David A. Wheeler addresses this question in his dissertation.

Spam in email is a solved problem because spam filters have become convenient and more than good enough.

Cryptographic signing solved the header forgery problem a long time ago, and the major providers all add signatures to the headers.

What? There is no TCP/IP monoculture. There are many different TCP/IP implementations. All of them interoperate without problems because there is a well-defined standard. That is not monoculture, that is standardization. They are fundamentally different things.

You're wrong. When I posted his last post was hours old and he had posted an update thanking people for the great AMA and ending it.

How typical of Slashdot that some AC gets upvoted to +5 for blatantly lying.

This is bad news. Another step on the way to browser monoculture, with all the problems that can bring. Next thing Firefox will switch to Webkit and we'll have only Webkit browsers and IE left.

Slashdot is late to the game. Don't bother posting there. Gates is long done answering questions.

After bricking three successive broadband routers using firmware upgrades recommended by their respective manufacturers, my position on firmware upgrades is simple: NEVER do them, unless you have nothing to lose (i.e. if your device is working so badly that you would need to replace it anyway).

This is a serious, though exasperated question, born of years of frustration with the leader of ideals I subscribe to:

Why in all of the universe don't you bother to look basically presentable and behave in a basically likeable way? Do you really not realize that you are the Free Software movement's greatest liability because of your shitty appearance and behaviour? How does this basic fact of humanity manage to evade you for all these years?

No, you can't. The kernel hasn't even fit on a floppy for many years now.

Simplicity and long-term convenience. The complications caused by those "conveniences" of other distros have a way of getting in the way at unexpected moments and making life very inconvenient. Doing the configuration right the first time by learning to understand what you're actually doing may take extra effort but pays off in the long run.

No you don't. Knock it off with the hyperbole, reality is more than bad enough.

DPI is what resolution is. "1680x1050" is not a resolution, it's just the number of pixels.

Firefox fixed that problem ages ago.

Uh... geez. Where to even start?

The first and last real MS innovation was the Microsoft BASIC interpreter which became ubiquitous in 1980s home computers. Everything else they ever did was shamelessly stolen and/or bought and/or badly copied from others. Even MS-DOS started out as a bought-out CP/M imitation.

They disparaged GUIs and the whole idea of user-friendly computing until the Mac proved them wrong. It took them a decade to come up with a usable competitor (Windows 95). Then it took them years to recognize the importance of the Internet, so they killed the competition by illegally leveraging their monopoly on Windows desktops. With the competition dead, they stalled IE development and set back web innovation by a decade until Firefox broke the market back open.

Now you can see them screw up the same way with mobile devices. It took even Bill Gates until last week to admit that the PC-centric model may be "changing". Thankfully, with Gates gone and that dancing sweatmonkey in charge, they don't seem to be capable of their past level of predation anymore.

MS has always been a follower at best. It has frequently been a predatory abuser of its monopoly. It has usually parasitized on the innovations of others. Embrace, extend, extinguish was always how they operated. It has never been an innovation leader.