the "average" user buys based on advertising and hype, always have, always will. The informed user ignores the hype and buys what they need, not what has the "best" spec. Still, they study the specs and read "real" reviews (not the marketing hype I find right now in all the American media about the "amazing" new iPhone 6 for example.

Stupid Humans

you buy a phone on a contract plan? didn't learn math did you? or to recognize that when you get something for "free" you are paying twice the real price.

I'm way too seriously old for this to be other than funny.
Like Apple stuff in general, The last really great Apple product was the blue and white iMac in '98. That was not just agreat product, it was equal to PCs for five or six years after it's introduction. While PCs were moving at light speed improvement, our old iMac was equal to or ahead of anything else you could buy.
But now... what are they showing us? Nuttin' Advertising and marketing hype about something that is old the year before it came out. And, as with most things, what people care about is the hype and the marketing and the buyer buy-in.

When I point out that iPhones are now just "toy phones" to my students, they really don't get what I am talking about: they are made for children's hands.

When I point out that you have to use two hands to use a "phablet" which is kind of silly, "phones" have traditionally been a one-hand operation they also don't get it.

Why not? because they buy on two criteria: what has the hype at the moment, and what will make them look cool. Phone as fashion accessory, no wonder we want the new watches, they are obviously fashion.

We have lost the battle of form vs function. Fashion has won.

Yes, yes yes!
I remember my grandmother as a failing, doddering old lady who was confused on her good days. Only as I got old enough to be old myself do I appreciate her history, what she did before I was an active part of her life. She wrote three books (on semi-autobiographical and two based on the history of the Surratt family during the assassination of Lincoln) in the fifties and early sixties, was a newspaper reporter in the 50s through the sixties. She was an active part of the war effort in her community during WWII and in general was a feisty woman in a world full of housewives. But I never knew her that way because of time. In some ways I prefer to let go of the actual memories of the doddering old lady and hold on to her real achievements, even though they are not part of my memories about her.

As a language scientist ( a linguist) I know that you are coming from the hard sciences with an argument that I honor for its simplicity, its integrity and its beauty. Unfortunately it struggles in the real world of complex systems. In simple experiments we can shave away all the complementary and supplementary functions that are connected to any simple act or action. But in the real world we are constrained by reality and complexity, because if we remove attendant functions, we lose the reality of the system itself. Things/actions do not exist in simplicity, they grow, change, advance or retreat through complexity and this is where the hard sciences fail to recognize that complexity is the nature of reality and that the empirical function, of reducing to a single simple element or action, does not reflect the nature of the real universe.

Thus we scorn "modeling" because if we make a change in an attendant function we get a different answer even though the simple question ("Are we changing the world through pollution?") has not changed. We get different answers because of the complexity of the system, not because of the inability of the practitioners to define the component functions (or parts) carefully enough.

Dude, I have the experience too, and don't really want to believe it or to make up pseudo-scientific reasons why it works, but it does. Come on over to the house, I'll stick a couple bent copper wires in your hands and let you do it. Although I have seen one or two people that really don't get it/do it, most everyone else in the world can.

I was taught this trick by a carpenter I worked for. He even showed me that if you put copper wires in a coke bottle they would find the pipes as well. I have used this many times, just a couple of months ago in fact, and it always works. I have also used it to find underground water flows when I lived in Thailand.

and why is the data from 2012? Looks like the author of the article followed a link to a 2012 report and wrote an article using that info, without any attempt to update. Or else the project died, or was censored?
Too many questions, my brain hurts when there is bad articles, bad data, bad , bad , bad................turtles. everywhere....

There are solutions to the problems we have with government that don't involve the demolition of government. That kind of binary thinking leads to a binary world that is not a reasonable and natural world. If we work toward a government that functions reasonably (unlike the American government which has dived deeply into binary logic and rhetoric) then we can have reasonable roads paid for by reasonable taxes and kept up to reasonable quality by reasonable companies that make a reasonable profit. What we have instead in the opposite of all that, so let's change the topic of discussion how we can create a reasonable world:
1. Reasonable expectations about time, humanity and expenses
2. Work on the core, not the rind
3. Use, grow, support and teach a reasonable set of virtues
4. Set aside ideology and empty stances, replace them with thoughtful, coherent ideas

There is probably a #5, but I'll let you share yours.

These are the reason's that I supported Lawrence Lessig's original proposal to create a SuperPAC to help end SuperPACs. I've stopped listening to him now as his ideology has overtaken the project. This will be its downfall.

as to your basic "challenge", the computer sitting next to me is a core2 duo that I built in Thailand in 2007. I thas been running Fedora since then, and nothing else. I upgrade it when new ones are released using the upgrade tools. Still works, all works, runs everything fine, never broken once. Does that satisfy?

hf, if your challenge is so realistic then why are so many companies running various distros? Why have I run a variety (say 8 or 10) of different distros in 4 or 5 different countries with different hardware and never, ever had a driver problem with any hardware? What is it in your challenge that you use to set a use case that would overcome the basic needs of a business person (me) a university professor (also me) and a parent with a wife and 3 kids all running Linux for home work and school (obviously also me.)

I really don't get why you feel the need to get all trolly about it as well. I have heard you being reasonable, intelligent and someone with useful viewpoints that, while not my own, are still valuable. What you are doing above is none of that. Why bother to be like this when you impressed me most as a reasonable and intelligent commentator?

"Wumao brigade"
The Chinese army of "fact checkers" who make sure that nothing "bad for the public" gets on the internet (or SMS when I was there, including Skype of course). The sad part is that most of them are unemployed Masters and PhD holders from mid to lower level Chinese universities who have formed the "Ant Tribe" and live in little concrete boxes with a bed, a desk and a computer on the desk. It is worse than you can imagine: they have tapped out their family's resources and have nothing to show for it, not even a factory job (they are over-educated for something like that).

hf, dear old friend, most of us who do use Linux are clueless about this driver problem you harp on about. We just don't see it. Now, someone has modded you down as a troll, which I think is unfair, because it is just you being you, and you really aren't a troll, you're just very tightly focused.

Robert A Wilson pointed out in his book "Final Trigger" that people have a basic instinct to find patterns, even where there are none. He pointed to a number of examples, but this over-focus of yours is my prime example for today: there is no "driver problem" with Linux, there is only your pattern rocognition brain sectors seeing what you "need" them to see.

I hope this helps, because you don't deserve to be modded troll, even though you did go a little over the top.

I'll meet that challenge:
I live in Tampa, today the high will be 94, I will be outside working in and out of the sun. Depending on the level of output required I might (OMG~!!!) sweat. But, because I keep the house AC at 80 (I have AC in the "common" area of the house where our guests spend time: I have a small B&B), I don't get uncomfortable in heat and humidity.

I hired a guy to come and help me load (and take to the dump) some roofing I had ripped off yesterday. Halfway through the loading (say about 4pm) he had to stop, fire up his truck and sit in the AC for ten minutes before he could go on. This is the state of the nation.

It is not the heat, or the humidity: it is your personal habits, your laziness, your lifestyle that abjures contact with the natural atmosphere in preference to your "comfort." I often point out that when I was young, in the 50s and 60s, my family lived in tidewater VA where the summer humidity was "stinkin'." We had a single fan in the cieling above the stairs to the bedrooms. That was it. I am sorry that your abusive parents treated you like a fragile flower and you didn't build up the immunity to heat that is a built-in possibility for you. Sue them!

(My kids often complain now about having air conditioning set too low: they "escape" to the outside, just as I have done most of my adult life. I hate AC, and especially the closed windows and doors that go along with it.)

yes, but think:
If you record that announcement ("this call may be...") and play it back at the beginning of your call with the company isn't there a good chance that the person on the other end of the line will assume a company phone glitch and ignore the information. That way they are still assuming that they are not being recorded even though they have been notified of the recording.
We all need to begin to record any conversation with commercial reps in all situations, what they say is innane, stupid and often wrong. But it is actionable.