My point was not that everyone considers it a fashion statement or status symbol. My point was that so long as it is both of these things then people will buy it regardless of the issues us technical folks may have with Apple or their products. Thus, Apple will keeping doing what it is doing because the developers will continue to come to it as long as they see dollar signs. Regardless of your reasons for buying Apple, the status symbol folks are in control because there are far more of them than you.

The entrance to their walled garden is a revolving door for developers. Some will leave but others will come back and new blood will always find their way in. If you do things Apple's way then you can make money and stay. But if you make money within their garden then you can bet Apple will find a way to get a cut of it or you won't be there to stay.

This issue and ones like it will have to go viral and hit more than just tech sites for people to care. In other words, so long as Apple's products are a fashion/status symbol, their users won't care so much about other people's first world problems. :p

I just wish we could vote "no confidence" and have all currently running candidates thrown out and the election process start over with all new people.

I think this is one of the better arguments against a pure-electric solution for an automobile... cost over time. $10k can get you a lot of gasoline and we still have no real indication of how long a life these batteries will have. If you have to replace the batteries every 50k miles at even $3k per set then the total TCO is not at all worth it. I easily burn through 50k miles in two years with my current commute. Electric cars cannot save me from gas. :p

That's an easy one... because they're being paid to. Special interests are the heart and soul of our government, after all.

You still have to get your Internet connection from somewhere. Good luck with that if all you do is cause headaches for your ISP.

There is nothing more terrifying than a Somali pirate hacker.

She's not saying it was aliens... but it was aliens?

Led by Frankenmonkey.

That's pink... the land of pink.

I've never seen or heard of a company hire simply because of tax cuts. Ever. They hire when demand for their products or services increase or some other factor requires more heads in house than they already have. It's that simple.

It's not like they need to report line items. They get their money from Google and this is the amount. What else do people need to know?

Amazon offers many, many ways to access the ebooks you buy on their site. Every major platform has a Kindle reading app and, as you said, there is the Kindle web reader for those that don't. This is not an unreasonable approach considering it is the publishers that force the DRM on Amazon (and, therefore, the rest of us), not the other way around. Amazon would be happy to sell DRM-free books, I'm sure, because it would mean less overhead for them and more profit. It is in Amazon's best interest to make the Kindle applications available on every modern platform.

The Kindle hardware is only there as a platform to sell content, nothing more. Kindle hardware is not a profit center for Amazon. If Amazon thought they could get people to buy enough content to make a profit, they'd be giving away PC's.

As a programmer and self-taught database administrator, I understand where you are coming from. However, in my experience, warning the user of anything rarely leads to rational thought by the user, especially when the warnings are frequent. In the user world, TL;DR applies to anything with more than one word, apparently.

Obviously, there are exceptions in user space, but they seem all too rare. :p

That is the problem, though. The better or worse comparisons are entirely subjective. That makes them "equal" in my mind. I do agree that total exposure time is a significant factor in one's ability to appreciate the merits of a piece of software. Windows Vista/7 sucked at first for me until I was used to them, now I can't stand going back to XP. I used to prefer KDE until I had many problems a version of Kubuntu and have since preferred to stick with other desktop environments.

On a personal note, I've had more machines have driver issues with Linux than I ever have with Windows, especially when it comes to wireless network adapters. Don't get me wrong, it's a problem on nearly every system, but in my experience I've had many more issues on the Linux side of things. I haven't had a lot of exposure to wireless adapters on OSX, but the few I have tried had issues as well (resulting in the equivalent of registry hacks to fix/install).

Video card and motherboard drivers have been another sore spot for me over the years. About two years ago I had a system that refused to install three different variants of Linux (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Slackware, if I remember correctly) because of motherboard and video card driver issues. None of them would give me a desktop and Mint wouldn't even let me see a shell prompt. That was frustrating so I reinstalled Windows and it went through flawlessly. Go figure. Since that time, most of my issues have been with add-on peripherals like a USB to serial cable I had (though that one is likely fixed now) and many other non-mainstream gadgets.

As for updates and reboots, Windows 7 gets about one update a month that requires a restart (though I'm usually restarting more than that because of other things). Most installs that are "Windows 7 aware" do not require a restart after install, either. Many that require XP compatibility do, however.

As for file compatibility, it is most definitely an issue for Linux users that must frequently cross over to the Windows world. Microsoft Office is a biggie. And before you mention Open/LibreOffice, it is NOT to a level of compatibility needed for many businesses. One word: macros.

Stability is another one of those subjective topics. I've never seen a BSOD (or equivalent) in Windows 7 during normal use, but I have had some related to waking from sleep/hibernate and some poorly made drivers. I can't exactly blame Windows 7 for this because in every case for me, it was third party drivers that caused the crash. But from a "always running" standpoint, Windows 7 is rock solid.

I will admit that over the last several years the vast majority of my Linux exposure has been with Ubuntu and its offshoots (Linux Mint being another primary one). I have given strong consideration to going back to using Debian and will for sure when I set up some test machines coming up in a few months.

Honestly, my experience with Windows far exceeds my combined experience with Linux and OSX. Of the three, OSX is my least favorite as a user and as an admin. I have a soft spot for Linux on the technical side, but as a daily user of computers Windows 7 fills more of my needs than Linux can right now.