And, yet, critical hardware runs on Linux all the time, like most of the world's supercomputers...

The cop here said that his intent in making the jaywalking stop was to stall for backup in order to effect an arrest for the felony murder that Mr. Brown had just committed.

I would hope men and women would carry guns if needed to protect their family, and that men and women would like respect at work.

(At work today, a physics professor asked a lady in the conference room "Ah, are you someone's wife?" No -- she is an English professor.)

Remember: In the same way a Fireman runs into a burning building; this Officer is going to be running towards the gunfire if there's trouble, not away from it like the average youth on the street.

If my experience with the "youths on the street" in Baltimore is any indication, they'll be running toward the gunfire, fumbling for their cellphone cameras, chanting "World Star Hip Hop".

I know this advice, but I wound up not following it, and it turned out okay for me -- in one situation. I wish we could come around to a policing culture where every story could end like this one. Sadly, we don't, and in many places the police have made themselves out to be the enemy.

***

I got hungry for a burrito one night at midnight in Tucson (a city of about 800,000; mixed white/Hispanic). Good thing, too, since there was a burrito shop three blocks down the road. I was reading an e-book on my netbook, so I grabbed my netbook and tucked it under my arm, and headed for the Taco Shop. Well, it was colder than I expected, so I started jogging down the road. It didn't occur to me, of course, that I looked suspicious, running down the street with a laptop under my arm.

Well, four cops confront me in the parking lot of the Taco Shop, wanting to know what the deal was. They were professional, and didn't make any aggressive moves toward me, put a hand on weapons, or touch me, but made it plain that I wasn't free to leave. They asked where I lived and what I was doing, and I told them. I said "I guess that does look suspicious. But this is my laptop. Can I show you some documents on it with my name on them, and show you that they match the name on my driver's license?"

The cop tells me to go ahead, so I do, and he says "Huh, guess it is your computer, then. Enjoy your burrito" and leaves along with the others.

Thing is, this is exactly what you shouldn't do when stopped by police in many places, since as you say their goal (often) is to find people and put them in jail. I could have said nothing, been detained, called a lawyer, and wasted a whole bunch of my time and a whole bunch of theirs. But, thankfully, I was able to take a risk that the Tucson police were better than that and try to demonstrate my innocence on the spot, and it paid off.

(Three of the cops, incidentally, were Hispanic; this wasn't a "white cops let the white guy go" situation. But there is far less racial animosity in Tucson than there is in places like Washington DC.)

And let's teach today's men to stop behaving like women and today's women to stop behaving like men while we're at it.

In what ways do today's men behave like women that you'd like to stop, and in what ways do today's women behave like men?

How would you like to see men and women behave differently?

Well, if your assortment of leptons includes positrons, some of them will hit the neutrons and undergo inverse beta decay, and then the electrons in your Mixed Lepton Soup will bind with them and make atoms, and then chemistry. So you're not safe.

It's hilarious that smartphones, operating in data mode, can give me nearly transparent audio in a voip connection to the other side of the planet... and yet in "phone" mode, people in the same city can't hear each other.

"Hold on, let me call you back on my Skype app" is something that should never be uttered over a voice call.

How could anyone competent ever call scripting obsolete?

It is no more or less than a tool to tell the computer wtf you want it to do in precise terms. If you don't have that you're reduced to hoping someone already thought of the things you're trying to do and implemented the correct clicky bit for you to click on. If not, you're SOL.

The Registry.

Oh, god, the Registry.

Those of you know more than me can maybe advise: why the hell does this thing even exist? Why not stick with ordinary text files containing things like

# set the preferred meaning of life
meaningoflife = 42

like sane OS's? Yes, okay, sometimes they're hard to find, but if you want to mimic the "registry" idea, make it standard practice to name them "foobar.ini" and symlink them into a central location.

Why not give users the option to use both?

The dumb thing is pinning a run command to the task bar: this requires both mouse input and keyboard input to do anything. It's far more sensible to use a keyboard shortcut for "run"; I can type alt-f2 (linux) or meta-R (windows) and then a program name and get it without reaching for the mouse.

Good call -- I was using "grandma" as a proxy for "people who aren't that computer-savvy", but I imagine my mother who's in her 60's runs Lubuntu just fine :)

No -- and, thus, I am not going to like Windows 9. I will hold my nose and use it for a few programs, but Microsoft's agenda is fundamentally incompatible with making the sort of OS I want to use.

What's your litmus test on Windows 9?

I want an OS that:

1) Doesn't attempt to hide the workings of my computer from me -- in particular, don't hide the way that paths and directories really work. (As a bonus: remove the spaces from system directories, dammit, because I get real tired of escaping them when I access my NTFS partition from a real OS.)

2) When something goes wrong tell me what the fuck it was. "The internet connection has limited connectivity" doesn't tell me a damn thing. "DHCP timeout" tells me something. Include both messages, by all means, for the benefit of Grandma -- but Grandma likely can't fix her internet connection on her own anyway.

3) Don't be patronizing. Copying .mp3's to a phone shouldn't give a "Your phone might not be able to play this file, copy anyway?" message, and there are a thousand things like that in Windows.

4) Get rid of file locking, or at least allow an override. I can decide whether a file is sufficiently "in use" that I shouldn't delete it.

5) Don't attempt to push other MS products (cloud services, "stores", and the like) on me, and don't keep spewing Windows Media Player etc. icons around after I delete them once.

Is that $3 to replace a scratched screen, including all the AR coatings? At that price they might as well include three spare glass plates with every phone in case you scratch one.

As far as the rounded glass: I had a Nexus 3 with a curved screen and it was a good idea -- wish they still did that more.