That's is because the drivers didn't stop driving and pull over when the weather got bad. While that delays your trip, the maneuver is perfectly safe and takes just a few seconds (or minutes if you need to find a motel).

Now try deciding that you underestimated the weather and you want to land your plane. It's much harder and takes much longer and you can't just land anywhere you please. Your safety margin is greatly decreased. Anyone who doesn't respect that fact that driving is not like flying hasn't been in a situation where you don't have the option to bail at a moment's notice.

What do you have on XP that doesn't run on Linux these days?

Poorly maintained XP machines are actively causing other people lots and lots of pain as zombie botnets, the same way bad cars are dangers to other people as well. And it's quickly getting to the point where a well maintained XP machine on the internet is not much better than a poorly maintained one. No one else is forcing people to switch to a mordern OS, so the stuff MS is doing is pretty necessary. They even offer rebates for turning in an old XP machine.

Then you should read up on it and be surprised?

Don't worry. Mobile browsers and tablets solved this for us. We used to charge you extra so that you site would work on 600x400 pixel screens. Now it's for 400x600 pixel screens instead. In a few years, we'll have you convinced that your site needs to work with 20x600 px columns (thanks to wraparound displays from Samsung and Apple: http://www.patentlyapple.com/p...), and on wearable t-shirts.

You are full of it.

The panty hose thing is silly: there are a million brands of hose you could buy instead if any company tried to create such a scheme for such a cheap and replaceable product.

The XP thing is also nothing like panty hose. Your copy of XP doesn't "wear out" more quickly because something MS did. It doesn't rely on servers like Halo. You're complaining that something that MS is no longer doing something that costs lots of money (writing patches for an old OS to keep it secure) for little benefit (XP's architecture was create in a different era of computing and at this point cannot be made meaningfully secure).

There are no technical reasons to keep XP on life support, but if you want to keep running XP, no one is stopping you. Meanwhile, since XP's release, we've gone through 7+ iterations of Moore's law and there's no way to make XP keep up. This is not planned obsolescence. Stop being stupid.

There are plenty of other things we can sanction. Scientific progress is a stupid one to choose.

That's silly. Bill Gates doesn't need more money either and he is incredibly productive and menial labor is not going to advance humanity. Keeping minimum wage low has nothing to do with keeping humanity from stagnating.

Also, you can keep competition alive without holding the threat of being unable to pay rent or feed a family over people's head if they don't work at least 40 hours a week, which is an arbitrary number.

...No?

OkCupid isn't even blocking Firefox; it's just speaking out and raising awareness about an issue the people running the company (and they probably believe a large portion of their user base) feel strongly about.

It's pretty easy for me to see why proponents of gay marriage feel like they've been treated by badly by the pro Prop 8 organizations (note I did not say the opponents to gay marriage), and it would leave a bad taste in my mouth too to use a product with a CEO who actively donated to the cause (albeit not a huge sum). Prop 8 was all kinds of wrong, including fear-mongering commercials, people donating to the cause that had no business getting mucking about in California politics ($20 million from Utah alone), and a lot of religious organizations backing what should have been a political decision. I'm sure all it would take is for the CEO to really try to understand how he's offended people and make a heartfelt apology to smotth things over. As it is, I can definitely how a CTO can get away with some things that a CEO cannot.

Aren't all cyborgs?

You should probably reread the article (if you did at all), because you have gotten it anything but straight. Dropbox is doing this with public files, no private ones, and it's just notifying you that some files can't be shared.

Since your unencrypted files are on Dropbox servers, they have had "the ability" to identify pirate files at any point that they decided to code that, but anyone with a basic knowledge of how "files stored on someone else's computer" works should already know this.

You don't need public links for keeping your own account in sync.

By whom, exactly? At the moment, using the INTERNET means your data goes through NSA servers, but that's not exactly a list. The people who'd care to put you on a list are people like the MPAA and RIAA, and I seriously doubt they have a digital surveillence arm. Are you just spewing random paranoia to sound smart?

I see no problem with this. You had to deal with it when people only released software for Windows. How is this any different?

I am not an expert, but my understanding of GeoDNS is that you would still have to own those IP addresses (at least in Turkey) to make that feasible. It doesn't seem like it would be that easy to clobber legitimate website's IP address.