The reality is was all about FBI agents with delusions of grandeur of pursuing 'Anonymous' and breaking open of global network of tens of thousands cyber activists. One giant global 'criminal' fishing expedition, with agents so blinded by the idea of becoming special agent super heroes then ended up breaking laws all over the planet without the permission or legal authority of those countries networks they were hacking.

This brings to mind the recent US proesecution of four individuals and the claims of hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, so how much damage has the FBI caused. Based on calculations they have submitted themselves perhaps 10 of billions of dollars damage to global computer networks and the companies using and creating them. Tens of billions of dollars damage, now that puts them squarely in the hole of being actively involved in global economic warfare, attempting to damage the economies of other countries by hacking computer networks and but the FBIs own evaluation of economic damage causing billions of dollars of damage.

This all to entrap a bunch of minors there own inside person, lured into crime, not only drawing them in but providing the tools and the knowledge and selecting the targets, this in of itself a criminal act especially when minors are to be the victims of conniving adults.

True, and clearly a win.

ROFLMAO. IME, the only thing more painful than maintaining a Windows system over the long term is maintaining a *nix system over the long term.

Let's consider Linux. First, you probably get to choose between a stable or a not stable version of your distro. Choose stable and you're OK as long as you don't need to run any software released in the last 3 years and you're OK with being forced to upgrade the whole OS after maybe 2 years anyway (which will quite possibly trash your entire machine to the point of not being able to boot, or at least breaking minor features like RAID arrays, assuming you actually managed to configure one of those properly in the first place after your distro's "user friendly" installer messed it up completely). Alternatively, choose unstable if you want to run more recent software but don't mind stuff breaking all the time instead of every couple of years on a schedule.

Either way, if you want anything that hasn't got into your distribution's package management system yet, you're almost invariably forced into compiling your own software and manually installing it with makefiles. Those might, if you're really lucky, also offer a make uninstall option that actually does cleanly uninstall. That might, if you're even luckier, still work six months later, as long as no-one inadvertently installed a new version of the manually compiled code over the top to "upgrade" it, or just ran make distclean without thinking leaving you with no idea what make uninstall should have done. In any case, Linux is going to enforce absolutely no system hygiene at any point in this process.

OS X is of course doing much better with a similar foundation, as anyone who has spoken the words "Apple" and "shellshock" in the same sentence over the past few days can testify. Or at least, they'll be able to testify, just as soon as they've finished wiping and reinstalling their botnetted systems, because the patch everyone else had within hours only arrived for Apple gear several days later and long after exploits were widely found in the wild.

You're absolutely right that we should be able to install many programs and uninstall them with no lingering effects. But the idea that the registry is the only thing preventing that on Windows or that *nix systems do better is crazy. The only reason *nix systems don't break more often is that the only people running them are geeks and professionals, and those kinds of people are less likely to install random junk and more willing to dive in and fix internals when stuff goes wrong.

Except there wasn't. Well, there was. A bit. Sometimes. Naturally, this half-baked approach actually made the problems worse.

Even today and with native Windows applications, many aren't very well behaved in following the "standards" here, because Microsoft did such a terrible job of promoting good practices.

Anything that isn't a native Windows application -- including almost every darling of the open source world, for a start -- probably ignores not only the application data directory but also the program files directories and insists on spewing its crap all over your filesystem and environment. Oh, and $DEITY help you if you need to do anything with Cygwin, and $CHORUS_OF_DEITIES help you if you have more than one ported application that requires Cygwin.

It is telling that you can't even schedule a backup of the "official" place to store documents without considerable effort, because Windows itself sets up so many links that most backup tools can't handle them.

And that's before you get idiots like the Chrome team at Google who think it's clever to install executable software in your data directory in order to deliberately circumvent Windows' normal security model, just so their auto-updater can do things it shouldn't without anything silly like troubling the user for permission. I'm always a little surprised that Microsoft hasn't, with considerable and legitimate justification, flagged Chrome's installer/updater software as malware and automatically removed it at some point.

On the bright side, if Microsoft can actually manage to produce an operating system with a sensible filesystem structure and application installation/update/uninstallation tools that actually enforce that structure, they might yet salvage the Windows brand and convince significant parts of their potential market to upgrade again.

Agreed about anecdotes. However, I can say that I have to reboot my Windows 7 PC weekly because of serious degradation in performance. I have installed a fair bit of software (the PATH can no longer be extended) but there's only about three games (Freeciv, Kerbal Space Program, Elite: Dangerous) and no apps, toolbars or junk. The rest of the software on there? MariaDB, Ingres, GRASS, QGIS (OSGEO is basically Cygwin, so I've now three incompatible Cygwin distros on Windows), HOL 4, Active Python, Active Perl, Erlang, Rust, Blender, PoVRay, BMRT - the sort of stuff you'd expect to find on any PC, nothing fancy.

And Netscape. Which is a horrible resource hog and is honestly not usable in its current form. I have abandoned all efforts to get Chrome usable. I'll probably deinstall both and switch to Amaya. Which barely does anything, but it does it tolerably.

You can make Windows systems run crap-free and full speed again as well, by cleaning out all the obscure registry entries and system services and automatic updaters and cached thingies and temporary wotsits. You just have to know what you're doing.

Also, as with the part of the Linux strategy you forgot to mention, you have to be willing to spend forever doing it, because the tools provided as standard are just about hopeless.

Karma whoring is the requisite corollary for non-anonymous trolling.

You mean to tell me that the US doesn't even trust the other Five Eyes nations' spy agencies to be able to do this?*

*Yes, I know, to get round legal restrictions, it was very normal for the US to spy on the citizens of the other four and to exchange that data for information collected on US citizens by other members of Five Eyes. However, we now know all the agencies DO spy on their own citizens, routinely. So the US can ask GCHQ to wiretap British citizens in Britain, it doesn't need to spy on Britain itself. This behaviour suggests wheels within wheels.

You mean to tell me that the US isn't all caught up in the US-UK "Special Relationship" stuff?**

**Most Americans were unaware there even was one and get horribly confused when the British talk about it.

Linux is indeed better. Not because of Open Source (the code doesn't care) but because it has fewer bugs (about 0.1% of the bugs per kloc), non-intrusive strong security (rated EAL 5+ on conformant hardware, conforms to B2 Orange Book standards), superior multi-processor support, superior memory management and superior networking.

Graphics? Not an OS issue. That's a GUI issue. Never confuse how something gets data with what it then does with it. The GUI is not central to Windows (as demonstrated by console mode startup, but should be obvious to anyone running it as a headless server). The core OS functions are, and always have been, resource management, virtualization, security and stability. (Filesystems are virtual layers on top of physical disks, so are resource management and virtualization.)

Linux is better at the things an OS is meant to do. Windows has an adequate GUI, but the OS is abysmal. Besides sales, the only reason the game industry likes Windows is that it has useful libraries - DirectX (an alternative to the functions the GUI itself provides) and easy access to GPU functions (bypassing the OS altogether, running on bare metal).

The reason Linux doesn't have these? Look in the mirror. The face you see was quite capable of working on GGI, KGI or Linux Framebuffers, of helping in the Berlin project, of submitting patches for SDL or Avagadro, or even hacking Wine to improve support for DirectX, CUDA or other graphical features.

I'm no innocent myself, but I own up to my guilt, I don't blame the OS (which IS innocent).

Windows 10 IS Windows 9. Microsoft engineers are even still calling it Windows 9. The source tree is the same, there have been no major changes.

What has happened is that Windows 9 has been getting very bad press and is still riddled with bugs. Instead of releasing a version number nobody will buy and would only have to patch almost immediately anyway, OR getting slagged off for Yet Another Delayed Release, Microsoft is renaming it version 10 and delaying the release until the bugs are sorted.

You will observe Microsoft has been talking up Windows 9 for some time, but now all talk (and apparently all memory) of it has ceased. Newspapers suffering amnesia is amost acceptable. Slashdotters??? WTF??? I'm sorry, but there is no-one in or around IT that has a single, solitary excuse.

There have been cases of Boeing 777s and modernized 737s developing unexplained system faults. Do not be so sure that RFI was not to blame. These have had much worse reliability than other Boeing models in recent years and as no other faults have been offered by Boeing as explanation, it is illogical to simply dismiss the one fault we know about as unrelated to the unusual number of abnormalities and crashes specific to these two models.

Obviously, Boeing has no interest in being honest about the problems they know about, be they software or hardware. Nor are they likely to Open Source anything, so there is no possibility of scrutiny by an independent party.

Simple logic (and self-preservation) says they have an unattributed defect capable of causing catastrophic failure, and a defect that can potentially cause catastrophic failure, therefore fixing the defect is essential.

The cost? The cost is insignificant. Boeing is hardly poor and is quite capable of covering the airlines' cost as this is a manufacturing defect. The airlines? They're making enough money that they can afford riots on board when seats are tilted. Besides, this is the cost of doing business. There's a price for bad decisions, all other sectors (except, apparently, banks) are expected to take the rough with the smooth. If several go bust because they chose unwisely, that's how life in business goes. You pay your money, you take your choice. Besides, they'd still be doing better than the German in Last Crusade.

If I went into business and made bad choices, would you be telling people to ignore my expenses? No? Good. If I'm not fit for purpose as a businessman, I've no business expecting support. So why should Ryanair, a notoriously incompetent company, deserve better? Because they're too big to fail? Not a good reason.

Android does sandbox apps. The default internal directory for each app can only be read/written by itself. Prior to version 4.2, the SD card was public and could be read/written by anyone. 4.2 and later, only parts of the SD cared are publicly readable and only parts are publicly writable.

In both cases before and after 4.2 uninstalling will remove the private directory. It will also remove any private directory on the SD card, so long as the app used the default location. Some apps don't, purposely, so their data will persist if reinstalled.

All you need are some windows that open in flight. Problem solved.

It's a LANoT.

But local reception really degraded...

Dankeshon!

Thanks for living in the past.