And that's why he moved to Silicon Valley? The model place for affordable housing?? Really?

Yes, really: SV prices are downright affordable compared to Vancouver's. In Vancouver, an actual crack house will cost you over $1M.

They've also completely failed to consider that just as quickly a one website may rise to prominence, another may equally quickly supplant it. Look at Facebook replacing MySpace for example.

Wouldn't a more relevant example of this be Reddit replacing Digg?

Bluetooth headphones seem to either be wicked uncomfortable (plantronic backbeats) or exquisitely sensitive to sweat (Motorola). So it's nice being able to listen to music over corded headphones, and still have the smartphone available to do whatever in between sets.

I don't know about your phone, but every decent smartphone I've ever seen has a standard 1/4" headphone jack. It doesn't keep you from doing other things with the phone.

Also the mp3 player just fucking 'works' on demand. Spotify seems to crash about 50% of the time and requires a reboot of the phone.

Every decent phone I've seen lets you just put MP3s on it (or even Oggs with Android phones) and play them directly.

Also having the headphone jack come out, then having my phone broadcast my horrible taste of music over its speaker after accidentally touching the screen/volume buttons -- was embarrassing enough to ensure it happened just once :)

Ok now this is definitely something I don't know how to fix on a smartphone...

It might not be about the electronics, but the things you talk about sound like really low-value products. The special thing about electronics is that they're high-value; maybe not as much as in the 80s when a VCR cost $1000 (a large fraction of the price of a car back then), but still usually a lot more than a stick of deodorant.

And TV shows don't get canceled because of lack of popularity, but because of idiotic network executives. It's not like they actually poll viewers to see what's popular (how many Nielsen families do you know?), especially in an age when people use DVRs, Hulu, and Netflix.

Most code written anywhere is crap.

I suspect you probably moved for very different reasons than Greek developers. In your case, it was probably because the housing costs in Vancouver (Canada) are insane.

Yeah, look at how awful countries like Norway and Sweden are with all their "nanny-state policies".... they only have the highest standards of living in the world.

I don't know about other KDE users, but I've never "hacked around with settings all day"; I've spent maybe 10-20 minutes hacking around with different settings, trying things out, and after that I've just left them that way for ages, because at that point I'm happy with them.

So instead of spending less than a half hour to play around with settings in KDE, you want me to write my own shell program so I can use Windows??? Are you fucking nuts?

I don't have to do any programming to use KDE and change it around to my liking. This is supposed to be a plus for Windows?

You sound like all the idiotic Gnome sycophants: "if you don't like the default Gnome settings, just write an extension! And when they break the API in the next release, just recode your extension for it!"

I write a C/C++ app that uses Qt. But people use GTK+ because its C and not C++.

GTK+ has C++ bindings and is used in C++ projects.

So how would you do away with the operating system and still enable people to 'get something done'?

That's easy: you go back to the days of MS-DOS (which was nothing more than a program loader). We got plenty of stuff done back then, it was just slower and crappier because changing tasks took so long: you had to save and exit your application, then start up the other application and load your work. If you had to constantly switch between two things, it was a real PITA.

But you could "get something done". Countless secretaries got lots of work done in WordPerfect in those days.

Competition reduces profit margins, but not to zero. It might force them to work to make their operations more efficient though. But still, they're not going to bother staying in business if they're not making a profit, and that generally makes CM more expensive (long term) than making things yourself.

Ok, so you don't agree with most people about the Terminator movies, but we're really talking about manufactured products here, not art (which is what movies are, a form of art). Lots of people have very different opinions about artwork. Some like Picasso, some like Rembrandt, some like Dali, but I doubt this maps very well with whether you'd buy a Zune or iPod, or whether you use a PC or Mac or Linux, or whether you use Android or iPhone or Windows Phone, or what kind of car you drive ; these choice, while there is some subjective component to them, also have a significant practical component, plus a big price component. As a Dali fan, I can buy Dali prints for a couple dollars easily, but if I like Ferraris, I can't afford one of those, plus I need a vehicle with some cargo space, so I have to buy a more practical vehicle. Movies don't have a price component: they all cost the same at the theater, whether you're watching a Terminator movie (good or bad), or a stinker like Gigli.

Do you have any actual examples of things you've bought that were duds?

Ok, you have a bit of a special case since you're talking about motorcycles and not cars, and there's some big differences there. Having to stop every 200 miles is one of them; normal cars go a lot farther than that. However, I would think that the recharge time on an electric bike should be shorter, since the battery capacity is quite a bit smaller than, say, a Tesla Model S. I guess we'll see when electric bikes actually hit the market in a signficant way.

Yes, 2-3 trips a year is rare, in the sense that the majority of the time during that year, you're *not* on a trip. You spend most of your time at home or work presumably, not on a trip. So use one vehicle for the trips, and use an EV for commuting. Or (for car drivers) rent a car for the trip. 2-3 trips a year is not uncommon for most people I'd think, but the point is, the vast majority of most peoples' driving is not long-distance trips, but rather short-distance commuting every weekday. This is what EVs are good at. And since most families have multiple vehicles, it's not a hardship for one of them (the commuter car) to be an EV, and one to be a gas car. Of, if they only have one car (perhaps a single person), it could very well be more economical to have only an EV and then rent a car for the trips. A lot of people already do this, without the EV, solely to avoid putting all those miles on their primary car.

Contract manufacturing isn't going to magically make tooling and setup costs just disappear, and some manufacturer isn't going to just eat those and go without a profit. Newer tools (CAD) and processes do make it easier and cheaper to make new designs though. The thing CM is good for is allowing smaller companies to get products to market, because they don't have to have their own factory (which requires a lot of capital), they just pay an existing factory to make it for them. It increases the market size and the number of players in the market. However, it doesn't lower costs; the CM has to make a profit too. It's always cheaper to have your own factory, but only in the long term. Companies obsessed with short-term numbers will sell off their factory and move to CM because in the short term it shows up as a positive, but in the long term they're paying more for manufacturing and also losing out in flexibility (it's easier to make changes, or do exactly what you want, when you control your own manufacturing processes). As an example, there's a good reason that Intel fabs all its chips, and doesn't just farm them out to TSMC like some other chipmakers.

Mind you, this isn't just contrarianism. I usually don't even pay much attention to what the rest of the world thinks about something. I only find out after-the-fact that every other human being on planet earth else disagrees with me--on EVERYTHING.

It really depends. Are you picking stuff which is crap, and the general populace correctly realizes is crap? Or are you picking stuff which is too high-quality for the general market?

A good example of the former is the Pontiac Aztek (though admittedly, its main problem wasn't utility or even quality, but its horrendous appearance). What kind of cars have you picked?

Another good example of the former is probably the Microsoft Surface RT.

A good example of the latter is watching anything besides The Kardashians.