You've obviously never done tech support before.

"You mean I drop my internet on this EXE? But I've been told that I should never open exe's on the internet."

"I edited the file like you said, but now my Firefox won't open."
"How did you do it?"
"Well, first I opened the file up in Word... That's a text editor, right?" ...ad nauseum.

No, he isn't God, but they've certainly got enough money to throw at this to make it stick. I would say they're off to a pretty good start too, wouldn't you? The key to establishing a platform is to make sure enough people buy it to make it self-sustainable. They now have millions of iOS devices out in the wild, so that keeps demand up.

Apple's misses have been somewhat minimized over the last few years. The last big "miss" they had was the G4 cube, and I wouldn't even really call that a miss -- just a bad call, but it really had no appreciable impact on their bottom line. The first iteration of the Apple TV was pretty lousy; the current gen, from all accounts, is selling pretty well. Their Mac division is growing year-over-year, their OS has proven it's flexible enough to make transitions between PPC, Intel, and now mobile chipsets. It's no Windows juggernaut, but it's pulling in pretty respectable numbers.

<blockquote>It just so happens that in arenas like MP3 players, phones and tablet computers, and online music stores, the options really sucked before Apple came along.</blockquote>

"All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?"

Can you name a "miss" that Apple has has within the last five years?

You mean like this? http://www.apple.com/ipad/from-the-app-store/imovie.html

I just attended a concert and a workshop where one of the performers was using two iPads as control surfaces for electro-acoustic music. To me, the iPad (currently) is more like "Web 1.0", where, for most people, it was a medium focused on consuming. If you don't think Apple is going to make this work in the consumer space, and guarantee its success, you don't know Apple.

The poster's wife sounds like a pretty light computer user, so I'm not sure if she's going to be hitting the extreme limits of the keyboard hardware.

What you call the "air intakes" on the left and right are actually the speakers. The exhaust ports on the MBP are in the hinge. I'm also sure that the MBP has a full-size keyboard. At least, I've never noticed any difference in the size. Not sure why you call this form over function - it seems like form and function to me. You always use an external keyboard, so *any* laptop keyboard is going to feel small.

What you call stupid, I call perfectly fine:
http://images.apple.com/macbookpro/images/design_trackpad20110224.jpg
- Backspace and delete are the same key, with the FN key modifying them. MBPs no longer have the different enter and return keys.
- "Should be" is subjective. For example, I can say my keyboard has an escape key where I there should be a cheeseburger.
- They're not swapped on OSX, they're exactly where they should be.
- Most keyboards have two sets of modifier keys, for left and right handed people. Again, personal preference.
- And what key would be "wasted"? "PrnScr"? Scroll Lock?
- Again, backspace and delete are the same key. Fn modifies them. Sometimes keys with two labels on them mean they serve two purposes.

Did you actually ever use one, or just hear friends of your buddies talking about a guy that they met in a pub complaining about his girlfriend that was using a Mac keyboard?

Wow. Slashdot really needs to fix this bug. It's pulling in comments from 1999! Everybody knows that Macs support multi-button mice now, and that their trackpads can be configured in one and two-button configurations. I mean, in this context it sounds like this poster has absolutely no idea what he's talking about. And that would just be absurd, right? So it must be a bug.

A theory is a belief, even if scientific. A scientific theory says, given all the known facts and observations, we believe this explanation to be true. Yes, it carries much more weight and credence than "I believe in something because a 6000 year-old book told me to," but it's still a "best guess" as to the true explanation of the facts.

Like it or not, we never really have a full picture of complex systems, like astrophysics, quantum mechanics, biological systems, and many other examples. The best we can usually hope for is a best guess of the explanation, based on observation, so that we can build on that knowledge and move forward. That best guess is also a belief, and from time to time, that belief is re-evaluated and either confirmed or invalidated for a new set of best guesses. That process and transformation doesn't make it *not* a belief, it just makes it one that we're not scared to change from time to time, unlike an absolute belief in a deity.

What part of what he said isn't true?

Yay for hand-wavy OH NOES GUBMINT IS INTERFEERING! tea-party populism.

If you want to complain about subsidies, I know a corn industry that could really use a talking-to. Or maybe oil & gas company subsidies? A $7k tax break for some people to kick-start a nascent, but promising economy is nothing compared to the kickbacks those corporations get.

Theoretically, yes. But why? OS X Server can be virtualized now. If you want to run OS X server to manage your Mac network, run it in a VM.

The economy did well because Bush could afford to ride a pretty prosperous wave. Typically the effects of an administration only really take hold after that presidency has ended. 8 years is not very long for widespread social and organizational change. If the economy did "pretty well" under GW, it was only because he was riding the coat-tails of past administrations.

The fact that the economy is in such dire straits now speaks volumes for the Bush administration's policies.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. Oracle seems to be doing everything in their power to gut the core of the Java community, so until a strong non-Oracle/Sun maintainer with deep pockets (ahem, IBM) steps in to pick up the slack, I'd stay away from Java as the basis for building a full platform.

How do you know someone won't go homicidal while watching paint dry? Or reading a book? Yes, let's ban everything because it might someday make someone fly into a murderous rage.

Only if you agree with the direction your union is taking. It works if you agree with the union leadership, but if you think they're being unreasonable (for example, demanding wage increases even if the employer is known to be under financial troubles), they're serving no one. If the unions were actual "locals," run by locals with a relationship with the employer, then things could be a bit more reasonable. But now we have these huge national unions (CUPE, CAW), and local leadership is often directed in a certain direction based on national policies, rather than an intimate knowledge of the specific nuances of the relationship between an employer and their employees.

Have you been living under a rock?

.... or until some citizen's group wins a major class-action lawsuit because wastewater from the landfill leached into the local water supply, or something along those lines. It only takes a couple multi-million-dollar lawsuits to make it worth trying to keep as much stuff out of the ground as possible.