If you think Obama's policies are representative of any sort of a "left", you watch way too much American TV news.

The troubleshooting steps for when my WWVB-controlled wall clock stops syncing amount to "move it to a spot near a west-facing window for 24-48 hours". I would really rather not have to do that with, say, my oven.

My example isn't "bad" just because you don't like the conclusion.

Define what "coding" means to you. There are two possible categories that definition can fall into: One so over-broad that it's meaningless but that includes nearly everyone, and one that fits what other people mean when they say "coding" but excludes a vast majority of reasonably happy competent people who hold jobs where 90% of their work day is spent using a computer.

Funny, when XP launched the Slashdot consensus was that it was 'goddamned Fischer-Price crap' for consumers who didn't care about the lack of signed drivers for (your favorite obscure ISA card here), and real big boy computers ran Linux, UNIX, or Win2k if you really needed Microsoft software.

It's really not, at least not unless you're going to expand the definition of "coding" to silly lengths that would include trivial stuff like Excel formulas. Those are mainstream job skills, proper coding is a niche skill.

Or to turn it around, if one absolutely must (FULL STOP!) know how to code to operate a computer, then operating a computer is self-evidently not a skill that everyone needs, as can be seen by the number of functioning adults who can't code "hello world" in python.

There's a lot more to "3D Television" than just a TV with a 3D capable panel in it.

How many of those people own the glasses? And a 3D blu-ray player (with the required HDMI 1.whatever cables)? And 3D discs (or if you want to get into really amazingly minuscule market share numbers, 3D cable/satellite programming)?

"Shuttleworth has neither given up nor been surpassed by another competitor in this area."

But he has been surpassed. Microsoft has already successfully foisted their clunky tablet UI on millions of desktop users who bought machines pre-loaded with Windows 8!

Rid of Flash and Silverlight? Netflix working properly on non-Windows systems?

The alternative was never "no more DRM on the web", it is (and would continue to be) "DRM that brings along its own bloated, proprietary, buggy application runtime along".

Of course we are. In fact, we're already doing it. 20 years ago any restaurant or hotel of note had a pastry chef on staff, now they mostly serve premade desserts that come frozen from factories where machines and fewer low-wage workers do the former jobs of many well-paid chefs.

There isn't unlimited risk though. If a user is going to win a lawsuit, they have to show their data was leaked because of your negligence, not just bad luck. As long as you follow enough "industry best practices" (obvious shit like "have a firewall" and "don't give employees admin rights") to appear non-negligent to a jury of techno-illiterate old folks, you'll be fine.

"I have my doubts"

You should. Short-circuiting AES-NI to return the plaintext XORed with the output of (weakened) rdrand would mean that the intended recipient can't decrypt the message. That's a lot of hard engineering work to tap a communication channel that nobody can actually communicate over...

When, in the course of the NSA revelations, have you gotten the impression that "if X became public knowledge... it would be the death blow to the current Y" was ever a consideration in whether or not they did X?

Yeah, he probably means Wolfenstein 3D, which did come out right before Myst, and was the only other game at the time with a first-person view.

As for TFA's premise "Why didn't Myst have a larger impact?" Are you kidding? First person view, real 3D (granted, pre-rendered real 3D), maps that are playable out-of-order and you can return to many times, using the fricken mouse (which most games were happy to leave alone until after Windows 95), using sound to create atmosphere, multiple endings based on the player's moral choices, the idea that PC games could be art instead of bad copies of arcade quarter-suckers, we're so surrounded by the trees of things Myst did first or did right first that you're missing the forest.

On a huge pile of money!

SHA-512, obviously. That 1 in 2^128 chance that your file has been randomly corrupted in a way that hashes to the same MD5 sum may be acceptable for a disc of bootleg mp3s, but it's just way too high for professional audio work.