Hopefully the phase-in of autonomous vehicles will bring about an end to rush-hour. It's a ridiculous misallocation of resources to have major arteries clogged maybe four hours of the day and underutilised the remaining 20. And all because most businesses cling tenaciously to anachronistic 8a-5p 'business hours' in many parts of the Western world. Flextime and telecommuting should be the rule. The whole convention of set business hours is about nothing more than the PTB controlling the lives of the unwashed masses.

Agreed. And the fact that IE12 will have a new extension engine finally puts it at feature parity with Chrome and Firefox. Microsoft is getting back in the game, and Apple seems to be coming out with ho-hum, me-too tweaks of existing products rather than anything truly new. Stuff happens in cycles. That's what keeps things exciting.

Who on earth would be trying to run a modern release of Windows on pre-2003 hardware, anyway? Stuff of that vintage is only useful for historical curiosity, or at best running a stripped-down Linux distro. Given that CPU's that old had a horrible power/performance ratio, it would be cheaper in the long-run to spend the couple hundred bucks on newer equipment.

Until lemon laws for computer-related products become pervasive, this shit will continue. Manufacturers are able to skirt liability and hide behind nebulous EULA's.

Hierarchy goes hand-in-hand with specialisation of roles in a society. Even in a hunter-gatherer society, the more physically endowed were hunters whilst the frailer members of the band gathered or engaged in child-care; even in pre-agricultural times, larger groups certainly had various factions even if they viewed other factions as peers. As agriculture took hold and a warrior caste developed, the more physically-armed members of society (or those were were under the protection of such) could keep the rabble down via the threat of violence.

Sounds like your ideas on development are just as atavistic and misguided as the ones you have regarding economics. I see a trend here.

Before I work on someone's machine, I ask that person to close all windows that may have sensitive content s/he may not want me to see. This policy establishes a certain amount of trust with the user. Put the onus on the user to determine what s/he considers private and sensitive. Easy-peasy, and it only takes 30 seconds.

Don't worry, there are some of us for whom your irony didn't escape us. :)

The War on Drugs does provide a substantial benefit -- for the police forces who can buy shiny new toys by auctioning off stuff seized via asset forfeiture; the owners of private prisons; drug kingpins who earn their filthy lucre from peddling illicit wares; the members of public-sector prison-guard unions; and the laboratories who get to charge outrageous amounts of money to administer and process drug tests.

The general public, of course, does not share in this bounty and furthermore suffers from higher rates of violent crime spawned by prohibition.

As to why the 'cheap shot', it's because Obama has been expanding upon many of Bush's most-hated policies. In his campaign speeches, he promised to scale back the War on Terror, close Gitmo and rein in the surveillance apparatus. He has done none of these things, and has indeed intensified those efforts.

Technology only goes so far. There are certain limits imposed by the laws of physics (e.g., thermodynamics) that are unyielding.

I like Amory Lovins' twist: 'Global Weirding'.

Have her run ReactOS in a virtual machine and she can run her favourite piece of software under *that*. She can run everything thing else (including a browser) under Windows 7 or 8.x.

Erm, no . If Bill Gates is a million times wealthier than me, do you think he buys a million times more automobiles? He does consume more than I do, but nowhere near in proportion to his greater overall wealth. You're committing a fallacy of composition. The wealthy may consume 10 or 100 times more, but the bulk of the difference in income and wealth are locked up in bonds and offshore accounts. This stuff gets passed onto their progeny, creating a de facto dynastic ruling class.

The people who profit from making all these inane rules are ultimately the manufacturers of the screening equipment, the people training security staff, et cetera. In other words, the military-industrial-security complex. It is with them (and the politicians who sell us out to them) that we must start redressing our grievances. We must also stop sensationalising every one-in-a-million occurrence (terrorism, being struck twice by lightning) and start mitigating the effects of problems that will likely impact us all (e.g., climate change).