Jesus didn't say not to keep the Jewish Scripture but he did effectively say that His law supersedes all others. (Matthew 22:36-40)

Lets have a look back in time at the history of Microsoft. Windows XP was the first stable version of Windows that was targeted at a typical end-user. Yes, yes, there was Win 2K Professional but it was targeted at business. Windows XP was a very attractive choice for those migrating from Windows 98/ME that were notorious for crashing at least once daily. And that was the incentive to upgrade. The operating system didn't crash repeatedly.

Once XP was released, Microsoft really dropped the ball on providing incentives to keep upgrading at a premium price. If anything Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 are like Plus Packs. They are just adding (mostly useless) new features that no one needs. They created an artificial restriction that in order to play games on the latest Direct X you had to be running the latest version of Windows. This was quite a departure from the older Direct X versions.

Microsoft would be better off selling the Operating System separate and letting people purchase the features they want a la carte. That pretty much would eliminate all of this nonsense. If the features really are worth paying for (which most of them aren't) then they would be able to support the feature on multiple versions of the operating system. Novel concept! Why does there need to be a monolithic operating system will all the bundled crap on it?

You married a keeper. They're a rare specimen but they do exist. This applies to both sexes. If you know anything about dating, there are key tests and questions to put prospective female mates through. They do it to us. The problem with most males is they get so wrapped up in the endorphin rush that they overlook obvious and serious flaws. This is a typical female strategy to attempt to sequester a mate concealing serious problems that would make them unattractive.

In order to be in a good relationship, both people have to approach as first working on themselves to be good mentally, physically and emotionally for a relationship. Then work on finding someone who essentially did the same thing that you connect with. It takes time but be patient and don't settle. Being in a bad relationship is worse than being single. The second time around, I didn't settle and I found the love of my life and we have a great life together where we work together as a solid team.

Basic laws of reality? Isn't science about increasing our understanding of reality? Many theories and ideas have come and gone and been replaced by more refined ones. We would be extremely naive to think our current understanding is even remotely close to all there is to know and completely correct. There is much to learn my friend.

Absolutely not. This is horrible security practice and will not fly even an inch in many industry standard audits. I can give countless examples. A developer sneaks a change into the software to funnel personal information and credit card numbers off to a private database and then sells it on the black market.

The whole point behind the division of labor is a set of checks and balances and reduction in conflict of interest. Quality Assurance analysts validate the code does what it is supposed to. The developer doesn't do this. Developers typically don't care much about that level of quality of their code. They have a different set of objectives. They must complete objectives, they have deadlines. The customer performs user acceptance testing not the QA analysts for obvious reasons. Even the brightest of user proxies cannot replace the customer's direct feedback. The deployment specialists, IT or Operations specialists deploy the software. They are responsible for the production server infrastructure and the environment not the developers. They must exercise great care in what they install, whether its the company's own product, Microsoft updates, drivers or anything else. It's all the same.

I'm shocked this question even gets asked. There is no free lunch!

Beano to the rescue! We can save the world!

I don't disagree that these things aren't without merit but you know what no one likes to think about in the midst of all this debate? The main problem is the rate at which our populate is increasing. All of our technological advancement which has been driven by our primitive instinct to survive and multiply has made us consume the resources on the planet much more effectively. No matter what you do to make it more efficient, it will just cause us to feel like we can increase our population more to consume more resources, making all those efforts in vain. You really just can't win. Wake me up when someone really wants to get serious about functioning better together as a civilization to grow in a responsible way.

Heard that one before. And in other news, unseasonably chilly temperatures suddenly sweep through hell, a deluge of eyewitness reports of monkeys spontaneously flying out of people's rear orifices around the world.

I'm fine with Microsoft's new logo. It certainly looks much better than any of their previous logos. However, their new flat gray color scheme with 80's era upper case menu items is crap. It is painful to look at. I've been thinking a lot about why Microsoft moved to such crap color scheme and the only thing I can come up with is they are trying to distinguish themselves from Apple and maybe Google. Apple has a similar color scheme but the difference is they make tasteful use of shiny buttons, bevels and drop shadow. It seems like Microsoft didn't want to copy them so they decided to go with the exact opposite. Now, I'm definitely not an Apple fan boy but seriously, Apple's site looks 100x better than Microsoft's. In fact, I think Microsoft's new color scheme and branding strategy widened the gap. If I didn't know better, I'd say a decree came down from the top that the next branding/marketing strategy had to differentiate Microsoft from their competition. Microsoft definitely accomplished that... in the worst way possible.

AT&T's share price has greatly improved over the past year and is almost back to where it was 5 years ago. I can only assume this means a great increase in revenue. Why can't they afford to increase infrastructure to provide better service? Where is all the money going?

No company in their right mind is going to adopt Windows 8 for their business workstations if Microsoft forces the Metro interface on everyone. It simply is not productive. Visual Studio Touch Edition? Microsoft Word and Excel from a tablet? Right. I have no idea what they are thinking. It seems like in their effort to pursue the tablet market they are alienating other significant revenue streams. I'm not following the marketing strategy.

You see, this is where we America in particular got lost. We lost sight of the fact that we are a society and that Capitalism was originally intended as a better system for encouraging everyone to collaborate for the common good of all citizens. Those that offer jobs and those that fulfill the needs of the jobs are in a symbiotic relationship. The executive boards of the corporations are small in numbers, not able to do the actual amount of work their companies need to bring in the revenue and everyone needs a job to feed and clothe their families and things they need to be able to go to work. The idea is that there is a supposed to be a balance between these two parties that produces the ideal amount of economic output, making the lives of everyone in the country as good as possible. To not acknowledge this and not try to do your best to facilitate this or even worse trying to circumvent or abuse it for your own gain is being a bad citizen. What good are corporations that take so much money out of the system that there is no money left for everyone else? They wouldn't survive very long because eventually they wouldn't have any employees and that would result in a total economic collapse.

This reminds me of the song by Alice Cooper, "Lost in America"

"I can't get a girl
cuz I ain't got a car
I can't get a car
cuz I ain't got a job
I can't get a job
cuz I ain't got a car
So I'm looking for a girl with a job and a car
Don't you know where you are

Lost in America"

Oh boy I'm rusty at this but I'll give it a go. The fond memories I have of writing stuff for the C64. I remember writing an application as a kid called Organizer where you could create user-defined lists of stuff and save it to disk. I found out much later that I had created a primitive database. Fun times!

18 FOR I = 1 TO 1000: POKE 55295 + I, INT(RND(0) * 16): NEXT I

That'll make things realllllly colorful ;)

Don't forget sound, turn the SID chip up! 19 POKE 54296, 15

That description is really messed up. Ocarina of Time is the first Zelda game to feature horseback riding. Twilight Princess is the first game to feature horseback combat.

With all due respect, you are just flat wrong. Laissez-faire Capitalism puts control primarily in the hands of the people who have the wealth (AKA "capital"). I assume you are referring to the United States. In this country the "peasantry" doesn't have much of a voice because we do not have a real democracy. Some may say we have a Republic but I think it's closer to an Oligarchy at this point. Here the most wealthy 1% control 35.6% of the wealth while the top 10% control 75% of it. The Forbes Top 400 has a combined wealth of $1.37 trillion dollars. That's who is primarily in control not the "peasantry".