If it is accepted as a religion, it is accepted as a religion. Or can you point to a legal ruling that separates religion from religion in the eyes of the law?

My work system has hundreds (literally hundreds - over 200) different applications from different industrial system vendors which I have to use in various situations to configure the systems I work with.

And you think it is a PROBLEM that these are organized by vendor name and machine system name in my start menu.

You have no connection to the reality many people who actually have to use their systems for work live in.

You are correct. I did figure out how to switch to another Office suite by now.

Yes, it is a bad thing that the scroll wheel affects things which are not under the mouse pointer. If I move the mouse pointer to a window or widget and mouse scroll it is because I expect that action to affect where I moved the mouse pointer to. Otherwise, why would I have moved my hand to the mouse?

YOU can not set the boundary. Only the church can. If they accept someone's claims that they are catholic, then they are catholic, no matter what boundary YOU set.

They invented churches and they are considered legitimate. By the government. You are correct that you have no say in the matter; the government will acknowledge any invented religion filling certain criteria, and it is quite possible to invent new churches and have them considered legitimate today.

I have no idea of the particulars in the IRS case, so it's useless for me to speculate on that. I haven't heard that internal mails were retrievable while external mails were not. The loss of a single user's hard drive does not explain that very well. It might be possible that the internal messages could have been retrieved from other users systems within the IRS. Perhaps the user could have filtered external emails to a local .pst file that was lost when the hard drive died, while internal emails were contained in numerous other mailboxes within the agency? I have no idea, but it's an explanation that could be plausible.

From 2001-2011, I worked for a series of contractors under NASA.

Most users who I supported were administrators and managers of various stripes, and a few users who were skilled with desktop publishing, web development, imagery, video, or 3d modeling/CAD. Most of them didn't understand how computers worked, and didn't care how they worked. They were just magic boxes that they used to do work with.

The idea of deleting email was frightening to most users. Email was a record that proved that you did work, and could be used for Cover Your Ass in the event of an inquiry. It could also prove a conversation happened, that an agreement was made, and so settle many disputes arising out of miscommunication. Most people whom I worked with hardly ever deleted messages, and because their local hard drive had plenty of capacity, they didn't have a real need to.

Until 2007, we used POP3 clients running on the local machine to download mail from a server. Messages were deleted from the server once downloaded, so only existed on the client machine at that point. Some users had decades of email stored in their client on their local hard drive, which typically was not backed up. I'm sure the servers had some redundancy and short backup, but to my knowledge we did not have a system that archived email. The closest thing resembling an archive was the aggregate collection of all mailboxes on the the client machines' hard drives.

Occasionally we did have users lose data due to a failed hard drive. Users who got bit by data loss tended to learn from this and implement safeguard such as backup to server, or to removable media. But incredibly, these lessons, once learned, were not applied at more than the individual level. People might talk to each other and departments might share knowledge for how to back up data, but it was never something that was codified in policy. People were on their own to implement their own backup and to make sure it worked. It was something that if anything, was encouraged, but not required or enforced. But very often it was not thought about until after the fact of a data loss incident.

In 2007, we moved to Outlook/Exchange for email. Many long time users were very put off by the change, and did not want to give up their Eudora, and could not deal with the fact that we were not going to migrate their old email into Exchange. Enough resistance was put up that IT ended up continuing to support the client side of the old email system indefinitely, so that users could still access their local archive of old email, and possibly also use automation features in their old client to continue to run processes that generated automated mail messages.

Exchange uses MAPI, so in the new system our messages were now always left on the server, until deleted. We had 1GB server quotas (around this time I believe Gmail was giving the world ~6GB for free). In theory, the 1GB server quota gave us security from data loss because the Exchange server's storage was backed up. In fact, the low quota size forced much more mail deletion than had ever happened in the old POP3 days of decentralized, distributed ad-hoc archive. But this was by design rather than by defect. And it was a lot easier to restore any retained data if it was lost.

All the same, users did not want to delete email, ever. Once they hit their quota on the server, they'd submit requests asking for an increase to their quota, which only would be granted if the volume of incoming mail that they had to deal with made a larger quota necessary in order to allow them to have a reasonable backlog of mail going back 6 months to a year, or they had a senior enough position that they could get whatever they demanded. Even then, when people hit their new quota, they still didn't want to delete old messages. The IT team supporting the new email refused to support this in any way, but didn't prevent users from creating local .pst files which they could use to store mail, once again on the local hard drive. Once again, this data was typically not in any way backed up. By this point, we had roaming profiles managed by active directory, so had we been able to use the user's My Documents folder to store the .pst, it would have been backed up over the network. But the roaming profile directories also had a minuscule disk quota of 1GB. Users still had access to C:\ so most of them used that as their .pst archive location, and enjoyed effectively unlimited archive space on their local hard drive, that was not backed up.

Users understood and accepted the risk, until they had a loss incident, at which point they no longer accepted or understood the consequences of their decisions. Then it became our (IT's) problem, and we had to do whatever ridiculous magic thing we could figure out, usually with no budget, but expending huge amounts of hours trying various things that we knew were unlikely to work, but would be compelled by management to try anyway, for "good customer service", to try to rescue the data.

I have no idea whether the IRS deliberately destroyed evidence, but it's entirely plausible to me that they simply lost the data due to a lack of competence and insufficient disaster recovery.

And for those five seconds you are ruining the movies for dozens of people around you. And you are completely oblivious to the fact that you are. And even if you realize you are, you consider such concerns beneath you.

Model citizen right there.

What is the point of checking - and thinking about - the pickup point DURING THE MOVIE?

Seriously, if that is your best contender for why it's a-ok to be an asshole to everyone else in the movie theater, then you have nothing. Your sense of priorities is completely screwed up, and you have no business in a proper establishment.

We need more such intolerant country clubs of cinemas. I would pay membership to such an establishment, where people with such poor control of their compulsions to check their phone are banned.

The reason I dislike going to the cinema is not the movies. It's the audience being completely unable to keep sound and light discipline.

There isn't anything fantastic about the technology in the F35, especially not for the price, but not even when ignoring the economical aspect.

Modern block designs of F16 and F/A18 have comparable avionics to the F35. The Silent Eagle F15 is just as good at avoiding enemy aircraft radar as the F35, and there is no reason the same technology could not be applied to F/A18's except lack of demand.

There is nothing wise about the F35 except throwing a bone to the US government. Which of course is a big part of any decision to buy fighter aircraft.

Avionics can be - and constantly are - upgraded. The block 60 F16 is just as advanced in the sensors and guided munitions as the F35 at a fraction of the cost, and with a superior airframe.

The point of the F35 is not advanced avionics - those are easy to replace and upgrade - but to lower cost through more common parts in the aircrafts while retaining airframe capability. And that is not what they're getting anymore.

So now the F35 is all about generating jobs in various states so the senators will keep the budget for it going. There are no technical advantages of the F35 program left.

There is rather a huge difference with a low unit cost assault rifle, which can be retooled or replaced with ease, and a modern fighter aircraft in general.

And the F35 is not in the middle lane of complexity of modern fighter aircrafts, it is leading the pack, both mechanically and electronically.

Further, the M16 core design was good (apart from the still present problem of direct gas actuation of the receiver bolt) and implementations details were the problem. The F35 is by design a compromise between competing demands. It is by design built, from the ground up, to not do any task well.

It has a body designed to accept the fan the Marines want to get sort-of VTOL capacity. This cripples it in other roles.

It has a half-baked stealth system, because of the fan and other trade-offs, and when in stealth it can't carry more load than an F15 rebuilt for stealth - an airplane costing much, much less in acquisition and operation.

And a pointy-nose in general is horrible for CAS. Almost no time over target, too little armor to go low and use direct fire weapons efficiently and too high speed to perform observation and guidance. The F35 solves none of those problems, except the speed one in the Marine version, but that plane is even more fragile than the non-fan version making it terrible for a CAS role.

There is no way to change that downstream on aircraft which are already built. The F35 will cripple US air capability, not directly because of its own problems directly, but because it removes aircraft more suited for the roles due to eating up their budget.

Quite correct, compiled code is scanned all the time. And in doing this, bugs are CONSTANTLY found. Big, bad ones which leave wide open holes.

And many of them are around for years before they are patched. Many years. Some are still not fixed, after many years.

And yet more of them are not possible to detect until other changes in the software or architecture exposes that part of the executable to a new environment. The bug could have been there for dozens of years - yes, there is code in Windows that old - and still not be patched today.

The difference is, with open source, we know exactly how long the bug has been there, and when it was fixed. With closed source, we have no way of knowing. None. Really. All we can know is what is exposed in the builds we have access to with the interfaces we have access to.

And you know, if "someone didn't look" then they didn't know. Srsly. What kind of brain damage produced that line of reasoning?