Face it, as far as these companies are concerned, you guys are even less relevant than transexual credit card wielding jihadists. They don't care about you. You're a rumor, recognizable only as deja vu and dismissed just as quickly. You don't exist; you were never even born. Anonymity is your name. Silence your native tongue. You're no longer part of the System ...

Hell, if it's only $35 dollars, I'm in.

Do you take Bitcoins?

Zaphod Beeblebrox: There's a whole new life stretching out in front of you.
Marvin: Oh, not another one.

Then you obviously are in the market for a new Mac Pro.

You know you are. Feel the force.

Arms race .... heh heh.

It's not a well crafted sentence but yes, most discussion of evolution concern themselves of long spans of time. It actually has only relatively recently when we were able to clearly see evolutionary changes in macroscopic organisms that occurred over a period of just a couple of years. Of course, rapidly dividing little things have been the forefront of molecular basis of evolution for some time but some people have found it difficult to grasp that growing longer toes and creating antibiotic resistance are really the same thing.

Back to school you go.

You got part of it - genetic (or epigentic, it really doesn't make a difference to the theory) variation.

And.

Selection. You need that part. Otherwise you just have a whole bunch of very slightly different critters wandering around the petri dish. Don't forget selection.

Then use some better metrics in selecting, training and above all, paying for them. When you pay a police officer just a bit more than a fast food flipper, you're not exactly going to attract the best of the best of the best.

Why you stupid bicycle! Don't you realize that Worcestershire sauce bowling ball stud muffin?

Sheesh. Potato chips these days.

I'm not in the position to argue the merits of the rest of your post, but this last part seems obvious.

Once you have more than a half dozen passwords, your ability to remember them drastically decreased unless you are some sort of savant. You need a password manager. Once you are using a password manager, there is no reason NOT to use a different, random, difficult to hack password on every site. I have no idea what the vast majority of my passwords are - the only ones I remember are the three I use multiple times a day at work. The rest get created and filled out by 1Password.

And, yes, of course, now I'm at the mercy of my 1Password password and the company's ability to manage their program. Can't be perfect and the current system really does suck but this way seems to be the best of the worst.

One feature I wish Agile Bits would set up is the ability to automatically change passwords on a regular basis. As it is, I manually change some high value passwords every so often (not Slashdot's of course). PITA.

Card Catalog?

Clones of Hasselton? I thought gain of function experiments were on a moratorium these days.

I can tell you're not an American.

Here, it goes:

"In Gold we trust, all others pay cash."

Boo !

If you are just trying to develop the next Unix clone of telenet or ftp, this argument might make some sense. If you are working in any sort of commercial environment, the cost of the PC is just a rounding error.

This entire subthread about the putative costs of a generic x86 box vs. something from Apple is absurd - nobody cares about these sorts of costs except poor hobbyist programmers -- and none of the companies, Apple included, gives a tinker's damn about this demographic.

For mid to upper range laptops*, Apple is very competitive with everybody else. If you like the tight hardware / software integration that MacBooks offer, then great. If you don't care or really want to run Windows, go get something else. I do wish that Apple had a few more choices - I'd love for them to resurrect the 17" MBP, but I'd also like Dell to have English speaking customer facing employees, for HP to make keyboards worth a damn and for Toshiba to simply go away.

But life is hard....

* The Mac Pro, especially the Darth Vader's ashtray version, is really a niche product