True, and clearly a win.

ROFLMAO. IME, the only thing more painful than maintaining a Windows system over the long term is maintaining a *nix system over the long term.

Let's consider Linux. First, you probably get to choose between a stable or a not stable version of your distro. Choose stable and you're OK as long as you don't need to run any software released in the last 3 years and you're OK with being forced to upgrade the whole OS after maybe 2 years anyway (which will quite possibly trash your entire machine to the point of not being able to boot, or at least breaking minor features like RAID arrays, assuming you actually managed to configure one of those properly in the first place after your distro's "user friendly" installer messed it up completely). Alternatively, choose unstable if you want to run more recent software but don't mind stuff breaking all the time instead of every couple of years on a schedule.

Either way, if you want anything that hasn't got into your distribution's package management system yet, you're almost invariably forced into compiling your own software and manually installing it with makefiles. Those might, if you're really lucky, also offer a make uninstall option that actually does cleanly uninstall. That might, if you're even luckier, still work six months later, as long as no-one inadvertently installed a new version of the manually compiled code over the top to "upgrade" it, or just ran make distclean without thinking leaving you with no idea what make uninstall should have done. In any case, Linux is going to enforce absolutely no system hygiene at any point in this process.

OS X is of course doing much better with a similar foundation, as anyone who has spoken the words "Apple" and "shellshock" in the same sentence over the past few days can testify. Or at least, they'll be able to testify, just as soon as they've finished wiping and reinstalling their botnetted systems, because the patch everyone else had within hours only arrived for Apple gear several days later and long after exploits were widely found in the wild.

You're absolutely right that we should be able to install many programs and uninstall them with no lingering effects. But the idea that the registry is the only thing preventing that on Windows or that *nix systems do better is crazy. The only reason *nix systems don't break more often is that the only people running them are geeks and professionals, and those kinds of people are less likely to install random junk and more willing to dive in and fix internals when stuff goes wrong.

Except there wasn't. Well, there was. A bit. Sometimes. Naturally, this half-baked approach actually made the problems worse.

Even today and with native Windows applications, many aren't very well behaved in following the "standards" here, because Microsoft did such a terrible job of promoting good practices.

Anything that isn't a native Windows application -- including almost every darling of the open source world, for a start -- probably ignores not only the application data directory but also the program files directories and insists on spewing its crap all over your filesystem and environment. Oh, and $DEITY help you if you need to do anything with Cygwin, and $CHORUS_OF_DEITIES help you if you have more than one ported application that requires Cygwin.

It is telling that you can't even schedule a backup of the "official" place to store documents without considerable effort, because Windows itself sets up so many links that most backup tools can't handle them.

And that's before you get idiots like the Chrome team at Google who think it's clever to install executable software in your data directory in order to deliberately circumvent Windows' normal security model, just so their auto-updater can do things it shouldn't without anything silly like troubling the user for permission. I'm always a little surprised that Microsoft hasn't, with considerable and legitimate justification, flagged Chrome's installer/updater software as malware and automatically removed it at some point.

On the bright side, if Microsoft can actually manage to produce an operating system with a sensible filesystem structure and application installation/update/uninstallation tools that actually enforce that structure, they might yet salvage the Windows brand and convince significant parts of their potential market to upgrade again.

You can make Windows systems run crap-free and full speed again as well, by cleaning out all the obscure registry entries and system services and automatic updaters and cached thingies and temporary wotsits. You just have to know what you're doing.

Also, as with the part of the Linux strategy you forgot to mention, you have to be willing to spend forever doing it, because the tools provided as standard are just about hopeless.

He was also an obese asthmatic and died from the strain of trying to run away from a volcano.

Oh, sexconker, you and your stories - "the study is wrong", "beer kills brain cells".... Now let's go back to that ... building ... thingie ... where our beds and TV ... is.

Yes, but the claim was that prior to 9/11 pilots were asking that locks be installed and that airlines refused the expense. I was asking for a citation supporting those claims -- that pilots asked and airlines refused.

I'm not a Republican, but even I can see that you've misunderstood the complaint. He's not holding having been a community organizer against Barack Obama, he's implying that community organizer is the role in which Obama belongs, i.e. that he's not competent to be the president and that he should therefore go back to what he knows how to do.

That's an interesting statement, because some US courts have ruled that we cannot be so compelled because it violates the fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination.

I see three options:

1. Makers of devices are required to provide back doors for law enforcement access. This was part of the idea of the Clipper chip... which was a total flop because no one wanted to buy it, and Congress didn't get around to (or didn't dare to) compel usage.

2. Makers of devices don't have to provide back doors, but people can be held in contempt for refusing to provide access to officials with a warrant. Some US courts have taken this position.

3. Makers of devices don't have to provide back doors, and fifth amendment protection prevents requiring people to provide law enforcement access. Some US courts have taken this position.

So, which should we aim for? I think 1 is clearly not a good idea, not least because providing a LE backdoor that can't be exploited by malicious actors is far easier said than done. 2 is what you suggested. 3 is what many on slashdot believe they prefer.

Personally, I lean towards 3, though I can see arguments for 2.

Likewise. I've got a Windows 7 gaming rig that has seen LOTS of installs and uninstalls, driver updates and Windows updates and have seen zero performance reduction.

Maybe this was a thing in Windows 95, but I'm not sure it's a thing now as long as you're not getting infected with malware.

Google has never had the ability to decrypt an encrypted Android phone. The key encryption key is derived from the user's password (plus salt), so a brute force search of possible passwords can recover it, but Google hasn't ever had any special back door. If you use a good password, no one is going to be able to get in without your assistance.

(I'm a member of Google's Android security team. Not speaking as an official representative, mind you, but anyone can look at the code and see exactly how it works, so no official statement could appreciably differ.)

Cite?

This story has pretty much nothing to do with the "Internet of Things" they are trying to sell us.

I seriously doubt that any of the WiFi sensors in Intel's machinery required an account with a third party company which then collected data on how Intel used their machines.

We already have an Internet of Things. It's called, "things".

You can't necessarily do that on Earth, either. Earth as it is right now, sure. But it hasn't always been like it is now... in fact it mostly hasn't been like it is now, and it's guaranteed that it won't always be like it is now. Changes can happen with lightning speed, too. A supervolcano eruption, a meteor strike... or even just climate change. What would happen if the planet suddenly reverted to "Snowball Earth", with 30 feet of surface ice covering the equatorial oceans?

We're eventually going to have to learn to either (a) sustain human life in extreme conditions or (b) engineer the planet's climate, deflect rocks, suck the energy from supervolcanos, etc., or else we'll die. Learning to live on Mars, or in space for that matter, without constant support from Earth is a Good Idea.

Greeks, too, have calculated the circumference of the globe (knowing distance between city and the height of the sun at midday on the same day).

The problem is not knowing how big the globe is. The problem is knowing what lies outside of the known parts.
Maybe it's only sea? That's what Columbus hoped.
But it turned out that there was a whole New-world continent hidden in-between.
Without a precise way to determine longitude (i.e.: without precise enough clocks), it's hard to tell how much one has travelled west-ward.

Perhaps all the circumference has been traversed, perhaps you've reached an unkown land half-way through.

And when the goal you advertised to your financial supporter was "finding an west route to India", you'd be all too eager to over-estimate the distance you've crossed and think you've reached the goal you've been paid for.

But then, that means you only have 1 point to change.

Want to lower the emission of you electricity production? You "just" replace the power plant with something else.
Then all the electric car can already run on the new system.

Want to lower the emission of your distributed cars exhaust? Now instead of changing 1 power plant, you need to change every single gaz-powered car.
A tiny bit more complex problem.

Not only have you moved around the emission, by centralizing you've abstracted them making future removal easier, and current car already compatible with future evolutions.

And that's just taking into account the US number about coal-based electricity production. Other countries (random example: Switzerland, Germany, Iceland, France ... ) my burn less coal and either count on renewable energy or nuclear energy (has its own set of problems, but CO2 and global warming arent among them).