I'd almost buy that, except people generally seem to like the Mac OS interface which hasn't had a meaningful Start button in the Windows sense, since OS 9 or so. You don't have to make an exact clone of XP for people to enjoy it.

If you believe Apple, that's how their iCloud Keychain works. They say they can't decrypt your keychain, because the keys are embedded in your phone and never transmitted.

You know, I think Apple, Google, and a few other companies could get away with calling their bluff. If Tim Cook or Larry Page had a press conference to announce that they'd received a hush order from the NSA, that they refused to honor it, and that it was against their company policy to spy on Americans (all while waving a flag and talking about apple-pie-eating eagles), I don't think much could be done about it. Can you imagine the firestorm if someone tried to have those guys arrested for "protecting average Americans like you and me against government oppression", which is what the front page of Google News would say for the next month?

I've been fired for taking off a weekend day that I'd told people about for years (first weekend every November) that suddenly became a "be there" -- announced after I'd already gone out of data reception.

So, yeah -- we might as well laugh.

It's one thing to export $106 billion more than you import and quite another to export $106 billion while importing $250 billion.

A good rule of thumb is that if an article doesn't explicitly tell you that it's a net export, it's because it's a puff piece with a bias and the truth would harsh the whole slant.

Yes, lots of educated (and wealthy) citizens create markets for better services in cities. But decades of surveys of companies planning locations and of educated workers considering relocation tell us it works the other way around, too.

States like Arizona and Texas that base their plans for attracting high-wage (lots of educated employees) employers on cutting taxes usually do it by also slicing schools and other services.

That seems to be working in places like Austin, where the city makes up for the lack of State support for education (or actual hostility to it) by cranking up local sales taxes -- which fall more on the poor than on the affluent. Which is a sweet deal if you're making serious money as a twenty-something in technology there, but might not look so good when you have kids and you're looking for daycare and primary schools.

We're doing the experiment. Check in again in ten or twenty years to see which way the arrow of cauality runs.

I'm waiting until there's a smart watch that functions as a feature-rich health monitor. Tell me about my white blood cell count, blood pressure, vitamin deficiencies, and so on.

So many schools, librarys and entire towns have no Internet access here in Rural Washington. The rich suburbs down the road near the lakes do, but not the inner city (very small city) does. My mothers town everyone is on dialup. They did start beaming in microwave to the town library and enable wifi. So People drive in and sit in the cars to get online, crazy. Funny thing, she use to get a flickering of 4G Verizon, but verizon shared the tower with the microwave isp, so company made a decision to cut Verizon's data to feed more bandwidth to the library. Now everyone is stuck on dialup. This is about 50 miles north of Spokane, WA.

This is crazy as everyone has underground power and telephone lines, but no internet. The power company put everything underground to save money from falling trees every year, and that had to be expensive as hell.

I'm certain the OpenBSD guys have literally never cared a single bit. Their goal is to make a secure, clean, and open codebase that people can use and build upon. Anything beyond it simply existence is a bonus.

The only bad programmers I've ever encountered, are programmers that are inconsiderate.
Those who do not consider that the purpose of a computing language is to communicate with other developers, not just the computer. That's really the main common-factor I've found among "bad programmers". It's a skill, that can be learned, but it's an emotional skill. Some people can be very intelligent, brilliant even, and still not want to learn that one crucial skill.

yes

>Are there any plans for additional desktop package repos for any of the Redhat based distros? I Remember looking for a little while a year or two ago but I didn't find any.

Yes actually, It comes with KDE or Gnome out of the box.

Ask yourself: what does the TSA do to detect iron oxide and aluminum? (Much less magnesium! MacBooks, anyone?)

They've known about this for years. They have quite competent "red team" people who think up possible threats, and they're not remotely so stupid as to believe that the Bad Guys can't think up this kind of thing themselves. Ask a classroom of sophomore-level engineering students to come up with ways to get plane-killers aboard and this is one of the first ones -- although it's a very, very long list.

However, stopping thermite from getting onboard is going to be way more of a public inconvenience than their mission statement allows.