Over 20 years of buying Macs for my family? I don't think so. My employer hands outs Samsung brand Android phones to employees who want a company bought phone. You'd be surprised at how many of those get trashed every year. A couple of dozen of them got sent to the recycler with a broken display from the wear an tear suffered by people pocketing them. According to the Samsung agent the ribbon connecting the display to the motherboard came loose (and people whine about 'bend-gate'). The same goes for their sizeable fleet of Lenovo and Dell laptops, workstations and monitors. The Lenovo laptops for example suffered from ethernet cards that just died after a few months of operation and we had to issue large numbers of users with USB ethernet adapters. Some of the Dells started to suffer bulging battery syndrome and we also had a brief flirtation with using Windows laptops from HP who suffered kernel panics every 3rd or 4th time you plugged them into a (HP brand) dock. I have a lot more examples but I'll let this suffice. I can't honestly say that these other 'reputable vendors' have a noticeably lower fault rate than Apple. I'm just sick and tired by these opinionated wing nuts who come here writing an angry post condemning some companies entire product line based on their experience with one or two their devices that they bought. If you are in the IT business get used to the idea of suffering equipment failures or get out o the IT business.

OMG!! Apple doesn't have a Twitter presence! .... Get a grip will you?!? Sure there are some problems/bugs Apple doesn't fix and that I had to research and solve myself but then again I have had the same sort of hardware and software related problems with Windows and (Sacrilege!!) Linux. I have been a Mac user for coming up on two decades and I cannot say that I have ever had a major problem with their service. Some of the things that I have had issues with are:

1. A Macbook that refused to boot out of the box. Exchanged without a world of protest for a functioning unit.
2. A Macbook that had a defective display. The display was swapped out three times, because of two defective Sony LCD panels. The first time they replaced the LCD when I bought the laptop in for a RAM upgrade without me even having to ask them to do it.
3. An Apple cinema display that I traded in because of dead pixels. Exchanged for a new unit without a word of protest.
4. Several charging devices whose connector cables wore out. All were exchanged for a new unit without a word of protest.
5. More software problems than I care to remember, many solved via the Apple support forum. I have also initiated several support issues with Apple online and so far they have never refused to help me.

Let me dispel a few myths for you (and apologies in advance for robbing you of reasons to feed your irrational hatred of Apple) Apple products do not always 'just work' out of the box, whatever Apples marketing dweebs may say Apple does not deny the existence of problems with their products because they do not flip you a bird when you ask them for support, Apple is no worse than any number of computer software and hardware vendors that I deal with on a regular basis and in my experience Apple is quite a bit better than many of them.

Yep. This is blogspam.

So TV and internet sites like Slashdot have pretty much the same functionality, then.

Lots of embedded projects are done on Raspberry Pi. If Windows does not run on the Pi, the company who decides to do a Pi based project will decide to develop under Linux. If Windows is available on the Pi and they have Windows developers available, they might decide to do the project with Windows. Also, its less expensive to hire Windows developers than Linux developers right now. Microsoft likes selling embedded windows because its a great way for them to sell lots of Windows licenses.

Right now the IoT OS doesn't include "WinRT" which is the app store windows runtime that "Windows RT" uses

Honest question, since when is windows not known as reliable? I have just as many problems supporting Linux on anything as Windows and to be quite honest, sometimes it may be worth paying the couple of dollars to license an OS that has great vendor support out of the box than to roll your own. Microsoft for example offers Windows 8.1 for free on Devices 9" screen size. I can't imagine this version costing much if anything at all - running similar to licensing of Android where some specific configurations may have costs.

Knowing Microsoft will have a "universal" app ecosystem and fully expecting that WinRT will be ported to IoT platforms fully (don't think it has been for 8.1 IoT platforms) it would be silly for an internet of things company to be concerned with OS when they can focus on Device - especially knowing Microsoft's long tail support of everything..

It's a shame the first few posts are complaints about virus's or other nonsense. Microsoft has had Windows 8.1 for IoT for a little while now and they have a great growing community of developers and devices that Windows runs on. It's pretty amazing that Windows can run on these devices. Raspberry Pi running Windows 10 with Plex should be a fun experiment if Plex makes a port and it will be exciting to see Visual Studio updated to have the Pi as supported device.

After struggling with VirtualBox for a while, I broke down and bought VMWare. I use it for running Linux and running other versions of MacOS X on my Mac. I have found it to be well worth the money. In general, I like free software and I don't mind something that is a little harder to use if the non-free alternative is expensive, but at $79 VM Ware has saved me so much time its well worth it.

How, if we stumbled across intelligent life, would we be able to recognise it?

Apple tries to control as much as they can on their platforms. Other platforms like Android and Windows take an approach of sharing responsibility for the overall quality between several different companies who can each point at each other and say "not it!" when a problem arrises.

Blade Runner is a Frankensteinian tale about creation revolting against its creator, questioning the meaning of death, whereas Do Androids ... is about empathy as an essential human quality in a world where everything is artificial. Much of the novel is about Deckard's desire to buy a pet, required for spiritual fulfilment according to the religion of Mercerism. Death is as unimportant to the book as Mercerism is to the film.

That's only true if you're surrounded by arseholes.

Eh, it's not like Blade Runner was a faithful adaptation either. For one, its theme is completely different from the book. Still, it's one of the best SF movies and one of the best adaptations ever.

One small point, it you really do all of this you will stick out like a sore thumb because you will be relatively easy to find in a sea of unencrypted data. Police have actually caught offnders like that. Better yet, the NSA, unlike the cops has compromised most VPN and SHTTP service providers so you will be one of a rather small number of people whose signals traffic they can't decrypt which narrows things down even more. You can usen couriers but you had better be damn smart about how and whewe from they do their transmitting because pattern analysis can still narrow down your location. If one of them uses the same internet cafe too often the next thing you know a van is permanantly parked outside your house to be followed by Virginia farmboys in ninja commando outfits smashing through your doors and windows.