Better yet, ignore Apple entirely and focus on Samsung and the other Android devices. If Apple wants to be idiots, let them pay the full price of their stupidity for once.

Being a smart ass and having a sense of humour is not claiming to be brilliant.

You, on the other hand, seem to have an arrogant ego the size of a medium planet. :P

How, pray tell, does delivering a new DLL with new APIs "break" existing code? Microsoft has added those APIs for writing safer software; they didn't modify existing APIs to do it. But in order to "run on Windows", developers can't use those new APIs without ignoring the huge number of Windows 7 boxen out there, never mind the old Vista boxes.

Looks like I just escaped disaster by not owning a TV at all. Torrents, baby, torrents and streaming.

I honestly don't understand why people would buy a "smart" TV instead of a monitor, surround sound speakers, and plug it in to a laptop or computer. How many people really use OTA broadcasts nowadays?

Have you ever noticed the runtime libraries that application installers check for and auto-install while installing the application?

Is there some reason you couldn't do the same for these magical Win7 patch libraries/DLLs?

The question is not just whether an OS is secure, but how long it takes for patches to be rolled out. While Microsoft often sits on their laurels when it comes to releasing patches, the king of procrastination is Oracle, which has left known issues in the wild for decades.

Still, I don't disagree with the general intent of your post, which I read as "closed source is not necessarily worse than open source." But that's only up to a point -- timely patches are critical to maintaining the security of a system, and when Microsoft purposely omits patches for downlevel releases that are still under support, they do a great disservice to their customers, to the 'net community as a whole, and to their own reputation and therefore bottom line.

Ever hear of the tech bubble of the 90s?

The way I see it, this mania for "social" sites is another tech bubble.

Bitching about it should remind everyone with a functioning brain cell of that last debacle.

But then there are people like you, who think that this crap is "special".

How much did they waste on a "service" I've never heard of before and would have no interest in using?

As someone else commented, if I want to know what my friends are doing, I call or email them, not check some random corporate spy network.

I think the fact that these people think a "tenure track" is the only use for the degree just might have something to do with why fewer people pursue it.

Maybe a few people don't want to teach, hmm?

The problem with public key encrypted email is that your keys only work for encrypting email you receive, not the email you send. In order for an email to be private, the receiver has to set up encryption.

While I'm sure I could set up encryption for my email quite easily, I can assure you most of my friends and family have no interest in going to the effort.

In addition to that, encryption only encrypts the body of the message. The to/from addresses, header line, and other tags are sent in plain text, regardless of whether you "encrypt" your email. And the NSA, et. al. claim they're only interested in that header information in the first place to identify who your contacts are, not what you're saying to them.

So encrypt away -- they're still getting the info they want from your email headers.

Oops. Sorry. It's not the personal income tax that gets matched, it's the unemployment insurance premiums.

Still, when push comes to shove, an employee's "cost" is roughly double their salary here. And that's not allowing for corporate overhead like accounting, management, receptionists, facilities, etc.

This.

Here in Canada, corporations match the personal income tax paid by an employee. Health coverage is not included, and the fees are increasing every year. But the biggest part of the pie by far is the liability insurance for a contract company.

Good luck finding contracts as an individual if you don't pony up for liability insurance.

I was lucky to have the card table -- one of the guys had a mouse pad on a couple of milk crates. :P

Perched on a rickety kitchen chair in front of a monitor that was sitting on top of the computer tower with the keyboard in my lap and the mouse on a card table to the side.

We were just starting a contract and the furniture hadn't arrived yet. :)

I know people who own both types of device who are so unhappy with them that they're swearing to never buy another one, and try the other with their next purchase.

It's like someone who buys a Ford, hates the Ford, so they buy a GM, hate the GM, so they buy a Chrysler, hate the Chrysler... they're just never going to find a "perfect" device for their needs.