Well, at least with steel doors you have a good chance of knowing when your security has been breached. With encryption, you have no such luxury. You're just relying on the fact that no-one has been clever enough yet to break your particular encryption method, and you don't even know if that is a fact still.

Er - yes. Much the same way as the doctor tells the alcoholic to stop drinking or he'll die horribly, or the smoker about the dangers of lung cancer.

The difference is, in the case of environmental destruction, the behaviour of individuals has far-reaching consequences beyond their own mortality.

Posting lots and lots of copied text doesn't really help you prove a point, it just makes you look like a dick.

I'll just quote you the bits you missed:

So far so good ... only one shell, and one scripting language - but still, I suppose it's better than none, which is what we had 10 years ago when I cared.

Ah - so it is just a bolt-on afterthought.

I think you were referring to PowerShell in your other post. PowerShell looks to me like an afterthought to windows to deal with the lack of a shell, not a fundamental cornerstone of the OS.

But you are right, I don't care because I have nothing to do with Windows servers.

Apple are not a hardware company. I believe they write some software, but apart from that they buy hardware from partners in the far east and concentrate on brand development.

Oh, yes - they did venture into antenna development recently. Look how good they were at that.

I agree anemic is a poor choice of word in this context. Inflexible might be better. However, calling someone incompetent because they would prefer to be emailed when an error appears in a log file than have to open the log file and look at it periodically, or whatever the alternative is on windows, is just rude.

For that matter, is there even an alternative such as "tail -f" or less with shift-F on windows?

Again, here windows is inflexible. You *must* use the GUI, therefore you must be near a terminal with a large enough screen and fast enough network connection to draw those extraneous pixels. However, with a Linux box, that transient error appearing in my log file can be emailed to my smartphone while I'm watching my kid play football, and I can ssh onto the server from the phone and check whatever I need to check. If I happen to be at my desk, I can use VNC. My choice.

Windows is fine as long as everything is working. However when something does break there are very few diagnostic facilities built in, and no remote management capability to speak of.

This is BT and Talk Talk we're talking about. Remember Phorm? I don't think they're too bothered about the extra overhead of packet analysis if it makes them a few more quid.

How does the machine know you're a man? That's scary.

Unless of course you're not - in which case, you're right, the damn machine doesn't work right.

+1.

And don't forget - turn off the TV, put down the laptop, and interact as a human. Toddlers don't need computers, they need messy tactile 3D objects and people to interact with. Computers (and TV) should come later, when social and physical skills are developed.

To you and me, possibly. Not to the vast majority of the internet-using populace who aren't even aware of it. I assume they were the targets of the ad in Times Square, not us.

Is that your real name? Your parents must have really hated you.

Don't know where you live, but round here they don't feed it back to a central location monitored by a private company, so they can inspect the footage to see what you bought. It's purely a crime-prevention mechanism.

I've been using the internet longer than google - why should I go?

Anyway, I'm just pointing out the fact that you don't need to be using google services to be tracked by them - some people may not be aware of this fact. I personally think the ever-more-pervasive nature of it is slightly worrying, not for what they currently do with the data (targetted advertising) but what they could do with this or similar data in the future.

Google Analytics means that you can be visiting any of an ever increasing range of sites with no visible affiliation to Google, but still be being tracked by them.

I'm playing a game at the minute, about a guy who relives his ancestor's life as an assassin in the middle ages. It triggered a latent ancestral memory in me and I realised this guy actually assassinated my mother's mother's father's mother's father's uncle's mother's mother's father. How could they to market this game to me? The disgrace.

watch it - if you sit there too long you'll die.