How about end-to-end, strong crypto by default? How about AES-256 built in to Ethernet adapters?

I agree that Samsung is "cooler" than Android. There are a lot of total crap Android devices. I can remember when Google was cool. Sometime before they want public....

I mod you to +6

I think a huge part of their problem is with branding. Apple and Android are seen as cool and sexy whereas Microsoft is perceived as uncool and business-oriented. XBox is the only exception I can think of. The exact same hardware, delivered by a cool, edgy start-up, could have done much better.

To be fair, I haven't even touched a Windows phone, but my perception is that it's going to try to lock you into MS offerings (Apple does this too) and it will try and keep you from doing cool things if that doesn't somehow make money for MS.

Is this really true, is this just my perception, or is this the general perception? Bear in mind that first-hand experience (reality) has nothing to do with the perception of those that haven't touched it.

I would like to see all faculty ratings (somehow) adjusted for the students' GPA and class grade. Too may students have an "I got an A, so instructor deserves an A, I got a C so instructor deserves a C" mentality.

I almost put something in that post about how "the business side would never go along with is because it dilutes the market for ...", but the thrust of the post was the social responsibility that companies have. If there are millions of unpatched XP boxes on the net, it could spell huge problems for the net as a whole and make the net unsafe and unusable for everyone. Profit may be job number one but it it squeezes out all other values it runs the risk of bringing down the whole system. Look what just happened to the baking industry as the result of unbridled greed. So while that may fail business 101 type reasoning, you fail business 501 and ethics 201 for being too shortsighted and polluting the well from which all drink.

I've met a few programmers that are in love with Visual Studio. But I have to ask, "Do you know how to program or do you just know Visual Studio?" Without it, many seem lost. The tool seems to be becoming the focus rather then the actual programming.

Consumerism convinced us to buy a lot of things that we don't really need or seldom use so, now that times are getting tougher, we're lending/renting our excess.

There's just something fundamentally wrong with a company abandoning a product with such a huge install base. It's a huge Internet public health issue. Microsoft has a social responsibility by virtue of their success to act. I see four reasonable possibilities here.

1. Microsoft keeps releasing security patches for XP.
2. Microsoft ships a version of Windows 8 that will run on XP grade hardware.
3. Microsoft spins off XP into a company that will continue to support it.
4. Microsoft releases XP source code so that others can (at least have a chance to) patch it.

Eventually, all XP grade hardware will die, but with the advent of low power/low cost hardware XP could see a second coming if Microsoft would just support it. It's not like there isn't a huge amount of reasonably good software for the platform.

Imagine if a company in India bought XP and started releasing XP SP4 for like $10 or $20. So cheap that the 1st world wouldn't both to pirate it and still affordable to many in the 3d world.

Did they look at the length of warranty? Obviously it's not fair to compare a four year old spinning disk with five year warranty ot a one year old SSD with a one year warranty.

I think you're onto something here. Senior faculty sometimes resent having to teach 101 classes. Tenure is important for academic freedom and to go against what the administration wants.

How about for copyright infringement? Even non-commercial copyright infringement is illegal.

I'm not nearly as much of a believer in RAID for the home environment. If you (accidentally) delete something on one drive it's gone from both. Better to buy two drives and do a daily rsync. That way you have a window of opportunity to recover data. Personally, I use rsync without --delete until the 2d drive starts getting full, then I use the --delete flag to clean up.

As a matter of policy they don't defend many 2d amendment cases because they do not believe (however misguidedly) that it's not an individual right.
As a practical matter, they don't take 2A cases because no 2A case, with merits, has ever failed to be defended, mostly by the NRA.
The NRA focuses on one amendment, the ACLU on the other nine. Also, the NRA's budget is bigger.

They way this usually works is the precise statement is true, but they leave the encryption keys where the government can find them.