Jeep, as a brand, almost died simply for having non-round headlights.

Brand association is a powerful thing. Probably an evolutionary thing, actually; if it doesn't taste, sound or smell like what it's supposed to, it's not the same thing, so don't risk it.

If the American public truly believed, so overwhelmingly, or cared, Congress wouldn't have an incumbency rate of somewhere between 96 and 85 percent (depending on how you count.)

America doesn't have elected officials, they have an aristocratic class, and a few political dynasties.

Which can be rewritten as 'Microsoft specified it would only be free for the first year, which I interpret to mean that there will then be a yearly fee.'

The other, more logical, interpretation is 'After a year, even if running windows 7, 8 or 8.1, you'll need to purchase an upgrade at standard retail.'

As I said, good points and bad points. A single platform can be good, because every program can leverage all features of that platform. Counterpoint: maybe there's no incentive to develop new and interesting features in future versions of the platform.

Multiplatform is good, because they're all competing. Counterpoint: no point in using feature of platform X if it locks you out of all other platforms, or you're coding lots and lots of platform specific code paths. Remember when games, say, would have the software renderer, the directX 9 renderer, the 10 renderer, the NVidia openGL renderer, the ATI openGL renderer, and maybe a vanilla openGL renderer?

Which also meant you had to code to the lowest possible denominator.

Solaris has a kick-ass new feature in it's shell? Too bad; can't touch it. IRIX has a neat library to do something? Too bad, can't touch it. You can code to C-89, maybe POSIX, and that's that.

Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages.

The other day, I booted up a new-in-the-box Acer laptop (or Asus, maybe) and was pleasantly surprised that it was already set to boot to desktop.

There's a fuckton of good stuff under the hood of Win8; the start menu just went fullscreen.

So, basically you're saying that you Love the Power Glove?

It's so bad.

This should be standard for quite a few things. Call it the 'eat your own dogfood' provision.

Easier to just slap on term limits, though. Members of Congress (or Parliament or any other elected representative) are supposed to be representatives, not an aristocratic subclass.

But the whole point of the project was to use cheaper, more off-the-shelf parts and components. Given that it's now ten years past it's 'guaranteed' lifespan, I don't think they did anything wrong.

Did FRAM even exist ten years ago?

The problem with the constitution was that it was largely a theoretical document. The Framers didn't have a lot of real-world examples to draw upon.

For example, the idea that all voting members would vote individually on each issue, and that nobody would ever form voting blocs or parties.

Or the idea that the loser in the presidential election should be VP.

How do you deal with, say, NTP update fixing your clock drift?

Personally, I like the idea of a 'second' being of variable length far better than shoehorning a '60' into a field that's clearly defined as '0 to 59'.