It's a new technology and it needs a new process.

Personally, I prefer to relocate the element of surprise such that it falls after the delivery of gift.

The wife looks briefly away from the screen to profusely thank me for the e-gift voucher. A couple of clicks, and... WHAM! Goatse!

Handing out an desktop operating system that only has a desktop user interface?

This is 20-damn-12, I'd expect a mimimum of at least one useless user interface!

Does that count as "holding it wrong"?

I'm not cynical. Just trepiditious when an industrialist comes with the name of a Bond villian.

I mean, RTFA. Nothing is contradicting this theory. The "Valley of Death" phase? his "Huge Steel Balls"?

Oh, yeah... and the insignificant little factoid that he's BUILDING A GOD-DAMN ROCKET AND TRYING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD?

No, it's the usual "[insert name of other product] is good, but, wow, this [insert name of Microsoft product] is great" spiel. Older than Slashdot itself. Noticed the "XCode taking cues from VS" bit. Nice flourish there. The smarter shills have started posting anonymously, or with suspiciously high UID's. Because a reasonable sounding opinion becomes less so once you read they said basically the same thing about Windows ME.

A poor workman blames his tools.

...is that my computer screen doesn't punch me in the face when I talk about the sweet, though slightly twisted and, depending on your geolocation, illegal relationship I had with your mother...

She was great, by the way.

Here in Australia, we have an excellent social security system; free, accessible medical care, and soon, an awesome broadband network. All government subsidised.

Results: Very few homeless. Medical care based on need, rather than financial status. An economy in great shape. Low tax rates.

All this forced sharing is achieved with lower tax rates than the US (if my glance at the graph on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_ counts as research). And, even better again, I can still have the big house and the nice car if I work hard.

But hey, you can have the homeless man pissing on your apartment door step, your grandma dying of cancer without respite care, a high jobless rate, and shit broadband. Wouldn't want that forced sharing, right?

Why?

Say the total number of characters upper case + lower case + numbers + special characters is somewhere around 80. And a password is, say, 10 characters on average.

Is someone really going to issue 10737418240000000000 requests to a publically exposed web server to break your password?

Or, even in the worst case - they manage to access the password hashes directly and don't need the requests to do it - aren't you basically fucked anyway? If they can access protected areas on a service you trust?

The "Don't Be Evil" way would be to simply not support Alibaba; not cut off Asus. Maybe "Don't Be Evil" has some small print I don't know about though. God knows I never read those damn agreements.

You, sir, are obviously a shill. Just not sure for whom!