"the TorMail e-mail server"

The server. Singular. Did TorMail's creators and users skip class the day they explained how Tor worked?

Good for you. How many of your classmates drove BMWs to school? Sorry I'm not trying to be catty, but that much attention to AP only happens at well-funded schools with prosperous, college-focused students. Not so much rich, just "adequate", which is rare in rural America.

I went to a large, fairly rural high school in a not-particularly-poor area. We had AP U.S. history and AP English. That's it.

Many of you (especially those of you who read and write the New York Times) come from adequately-funded suburban schools, and while you've watched The Wire and think you know what urban schools are like, you have no idea how weak the educational programs at rural high schools are.

Possibly a small piece of sensor code in a major automaker's engine computers. These are very conservatively built -- probably there are large chunks of code that haven't changed since engine computers appeared in 1980 or so. They're very common -- probably hundreds of millions have been built. And they run the same code constantly over and over, every moment the car is running.

The main reason I might be wrong is that the clock speeds for these engine computers are presumably pretty slow.

Meh. Canada is, in this as in most other things, negligible. (Sorry, guys. You know I love you but there's just not enough of you to make a difference.) Target really just opened in Canada this year, and their retail sales there amount to less than 1% of their total business.

Again, why? They aren't providing anything new to us so why should we spend money on their new products?

The whole point of this article is that you *do* want something new: continued bug fixes and security patches. Which you apparently want forever, for free. I'm no MBA, but I'm not sure that works as a business model for Microsoft.

Do you have the $6.5 million Microsoft wants from our organization to upgrade our workstations to Windows 7? $6.5 million is a damn good reason not to upgrade.

Oh look guys, it's Target's CTO posting to Slashdot! Good to see you man, but I'm surprised you found time to hang out with us.

Microsoft has provided not provided a single new feature in Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8 that we actually need or want

Instant search of file contents was reason enough on its own to switch to 7. If you don't think you need it, it's because you haven't really used it.

In what sense are these people "customers"? They haven't bought a copy of Windows in six years, and let's be honest most of them never bought it in the first place. Microsoft doesn't have to care if they're mad.

Also, the reason given for their failure to switch, the disaster that was Vista, is idiotic. Windows 7 was a perfectly adequate OS -- and I say that as a Mac/Linux guy. They've had seven years to get over their grief and move on to 7, or switch to Mac or Linux.

The only reason for sticking with XP that I have any sympathy for is that your business is dependent on old hardware that doesn't support a modern OS. But once again, if your third-party vendor hasn't released a driver or software update in seven years, you're a moron for continuing to rely on them.

With the failure of so many blue cities and states, it should be increasingly more obvious that their philosophy/ideology is wrong

The states with the lowest GDP growth in 2012 were South Dakota, New Mexico, Wyoming, Delaware, and Connecticut. (2 blue, 2 red, 1 purple.)
The states with the highest GDP growth in 2012 were North Dakota, Texas, Oregon, Washington, and Minnesota. (2 red, 3 blue)

Just the fact that ND and SD are on opposite ends of that list should convince you that economic vitality has almost nothing to do with political partisanship.

Remember the days when this story wouldn't even have made the local paper? Seriously, 25 years ago your average school saw one of these every few years. It headlined the school paper, the local cops investigated, but the FBI? National news? Heck no.

Who needs terrorists when we now pay large corporations and government agencies to spread panic? Quit terrorizing the nation to protect your job security and let me know when something actually blows up.

The difference between the U.S. and other places is frontier mentality. Unlike most places in Europe, rural America still carries a tradition of independence and do-it-yourself attitude from the frontier days. The wealthy urban right actively encourages this spirit in the rural right, and uses it to push the rural right to vote against their economic interests.

The only other place I know like it is Australia, where (correct me if I'm wrong) rural areas also tend to lean right.

1984, Ciudad Juarez: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radevents/1983MEX1.html

Get your paws off me, you damn dirty ape!

Nope. Chimps aren't human, and don't deserve civil rights. Especially not Second Amendment rights. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhxqIITtTtU )

But seriously, that doesn't mean we're free to treat 'em badly. We tend to draw a black-and-white distinction between persons and nonpersons. If it's a nonperson, we can do whatever we want with it, torture, butchery, it's all good. But it's not that simple. Living things exist on a spectrum of intelligence and "person-ness", from bacteria to plants to fish to cats to chimpanzees (and from fertilized egg to full-term fetus, if you want to go there). Our morality needs to reflect that.

So no, chimps don't get rights. But they should get the respect they're due as almost-persons.