Yesterday in my repair shop

Wait, there are still computer repair people?

Say, if I buy a new video card, you think you could come over to my house and install it before Assassin's Creed Unity comes out? There's $50 in it for you. I live in Chicago.

3 secs should be just enough to click the "more information" link.

I'm pretty sure that unless he's suffering from the DTs, it won't take him 3 seconds to click a link.

Most won't even care about that, they just install without reviewing.

I doubt it's much different in other platforms. Mac OS or Android or Linux. When there is an update, most people don't have the time to carefully go over what it's doing. Nor should they.

When the plumber comes to my house, as he did yesterday, all I care about is that the hot water is coming and the toilets flush. I don't crawl under the sink to see if he properly greased the pipes or whatever the hell it is plumbers do.

I have met people who work for Microsoft and Apple and they are neat and earnest and are by all appearances proper and trustworthy citizens. I've also met people who contribute to open source OSs. They look like the guy who stands on the on-ramp with a sign asking for change. A little bit dangerous with greasy hair and a a psychotic glimmer in the eyes.

I'm kidding of course, and just tweaking people who use Linux (like myself), but as Eclipse (played by Frank McRae) said to Sylvester Stallone upon his imprisonment in the classic American film Lock Up, "You gotta trust somebody. Let me hip you to the joint."

some might find it more convenient than dealing with dodgy/illegal web sites, poor quality cracks, possible malware, and other annoyances.

The top torrent sites are a lot less "dodgy" than uplay (and have better uptime), and the best of the scene outfits put out cracked products that are often more stable than the companies that produce the games.

How many times have we heard about games that had huge problems because of their DRM that were fixed in the torrent?

There may be arguments for using Valve/Origin/Uplay etc over torrents but the ones you mention aren't really among them.

In fairness, have you ever seen a car seat that a horseshoe crab would find comfortable?

Yeah well that whale should have known I had the right of way.

Lighting (the Mozilla calendar app) is also pretty nice. Rust is gaining a lot of interest as a systems programming language, although not so much in the application space.

Again, hand waving without specifics. The most noticeable change for me was that they button to customise the UI is now on the toolbar by default, rather than hidden away somewhere. What can you no longer customise that you could previously?

I really don't understand this complaint. The UI changes were relatively small, and one of the biggest ones was making the 'customize UI' button more prominent in the new versions.

I switched to Firefox on Android recently because Chrome for Android has the same handicapped cookie management policy as the older Android Browser, but Firefox lets me run the self-destructing cookies plugin, which does exactly what I've wished for the last 15 years all browsers would do by default.

No, it's developed in the open, but it's really hard to get changes pushed upstream. We have a bunch of patches for the FreeBSD support and to improve sandboxing, and it looks like it will end up taking 2-3 years to get them all upstreamed. Meanwhile, the code follows the traditional Google development model of gratuitously refactoring things (are Google people paid by number of lines of code changed?), so it's a lot of effort just to keep the patches up to date.

Building schools after you've been seen to come in and overthrow their government doesn't buy you nearly as much goodwill as building schools after you've just helped them overthrow a foreign invader and then removed your military presence from the country.

Nah, Raid Over Moscow for sure.

No, I think the most terrifying moment in history is when Hillary Clinton was born.

No matter what the outcome, the Jury will always be out on America. Unlike all of the previous mentioned, the US doesn't seem to be aiming for annexation, so it's kind of hard to argue that they "failed" when they leave, because they never at any point intended to stay.

Once, while clearing out a bunch of junk at the office, we found an old invoice for a 1 gigabyte hard drive. For $10,000.