I don't think I would say 'fad' so much as 'niche'.

For someone who lives in a city and rarely if ever drives outside of that city (and that describes a lot of people I know, even if that's still definitely a minority of drivers) even the current setup of EVs is pretty solid.

But then there's a lot of people for whom it's totally impractical, too.

To be fair, they're targetting serious gamers, a market Apple gave up on back in the 1900s.

The problem with that statement is: basically everyone who uses Eclipse seriously also uses a lot of plug-ins to provide all the functionality Eclipse doesn't out of the box.

In my career I've known over a hundred developers who used Eclipse as their major development tool, and not a one of them used less than three or four plug-ins with it.

Saying Eclipse doesn't run like a dog if you don't add plug-ins is like saying your car gets great gas mileage if you take the seats out and don't weigh it down with passengers or cargo: technically true and yet totally useless from a practical perspective.

No, but in practice Java never really lived up to that promise either, except for very trivial applications.

"Write once, run anywhere" was like communism -- an idea that sounds nice in theory in some ways but utterly fails to work in reality.

If that's because you think it's pretty clear that Apple's been worse for a while, I agree with you.

Uh.

If you hack some home user's computer, you may get A credit card number.

If you managed to hack one of the financial services companies I've worked at, you'd get more of them in one score than you'd ever need.

Some of those companies did security updates at a glacial pace, incidentally. At one, seeing e-mail viruses going around was hardly uncommon.

Even many small businesses will have hundreds if not thousands. They shouldn't be storing that information, you say? Well, people shouldn't install Bonzi Buddy either, but they do/did.

The world is full of even Fortune 500 companies whose idea of IT is still storing crucial, accessed-everyday data in an Access '97 database on one user's desktop.

You're way, way underestimating the vulnerability of business and the financial rewards of exploiting it.

The theory is that by 5 months (and, probably, a much shorter window, like 1 month), most of the people who will ever buy the game already have.

> Wrong! Anonimity does not imply bad behavior, and for those who rage in anonymity they do not do it all the time. Anonimity is a necessary protection in some circumstances. Without it we would not have wikileaks, whistleblowers, political and religious dissent.

But that some form of anonimity is important doesn't mean that internet anonimity specifically is automatically necessary.

I see you don't work in business.

The cost of a license for your workers is a rounding error. The cost of training people to use something that isn't Office isn't.

You implicitly assume the cost of switching is zero. It's very much not in any business of moderate or greater size, even if you assume the time of your employees doesn't cost you anything (which it does). It's not even low.

That's not quite what I said.

I said you'd need to not think very hard to not see any drawbacks or potential pitfalls to what you suggested. It's the kind of statement that usually would be followed by a facetious, "What could possibly go wrong?"

Have you considered the possibility that those people might actually not care and might actually believe no one else should, either, and that no attempt at humor is involved?

If you can't come up with any reason why that's a bad idea, you're either not thinking very hard or you're an anarchist.

If I were a betting man, I'd lay money on it being both.

Everyone thinks some of government should be cut.

No one agrees on what that some should be.

That's the entire problem.

Considering the 4 had some well-publicized problems the 3 didn't (whether or not you consider those problems significant in your own case), is your statement based on a belief that lightning can't strike the same place twice?