including the car charger. It's a very affordable smartphone, has great GPS functionality which doesn't require an internet connection to download maps, can play high resolution videos, has a real (albeit kind of slow) web browser and is made by Nokia, which is the most OSS-friendly cell phone manufacturer out there.

Gentoo?

He said we wants to get work done, not tweak or play around with crap. Any major distro would be better suited than Gentoo.

Think about it. These are BLACKHAT awards. (...)

Registration for Black Hat costs around $1500, and one of their major sponsors is Microsoft.

Draw your own conclusions.