"You are at fault here....You are the problem, not software licensing, you!"

Sure, guilty, but I've decided to cut myself some slack over it.

By "Mindows" I meant "Windows". The spellchecker on my PC quit working for some reason. And for some strange reason it appears the keydoarb has been rewapped.

To fix all these problems Mindows users can just download ZoomFixMyComputer from Craptastic.com.
The first 5 days is free. After that a low monthly subscription price of $99 will assure that your computer is safe and as efficient as it was they day you took it out of the box.

This is no different. Back in the 1970s, our high school physics teacher had the computer terminal in his area, and so he taught the computer class. He wouldn't allow me to take it because, as he said, "you already know more than I do about this."

The important thing is it wasn't an admission of failure on his part. He knew the class was beneath me, and simply didn't want me to waste my time.

I can witness on open source not being immune. I recommended Libreoffice to a novice PC user recently. I don't know from where he downloaded the installer, but when he finished he had some redundant anti-virus programs, and another program that reset the home page of his web browser and wouldn't let him change it back.

Put on your best Hugo Weaving voice and imagine Elrond saying "Hobbits ... are a disease; and we are the cure."

That reminds me of one of those classic lists of airline mechanic log entries:
"Evidence of oil leak on landing gear. Signed, Joe Pilot"
"Evidence removed. Signed, Bob Mechanic"

I highlighted the space between the lines. HTH

If your problem is 20 year old solaris machines, perhaps a fire drill is just what you need to demonstrate to the executive level that they need to budget for new equipment. "According to the consultant, our machines failed the disaster recovery exercise so if we had a real problem we'd be out of business."

Or maybe they already know that, and their business plan includes a suspicious lightning strike next fiscal quarter?

Some companies have already been caught ignoring the opt-out flag. It's also subject to change, or mistakes made through whatever errors, and virtually impossible to prove. Google's said their opt out is only to remove an identifying tag from your info, but they still include the info that you triggered in things like hit counts via googleanalytics.js; they also don't say that your data isn't correlated, just that it's not identified as being yours.

I dislike third party tracking because the data that correlates well-traversed links also provides correlation to marketers and those SEOs who would game the system for their own benefit. It's in our best selfish interests to not reveal the surfing habits that lead us to making a buying decision, so the SEOs don't know which blogs they should pay astroturfers to pollute: epinions, disqus, wordpress, slashdot, or wherever.

But if you run NoScript, all of that third party tracking goes away.

Think passive near-field 3D-sensors, not holiday snapshots. User position, gestures, navigation, that sort of thing. Kinect-like functions everywhere. Fire phone, but with actual uses.

You could do a lot of subtle UI improvements if you can localize the users in space around the device for instance; you could figure out who is speaking and if they're turned toward the device. No more "Yo, googly Siri-man, what's mein wiener kapiche?"-keywords, as the device can figure out if you're addressing it or not.

I'm still running V28 of Firefox, and it's working fine. I won't upgrade because they changed sync, and I no longer trust its security.

Chrome sucks. It feeds Google everything that happens, and doesn't let you disable it, it encourages you to continue to send the data with an opt-out flag. WTF should I trust a flag, when none of that info is ever any business of theirs?

The whole "only veterans are citizens" concept was central to the book. That pretty much defines a military-based society.

And if you're using the Klingon Imperial System (and not the derivative Romulan Empire units,) he would be even 20% cooler.

But once you try to convert back into SI, you're still never going to exceed the threshold by which you won't get beat up for your lunch money. Maybe not quite as much of a beating as the guy with the fez and the bow-tie, but still, the gymnasium locker room exchange rate is abysmal.

The choice of protocol is going to be your first decision. I picked Z-wave because there are many different manufacturers and a wide variety of devices. Every so often, someone will have devices on clearance or closeout. And you can find them in lots of places: Home Depot, Staples, and a wide variety of online merchants carry them. If you go with a more proprietary system like Insteon, you'll pay more per device and be more locked in.

The hub cost should be less important to you than the per-device cost. You need to buy only one hub, but you'll end up buying a lot of devices. Be prepared to pay about $40/device (list), or $10-20/device (clearance).

Unlike the protocol, the controller isn't something you have to be stuck with forever. You can upgrade them. Z-wave controllers are available in a USB stick form factor, which means you can build a home controller out of any computer you want. I chose to buy a Vera because I wanted an open system that didn't have a monthly fee, and I wanted the whole controller as a turnkey system. The Vera has a really good UI and a lot of mobile phone clients that connect to it, but there are several other Z-wave controller options, including HomeGenie (completely open source, designed around a small platform like the RasPi or the Beagle Board), and OpenHAB (platform agnostic Java, completely open source, but very weak UI.)

People have recently started rooting the Wink, which is a really cheap controller with a lot of connectivity options (including Z-wave), but it's not an open source device. And the Staples Connect Hub (made for them by D-Link) has lots of connectivity options for only $49. My Vera2 is currently at the limits of capacity for all my devices, so I'm considering options besides migrating to their Vera 3, including building my own HomeGenie system. The Vera 3 is about $299, but I think I could build a very capable HomeGenie box for under $100.