Given that Eiffel was created by Satan himself to torture lost souls, I can't see how Java could be worse. The language itself was quite nice and had some good ideas, but the programming/development environment was appalling, I'd rather spend eternity in the company of Beelzebub and all his hellish instruments of death than have to develop code using those tools again.

Like Slashdot, a peer-reviewed Internet news site?

That's not a silver bullet. There's a government IT project running in Australia where they decided to do exactly that, Own The Fucking System. You now have a government department with this huge tumor growing out the side of it that develops, updates, and maintains their IT project. Since govt.departments aren't set up to run IT development work, it's ended up as an antipattern for everything you can do wrong in a project of this nature. There's way, way too much to type in here, but given the level of fail I'm sure one or more people will write books about it at some point.

The same people who buy 18,000 watt PMPO stereos. Obviously if it has bigger numbers it's better, so manufacturers oblige them by putting bigger numbers on things.

Och aye 'n fock off the noo!

I was just wondering if RightsCorp was now run by the Yakuza, and were extracting payment in fingers.

Licensing implies some minimal level of quality control. People in western Europe, and most parts of the US, are used to a relatively good quality of taxi transport that comes about from decades of regulation. Now before you complain about how bad things are in your home city, try catching a taxi in St.Petersburg, or Bucharest, or Tirana (in St.Petersburg I'd get a marshrutka which is shared with lots of others or a taxi from a hotel, in Bucharest I'd get in a car driven for a fee by a friend's cousin's brother, and don't even ask about Tirana). Even cities like Budapest a decade ago were still the wild west until they introduced stricter regulation of drivers, now it's almost at the level of somewhere like New York, although hailing a cab on the street is still a no-no (you phone for it and order one).

So before you advocate a free-for-all, remember that the current situation only exists specifically because there isn't a free-for-all.

Linksys hardware isn't made in the US, it's designed and made by Hsu Chien Lucky Golden Noodle Manufacturing Co. in Taiwan (OK, that's not quite the name, it's actually Gemtek in Hsinchu, Taiwan, all Linksys/Cisco/Belkin/whatever do is put their brand on it and resell it). Still, it's crappy hardware, and any firmware they bundle is an instant legacy product the minute it ships, the only way to get newer firmware is to buy a more recent product. They should stick to noodles...

Exactly. Now all he has to do is block Flash and Acrobat and he's protected mother Russia from 99% of all malware vectors.

Quod dixerit ad illum, infantem!

You're in Estonia? Just trying to figure out which country actually uses client certificates for tax filing.

It'd be interesting to see more details on power usage from other devices, if you look at the PF figure it's just over 50% which means they must be using awful power supplies (PFC != efficiency, but it's useful as a rule of thumb, once you get into efficiency classes like IV or V you generally need active PFC - optional for IV, mandatory for V - which these things obviously don't have). Most external power supplies (EPCs) now should be class IV or V, whereas these look more like class I, a.k.a. "fail".

If this is indicative of the rest of the electronics, it's no wonder that these things are power-guzzlers.

With the Xiaomi this is especially the case, it sends a pile of private information on you back to Beijing, China. So it's not just the generic spooks, it's also the manufacturer who's spying on you.

No, that's Windows Vista. And then there's Windows Cthulhu, a.k.a. Metro/Win8.