One of the hackneyed excuses for spelling or grammar mistakes is to say that language is mutating.

Your: I am dependent on evolution to cull the vulnerable so that future generations are immune to each disease naturally, matches pretty well with Wikipedia's: advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population, from where I'm standing.

Anyhow, I see you're a brand-new user who's previously never posted. Others have already moderated you down to 0 (harsh, but fair, on a site with a scientific approach to life) and I'm just giving you the oxygen of attention. Good luck with making "anti-dysgenicsm" anything other than, in reality, eugenics.

One final definition: "irreverent": showing a lack of respect for people or things that are generally taken seriously (my emboldening). You throw around words and phrases like "poison", "cull the vulnerable", "cocktails of poison", "crap", "toxic", "natural lottery", "destined to die", "medical industrial complex" and then expect to be taken seriously. No, I don't think I was being irreverent.

Dropping into the third-person eh?

From Wikipedia: Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually a human population.

No need for artificial-selection - your practice of non-vaccination is a practice aimed at blah blah blah.

From the Oxford English dictionary: the science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics.

Again, you would like the breeding population to drop vaccination, with the hope that some gene for resistance to diseases is inherited (notwithstanding the fact we tried that for a few thousand years before vaccines came along).

You quack like a duck.

How's evolution working out for you? As an individual, living here today, for let's say 80 years? Or maybe you really think on a thousand-year or 10 thousand-year timescale?

As a family person, do you play the lottery game with your children? Or as someone with friends, are you prepared to play that game with other people? When they've chosen not to play, but rather do the best they can for themselves and their families?

The polite description for you would be "eugenicist". Selfish, misguided, conspiracy theorist, anti-science would also fit.

Useless, eh? My 2560x1440 (16:9) and 1920x1200 (16:10) monitors covered in 80x48 character vim and log windows beg leave to differ. Your "actual work" differs from mine, so let's keep the generalisations down, okay?

Incidentally, a 364x106 character terminal window has also occasionally been useful for long-lined log analysis.

It's new, it's washable, but it's already been done at least twice by other companies. So it ain't news, it's an advert. Grrr.

Good point on the retailer vs manufacturer. Agree entirely that this lock manufacturer is negligent/naive.

but having a maintenance contract is likley to make them sweing the benefit of doubt in your favour

If the vendor is sensible, they'll have used the maintenance contract fees to pay for appropriate insurance against future claims, so they'll be happier to deal with the issue swiftly. It seems that the lock manufacturer didn't do that...

IANAL. But I've been corrected on this issue by someone who is, and who happened to be my boss at the time.

If you're talking about the UK (my version of "over here") most of the stuff to do with refunds and longer-term fitness for purpose only apply to individual consumers. As long as the Cisco device is supplied in a fit state at purchase time then a purchasing company has no come-back if bugs are revealed later and require a paid fix. And in general, a Cisco router, for example, will route packets as advertised. It may have edge cases and rarely-exercised bugs that are only revealed in the field, but Cisco sold it as a router, in good faith.

An individual consumer could expend some effort talking to Cisco about "reasonable" fitness for purpose for up to six years after purchase, but the probable end result would be that Cisco suggest you accept a refund for returning the item.

Have a look (if you've got a lot of time) at the Sale of Goods Act 1979 (and later modifications, etc.) for the basis of all this. There may be European law overlaid on this as well, but so far as I know, no-one's ever tried to use "the law" to resist paying for ongoing maintenance fees on computer hardware, or at least nobody's succeeded in such a venture. And again - IANAL.

Fair enough, although can one buy a Vista OEM licence at the moment anyway? Will you be able to buy a Windows 7 OEM licence once 8 is released? If not, the point about sealed/unsealed is moot.

Nice bit of shoe-horning there.

The rMBP along with all other sealed or unsealed computers will be able to use the PULSB licence, which is supposedly going to cost about the same as the OEM licence. So where's the problem?

And if you want to do one of the things on your list and you can work quickly, then developers can even download a free 90-day eval version of Windows 8 .

But again - why the special mention of the Retina? It has no relevance to the discussion at hand - ie the new licensing that Microsoft offers.

I'm sure not going to argue that people use KDE under OSX, but for general OSS needs try homebrew - http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

I develop for Linux, Windows and MacOS on my Macs. I abandoned MacPorts and Fink a year ago and haven't looked back. My current list of brews is:

brew list
ack gettext markdown postgresql tmux
autoconf git mercurial qt vim
automake graphviz nmap readline watch
boost htop node scons wget
cmake htop-osx ossp-uuid splint xerces-c
dos2unix libevent pcre ssh-copy-id
doxygen macvim pkg-config swig

You've got the world waiting to hear about how "OSX screws up just too much" and the first thing that you choose to share is that you can't have the same wallpaper spread between two monitors. I don't normally like snarkiness but it must really be tough being you, what with the massive annoyances you have to deal with. Sheesh.

Still, it's your choice to jettison the reliability, consistency, elegance, support and put Linux on the machine because you can't spread wallpaper across monitors. Meanwhile some of the rest of us have applications or content on screen and tend not to bother with wallpaper.

Like I say, I'm not normally a fan of snarkiness, but today's been a real doozy of a day for idiotic comments, from people accepting the "UK threatens to storm the Ecuador embassy" line from Ecuador, through to people complaining about a change of connector (in a story from the frikking Daily Mail of all places), through to a piece about how Linux doesn't run well on a machine specifically designed to run a different OS.

You beat me to it, although an 80's kid (such as me) would mostly be using BBC Model Bs and Master 128s which didn't really have a GUI (until the Compact). Archimedes was only launched in 87 and took a while to get into the schools. I was hacking on them between school and university (87-88) and wrote my first few papers on my trusty A310, before "upgrading" to an evil Elonex PC with a 33Mhz 486. For the love of god, why did I do that?

As a European (from the UK), who regularly travels on business and pleasure to France, Germany and Switzerland, I don't have enough data to make any statements such as you make in your original comment. Hence the request for citations. I can't speak for "people like me", just me, but I can say that what I "won't understand" is rampant generalisation, backed up only by anecdote, but stated as fact.

So, help me out, show me the data that describes your reality and we can avoid the silly name calling.