My Nintendo DS came with a typing needle. So did my Newton MessagePad 2000.

That's because the .NET Framework is rebuilding the "assembly cache" (recompiling the runtime library into the processor's assembly language) after an update. In a comment to a Slashdot story a few days ago, I suggested doing this rebuilding in the background, letting the user use native applications in the meantime, and marking managed applications that aren't yet ready to start with an hourglass icon. But another Slashdot user objected that letting the user run anything before the assembly cache finishes would break native applications that start a managed subprocess without user interaction.

The JavaScript runtime (Firefox or Chrome) needs updates as well. And on Ubuntu, I get plenty of updates to various libraries.

Tried it, didn't like it, got rid of it. Windows 8 has worked fine for me since.

I think the point is that criticizing behavior takes time that could better be spent to engineer a workaround to said behavior.

Microsoft would probably do it the way it does crash reporting, where the user is given the option to automatically send error reports to Microsoft. The developer can retrieve these crash reports by 1. forming a corporation or LLC, 2. buying a certificate from VeriSign or DigiCert in this company's name, and 3. registering with Windows Dev Center Hardware and Desktop Dashboard (formerly Winqual).

That would have goaded the popular tech media into making unflattering comparisons to Windows 3.11.

A telescoping antenna analogous to those on portable radios would have sufficed for that. For a keyboard, I would have probably used the 4x4 matrix of my Casio calculator watch.

If we managed it like we do fossil fuels we would load it into crop dusters and let it fly while chanting "the solution to pollution is dilution".

OTOH, we could reprocess it and have lots of fuel and a lot less waste to manage.

It still amazes me TMI is even mentioned in the same paragraph as Chernobyl or Fukishima. Yes, I can well imagine TMI scared a lot of people who lived near it, but ultimately not much happened outside the plant.

I've heard plenty of "don't worry, they won't enforce that" from both parties and in almost always proves to be incorrect (as was intended from the start).

There's not a lot to go wrong here that can't be corrected. Other than the usual stuff all missions to ISS face.

And if they care, they'll do what?

Congress repeatedly dangling funding in front of them then pulling it away when they reach for it repeatedly didn't help.

The only time I've had significant breakage is when I have heavily modified something and hacked it in rather than doing it the right way.

When a new version goes stable, I wait a few days, then dist-upgrade one machine and look it over. Then I upgrade in batches of 6 or so. Never a significant problem.

Doing updates within the same major version is even easier.

One way to detect a backdoored compiler to a fairly high certainty is diverse double-compiling, a method described by David A. Wheeler that bootstraps a compiler's source code through several other compilers. For example, GCC compiled with (GCC compiled with Visual Studio) should be bit for bit identical to GCC compiled with (GCC compiled with Clang) and to GCC compiled with (GCC compiled with Intel's compiler). But this works only if the compiler's source code is available. So to thwart allegations of a backdoor in Visual Studio, perhaps a better choice is to improve MinGW (GCC for Windows) or Clang for Windows to where it can compile a working copy of TrueCrypt.