Mmm hmmm, exactly, I didn't buy one. It's a shame because it's nice software running on nice hardware. I'm glad Android is an excellent alternative (equal in my opinion, perhaps superior) or else I'd be left with nothing. That's sort of how I feel about Mac OS: I really don't like the direction its going but there isn't a great alternative. Linux is pretty good but it's not as good as OSX.

I'm a programmer not a sysadmin, but yeah I've had to program against and deploy software on Win servers in the last decade. Actually, you know, yeah I did do some sysadmin tasks with some of those servers when I was doing the deploys and configuring them afterwards. It was such a pain having to use the GUI tools to change settings instead of copying config files into an etc dir. It was such a pain to find the "restart" button instead of just cycling a daemon.

Many of my complaints are answered by Windows apologists with recommendations to install things that should have been baked into Windows twenty years ago, such as PowerShell or Cygwin. In my opinion if you have to install Unix utilities to make your Windows server useful, then that is an indication you should be using Unix in the first place.

I won't defend the "less useful" comment but I will defend "useless". I don't claim to be open minded. I'm closed-minded to Windows so it's not like a well-reasoned and informed opinion could sway me, so if you want you can just roll your eyes and dismiss me.

Running a closed app store with a tight approval process is fine. Preventing use of outside apps or app stores is not fine. That's where the line is, and Apple is over the line. They could still have their branded kid-safe no-porn carefully-checked pre-installed app garden, and everyone would trust it and use it and they would make tons of money, but Apple has an ideology of control which means they can't abide alternatives.

It's not a Mac, and it's not a virus, so actually I don't get his point.

"If you run a program on your computer, that program can do stuff to your computer, so maybe don't run malicious software on your computer."

I literally can't think of a way to avoid that. It's pretty fundamental to how computers work.

What would be your legal claim in your lawsuit?

By secure means? Maybe they could message him on Facebook or something.

You would follow bad advice because someone's insightful rhetorical question isn't phrased in the form of a detailed argument? Damn. That's foolish. I hope you are not serious.

This is the most undeserved Troll mod I've seen in 15 years on Slashdot. I hope it ends up at +5, Insightful when the dust settles. Windows is shit, it's been shit since the Clinton administration, and in every way except stability it has gotten less useful over the years. (As for stability, Microsoft gets credit for fixing what used to be comically bad stability issues.)

Agreed, the quality has a long way to go. I've signed up for three or four online courses but the only one I completed was an excellent, well-polished and complete introduction to MongoDB (not exactly a college-level course, but very well presented). A video classroom needs to be even better than a personal classroom and so far the average product quality is decidedly subpar.

Dude, this is Slashdot, people here will never ever agree that getting an education can help your career. Around here, the mythology is that super-genius programmers don't need any education at all, and anyone who isn't a super-genius programmer can go to hell because they don't fit into the mythology.

As for me, my name-brand expensive education was hands-down the cheapest cost-per-value thing I've ever purchased by a long shot.

I agree. Although I wouldn't want economic interests to decide every immigration case, it seems to me that America should be greedily hoarding the smartest people in the world by offering them a ticket into our culture, paid for by attending a major university, excelling there, and working in the field afterwards. Why the hell would we give them our top-notch education and then afterwards not let them stick around to grow our economy? Sure, many foreign students will want to return home and help their homelands, and that's nice and all, but in the marketplace of nations I think we should be grabbing all the talent we can get our hands on.

If we don't do that we will be doomed to export our brightest candidates leading to a talent drain and resulting in a washed-up nation of uneducated pasty-white assholes. Well, I guess that's the Republican agenda so maybe it's not surprising.

Whenever I've asked a PhD who I met how they "advanced human knowledge of the field", they have giggled at my naiveté. Based on a number of those experiences, I now take that requirement as not at all literal. Some PhDs advance the field; most don't.

I've long heard suicide described as the only action which is illegal to attempt, but not to succeed at. The reason attempted suicide is illegal is because society judges that only a mentally ill person would do it, so we use criminal law as a wedge to force a person to get help. Obviously this is at odds with euthanasia so society has been discussing that for a generation or more.

Oh, goodness no, if they deleted the Geocities data then they did a laudable favor to future generations. I had a Geocities site, it was stupid, and if it's totally gone then I'm glad.

That's a good answer, thank you, but I still have to wonder:

an immediate termination of your work contract, you'd lose your severance, and the first 6 weeks of unemployment help

What I really meant is what happens when an employee wants to leave for a new job. In that case, of course termination of the work contract is what you want, you wouldn't be getting any severance because you are quitting not getting fired, and you don't qualify for unemployment because you are going to a new job.

That leaves two things: the black mark of contract breach (a fair point) and legal liability (definitely a fair point). How often do people get sued? Would employers prefer to have the new employee they want, or prefer am employee that cleaves to severance periods?