Wow so all I have to do is have half a dozen apps to do what one app does on my Android phone.

So much for "it just works".

I'm a state employee (I really am - I belong to SEIU 503) - I think I should be able to associate with whoever I like, and to vote for my own best interests.

I don't think that is typical - my dad retired at 58k and he was a public school teacher his entire life. He also made the top pay scale which only requires a masters degree.

Administrators make about that much though.

The one to be on the ballot in every state when running for president of the united states.

This is true, but it has funny results sometimes. I used to run the computer labs at PSU and the English Language Program bought a disk called "Focus on Grammar" by Pearson Thompson. The thing used SecuROM and required admin privileges (and the manifest was in the EXE "requireAdministrator")

One thing you learn when you have 1200 or so odd Windows machines to manage is no-one gets admin privs. They ended up having to send it all back because the courseware it came with violated basic Windows security rights.

Ask them what kinds of scripting languages Windows supports (Powershell, VB, JS etc), what does WMI do? How would you deploy a printer using policies?

A LOT of Windows admins know how to call for help and push buttons, but not so many know the backend stuff that makes Windows tick which is kinda invaluable as an admin.

People just use certain chemicals instead of a Tardis.

Or maybe that is the idea - use certain chemicals inside the Tardis?

Actually in the 12 years I've been out of school it looks like there are even more theories on why it rains now:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain

Doesn't mean it isn't true.

Theories make all these electronics work, theories make radio/cellphones/broadcasting work. I took a weather class in college and found out there's three theories on why it rains.

It still rains :).

My Samsung phone uses a micro-usb connector. Its only 6 months old, but I'm pretty sure other much older samsung phones use them too.

They send *digital* signals over usb :). Imagine that?

You say this, but have you looked around? They do stuff lock step. If Verizon can get away with charging higher prices for voice and text, AT&T/Sprint can too!

Flash wasn't just about videos and ads on the internet. Some of us developed useful applications like forms for front line people, reports for pointed hair people and video games (look up sharpform - a lot of video game UI's run on Flash). Its sad that the platforms it supports is shrinking and not growing.

Ages ago when I worked for Adobe - an internal conference was show casing everything they just acquired from Macromedia. The mantra was "the future of the company is everything we just acquired" (that wasn't the official mantra, but after attending plenty of developer sessions that was what I was feeling) - I'm sure that is still true to a certain extent, but there was a genuine feeling that Flash could actually take on Java as a web runtime - especially because we were going to have the worlds first full runtime on a mobile device (at the time they were talking about Symbian and WebOS).

Don't laugh - one of the internet's biggest websites youtube.com runs on top of Flash media server :) (or at least it used to!). Also this was long before HTML-5 and Javascript was showing any promise. If you wanted to have a rich web app your choices were Java or Flash.

The place I work actually has a subscription. I logged in and was even assigned a researcher who sends me spam like emails every month... As far as I can tell its really only useful as a method to justify a decision to management. The one time I called them (the request of my boss) was concerning JAMF Casper - to which they admittedly had never heard of it, but were willing to research it and come up with the same conclusions I did - it was worth implementing.

Most of the articles and the paid for content you could honestly dig up similar results with Google. I've even found one article that has plagiarized content from Wikipedia no less (now archived article about Ruby - a good chunk of it was lifted from Wikipedia word for word). I got suspicious when under platform support they mention Amiga... (I love the Amiga, but its not very enterprise researchy...).

As a state employee (I'm not a cop) its amazing what we let corporate employees get away with too.