The analogy works very well. Shovels and backhoes have very different user interfaces, even though they both shovel dirt. But you use them for qualitatively different things. You use the shovel to do some gardening in your backyard. But if you decide to put in a swimming pool in, you're quickly going to find out that the shovel isn't going to cut it. And if you realize you need a backhoe, you're either going to need someone skilled to drive it, or you're going to need to pick up a whole new set of skills to control it than the ones you learned for gardening with the shovel.

Tablets, smartphones, and desktops all are general purpose computers that process electronic data. Tablets and phones are devices primarily optimized for media/content consumption. In terms of functional complexity and data entry volume, that is a qualitatively different task than that of the typical uses of content creation/manipulation for business desktops/users. The simplified UI that is a boon for the former, is a dragging anchor for the latter.

The thing is of course that MS doesn't want to maintain two UIs and developers don't want to have to support/develop two GUIs for their apps. MS wants everybody to move to managed code in Metro ASAP so that they can sunset and kill the classic desktop yesterday.

Clearly we need to replace all backhoes with Aliens-style power loaders that can handle giant shovels. Open pit mining? Really big power loaders and really big shovels.

So what should someone use when his digging needs grow from a shovel to a backhoe?

How is it then that we can afford so much better medical services, so much better air transportation, so much better everything else, but if we want reliable code its going to cost extreme amounts of money?

Most medical practice is based on a limited set of diseases. It's a large set, but it's not the medical equivalent of Turing complete. When patients get sick and no known treatment is known for that disease, they sometimes die. Sometimes the treatments are only partially effective. Many times, patients are given the wrong drugs or doses in hospitals with harmful or even deadly results. Patients get mixed up and have the wrong operations performed on them (to the point that it's getting more common for the area scheduled to be operated on to get marked up with ink while the patient is still conscious). Such are the bugs in the medical field that many lawyers get rich from litigation over those bugs.

So when the employer mandates an inappropriate tool for the job (because they believe it will be cheaper/easier to find people to maintain the system), then who's on the hook for the repairs? I mean, do you expect the mechanic to pay for a problem that arises because the car owner decided he didn't want to pay for someone with access to a service bay with a hoist?

It reminds me of the scene in Rising Sun where, after spending most of the movie up to that point haranging his blunt co-investigator to follow his lead and respect Japanese customs so that he doesn't get dismissed as a gaijin, Sean Connery's character has been infallibly polite, patient, and following Japanese customs to a T in trying to obtain some answers - but succeeds in getting nowhere, at best a polite brush-off. Sean Connery's character then proceeds to deliberately pitch a major scene with yelling and rudeness... and finally gets a response with the information he was looking for.

Apparently the GP only ever learned the C major scale. That's surprising for a programming-aware individual who should have at least heard of C#.

You mean like APL? While it does have a fiercely devoted community, it's a fairly small community.

You make a good argument as well. What a lawyer for a class action lawsuit would need is some indication that the executive suite, prior to the buyout, had requested/obtained some simulations/estimations of the effects from layoffs of the same magnitude on short and long term profits and revenue and found that profits would increase. Then, even if those simulations were incorrect, there would be evidence that the executive had failed in its fiduciary duty to shareholders.

Um it said in the title that Dell is now a privet company there are no stockholders to screw

Guess you missed the part where he implied deliberate mismanagement to keep the stock price down when it was still public in order to keep market capitalization lower and make the leveraged buy-out possible. I'm not saying that he's right, but if he was then his characterization that it was a failure to uphold the fiduciary duty to those shareholders seems reasonable. Finding enough evidence to prove it in a court of law as part of a (past) shareholder's lawsuit would be the tricky part.

It takes that long because of the greater proportion of engineers already in the work force. They don't have the financial burden to pay off that the new graduates are faced with, but they won't be happy if the new hires get paid the same as a 10-year veteran even though that's what the new hire needs to pay off the loan that the 10-year veteran didn't need. So wage inflation has to happen across the whole class of employees, not just the new hires, otherwise people will quit and find work elsewhere to take advantage of the new wage competition.

That means that the increase gets averaged over the whole workforce - those who have been in the workforce get a "free" pay raise and those entering it get less of salary than they need to pay off the tuition loans, which effectively translates into a pay increase inertia requiring years of new hiring requirements to balance out the existing (minus the slowly retiring) workforce. That lag can lead to nasty wage fluctuations (think damped harmonic, where the supply/demand curve and supply variation acts as the spring and the workforce wage inertia acts as the damper).

But hey, the free market is perfect and government intervention is unnecessary, right?

It doesn't exist because the results of your compilation would depend on the version of the compiler you used to do the compilation and what optimization flags you used (due to target object code and optimizations performed). Either you compile from source which you can first check against a known cryptographic checksum, or you run binaries that have been cryptographically signed by the developer. What you are suggesting would require unnecessary added complexity for no gain in security.

You're moving the goalposts. Where do you think the point of ingress is? Chances are it's a carrier exchange point run by those corporations you want to designate as common carriers, and who can then no longer do anything about filtering the traffic. Oops.

Well, it would if the "metaphor" I had heard about how Hawking radiation works were correct, but apparently it isn't. While I won't say the explanation in the linked page makes sense to me (I probably couldn't follow the math anymore even if it was included), I must admit I had some similar concerns as Mr. Kujareevanich regarding that metaphor. If a gravitational well did result in the polarization of the gravitational dipole, then it would seem that perhaps it might affect the results. However if Hawking radiation is just an apparent effect, like blue/red-shifting or Lorentz contraction at relativistic speeds, then it presumably wouldn't be affected.