Ya, I am pretty sure they use this information to weed out unsavories during the enlistment process. When my friend enlisted a couple years ago, he got pretty far into the process before the issue of a bankruptcy came up. He had to talk to someone pretty high up, pretty sure it was the commander of the base they were going to ship him to, and the commander had to sign off on it.

I don't really agree with you. In 2000 Apple gave the world a powerful commercial UNIX workstation OS that "just worked," along with a fantastic IDE and development tools for free. There were lots of things in there for power users that may not have been advertised or easily discovered, but they were there and documented somewhere if you knew how to look.

Now, the workstation OS started going to shit as you described after they moved to intel, supposedly Mavericks fixes that a bit. I don't know, never owned an intel mac (thats also when they started sunsetting hardware almost as quickly as it was released).

Its iOS thats for the lobotomised retarted proto-lifeforms. And, yes, some of that was getting into OSX proper. But I believe the backlash with Windows 8 showed them that might not be too wise and I've heard they've backed off, again, with Mavericks.

It didn't seem to me that he was critical of Microsoft as much as he was desktop users. I could barely get through the article due to rage, but this is how I parsed it:

"Look at all these redundant features Microsoft felt they had to add to appease stupid desktop users who haven't learned anything from Vista's UI 7 years ago. These users need to go away, they are forcing Microsoft to clutter up my Metro!

Look, a power button! A power button for Ballmer's sake! Who the hell needs that? If you are a laptop user, close your damn lid and let it sleep. If you are a desktop user, push the button on the front of your pee cee. That's been standard since ATX came out in 1995. GET A CLUE PEOPLE!

What? You say you want to reboot? If Windows needs to reboot it will do it for you. You don't need to waste time doing that on your own.

Well, crap. Metro apps have title bars now. Well, I guess that's not too bad. But, you know, you could have just dragged down with your mouse you lazy desktop users. Ugg, now that ugly task bar is covering up the ui in the bottom portion of the screen. I don't remember you desktop users wanting that. Leave my metro alone!

OOOOOH PRETTY! SkyDrive is now called OneDrive, and I can access it in Metro, the OneUI to rule them all.

Well, I don't know who wanted this. Its just redundant crap taking up space on my metro. Desktop users avoid metro anyway, so they obviously don't want it. Stop wasting time on desktop users, Microsoft.

Because it was designed for netbooks. Though, I think it takes up way too much space on a netbook.

Because it was originally designed for netbooks.

Its not his fault. He, like a lot of Americans, has been trained to believe that homeopathy = "home remedy," not a discredited alternate theory of medicine.

Slashcode is open source, ya? Can't we just "fork" the site?

Dear God, thats the worst thing he could do. I trust the NSA more with the data than spreading it around to corporations for "safe keeping." The problem is the data exists / has been collected in the first place. If anything, his suggestion is an insult.

Well, thats all well and good, however, in the US the rich don't pay taxes. So more paid by whats left of the middle class, the poor go to prison.

Jack Horner did a great TED Talk about this very issue as it applies to paleontology.

Here is a video of Steve Jobs saying "app" from 1992: Link!. Don't have to wait long, at 0:16 mark.

The way copyright is intended to work, after copyright expires the work falls into the public domain. Hence, anti-private.
The way patents are intended to work, the cost of patent protection is that the way your invention works is public record. Again, anti-private.

I am not arguing that this is a bad thing, but I do believe his claim is correct.

However, as long as copyright never expires and you can fudge your patent application with false or incomplete disclosure you can argue the other way.

Spot on. The only thing a ratings system would accomplish would be handing out salaries to a handful of cronies tasked with compiling a worthless metric. Unless you are born into privilege (money, athletic, or scholarly ability) and you are going to college, its going to be the local state university. Hopefully one that caters do your chosen discipline without extreme financial burden.

Gut Homeland Security (by extension TSA), cut military spending, stop spending money on the militarization of local police. Stop taxing labor so working families can afford to send their kids to college.

Invest in education, don't subsidize tuition. Distribute more money to universities through grants. Invest more into agencies like NASA that can outsource some of their work to universities. Create an environment where universities can be flush with cash so that tuition becomes known as a barbaric tool used in the past by the elite.

Several times per day. I work in a pharmacy.

The problem is that the medical bill was $500k. The cause of the problem is insurance and government. A working solution will never include insurance or government.
There used to be a things called charities and community. There was also a time when doctors were allowed to charge varying rates according to what people could afford.

Did your grandparents speak of the horrors of medical costs in their youth? Their parents not being able to afford a procedure that could have saved one of their siblings, so they died? The stigma of needing to declare bankruptcy because the hospital bill for when Grandma went it to give birth to Dad was over $20,000?