Yeah, it sure does sound like somebody with an agenda trying to establish an unsupported equivalence between religious dogma based on belief and scientific theories developed to explain a diverse body of factual observations. Cue "evolution is just a theory" wilful ignoramuses.

You've deviated from the original point of your GGGP post. My reply is that you should use tools optimized for the tasks you perform, and with computers, the operating system's HCI model is very much a functional part of the system. Screwdrivers can be used to hammer in nails, and hammers can drive in screws (very poorly), but it's better to use the appropriate tools for the job. You shouldn't expect to use the tools and skills optimized for content consumption to carry over for content creation. Portions of the hardware may be general purpose (although even that's debatable as mobile processors are optimized for low power consumption whereas desktop components don't have the same power constraints and tend to be optimized for performance), but the O/S HCI shouldn't be. You don't use a shovel to dig a swimming pool, and a backhoe is overkill for tilling a vegetable garden.

But the difference between the UI of a tablet and the UI of a desktop PC is a matter of software, not hardware.

So touchscreens are a common and primary form of input for desktops? Never mind. However I see your (new) point regarding adding a keyboard and mouse to a tablet (presumably via Bluetooth, although I suppose you might be able to use a powered USB hub with some tablets). Yes, Windows is proprietary system created by a for-profit corporation which chooses to enforce market segmentation to maximize profits. They've been doing it, and been publicly lambasted for it for at least 20 years, so it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. If you want to use your tablet as a desktop for content creation, you could always wipe Windows 8.1 from your tablet and switch to a Linux distribution, or perhaps re-size/re-partition storage and dual boot. Ideally Windows would present a Metro interface in tablet mode, and detect when you are plugged in to a keyboard/mouse/screen dock and automatically switch to a desktop UI. Microsoft have chosen to not do what is best for their users (provide flexibility) to make up for the fact that they are years behind competing mobile O/S solutions in developing mobile apps by artificially pumping up the market for Metro apps for developers. Caveat Emptor.

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.