You're arguing from a misconception, and looking like an idiot doing it. I haven't "lost" anything, because I'm not in a competition with anyone. This war that you think I'm fighting against Microsoft exists only in your own mind.

It is undeniable reality that millions of people, many of them non-technical, use a Linux desktop every day. You can make up your own definition for "year of the Linux desktop" if you like, but good luck getting everybody else to follow your lead.

I won't even throw a temper tantrum if you dare to present an alternative definition.

Which suggests that for your first job or three, the people hiring you will, indeed, care where you got your degree.

This is false. (Where are you getting your information from?) Not only are they not required to check, both Visa's and Mastercard's policies say that although the merchant may ask for ID, they cannot refuse a transaction if you refuse to show it.

Discover apparently does say that they should check alternate ID if there are any suspicions, although it doesn't require it all the time.

Sources:
http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/card-acceptance-guidelines-for-visa-merchants.pdf
http://www.mastercard.com/us/merchant/pdf/BM-Entire_Manual_public.pdf

While it's common in the US, both Visa and Mastercard policies say that merchants should not accept a card with "see ID" or similar instead of a signature. Technically, the merchant could be on the hook for fraudulent charges if they accept a card without a signature.

From a practical point of view, I've only heard of refusal to accept a payment because of that once or twice. But the cashiers aren't obligated to check your ID to validate the signature, so you don't have much call to get mad at them because of that.

That's their definition. It's by no means a universally-accepted one.

If you want to argue about whether or not particular goals have been met, then you're going to have to define what those goals are and who is trying to achieve them. The phrase "year of linux on the desktop" doesn't do so.

There is no standard for what the "year of Linux on the desktop" means, so it's not possible to move the goalposts. The fallacy that you reference cannot apply.

Linux-based OSs have had reasonably advanced desktop functionality for well over a decade now. Millions of people are using one of them as their primary OS today. The AC is right. Your "year of Linux on the desktop" is the year that you decide to use it.

Does Netflix give you everything you want? Then just subscribe to that and be done with it, no more complaining needed.

If not, then the existence of Netflix doesn't really say anything one way or another about whether a similar model works for whatever it is you're interested in.

Hey, you can say the same thing about the maternity ward at the hospital.

Nice try, but the article doesn't say anything about the comparative distribution of vaccination rates between these daycares and the rest of the state.

The alarmist conclusions that they try to draw from the data are invalid, because they do not recognize that it doesn't actually show that Silicon Valley has low vaccination rates.

I don't know whether the author really doesn't understand what the data is telling them, or if they just decided that nobody who reads Wired would be interested in an article that says "Surprise! Vaccinations are important, but parents in Silicon Valley aren't any better or worse about vaccinating their kids than the rest of the country!"

The article title is "Low Vaccination Rates At Silicon Valley Daycare Facilities", but the evidence is actually for average vaccination rates compared to national rates.

That's enough to make the whole thing rather suspect.

If you're installing malware that installs a browser extension, the malware can probably just replace your browser. Or patch it so that it doesn't flag a disallowed extension even without the override turned on. Or any other number of nasty tricks.

This is not true in the stable release for Debian. (Source: using it right now, with extensions that aren't from the Chrome web store.) My understanding is that you have to use a command-line switch to enable it in the Windows version, but it is still there.

Only if your software or system is already otherwise either compromised or hopelessly mis-designed. Given that this is Firefox, the latter might be possible, I guess. But overall, the notion that an already-compromised system could be compromised again is not a particularly strong reason to cripple your software.

This is not a good solution for developers who need to test against the stable release builds.

That's just stupid. So passwords are not a security feature if you can disable them? Disabling telnet access by default to a computer is not a security feature? Blocking Flash or Javascript in a browser is not a security feature if you can turn them back on? HTTPS access to a web site is not a security feature if you can access it via HTTP?

The default should be the one that is right for most people, but that's no reason to cripple your software for those that have other needs.

Chrome allows the user to re-enable installation of unsigned extensions.