Discrete* damnit.

See, when you say "in the limited cases I used it" did you not find it irritating as hell and disable it like I did?

As for productivity... it's a tablet OS, it's consumptive, not productive. It's (normally) missing a keyboard so you can actually do some entry without covering the thing you're entering into or reading from, (always missing) a mouse so you can actually copy and paste with some accuracy and speed, and (always missing) a second discreet screen so the OS can't misjudge another futile attempt to change the sub-page for an attempt to change apps entirely.

The Surface is a very different device, it's a laptop sold in pieces with a touch screen and around here generally has a second screen attached since it's FAR more productive than 2 windows on one screen... Not that I'm a MS fanboy, and I don't have a surface myself, but there's a lot more than windowed support needed to get from AUD$4-600 16Gb Android tablet to $1400AUD 128Gb Surface Pro 3.

I still hate winmodems, they should never have been able to be legally sold with the word modem on them since they lacked the ability to be one. Sure they had a DAC/ADC but were not modems.

Your point with X is valid, it was a nightmare in those days and it was easier to get the right monitor than the right settings.

Dual boot though, I would bet dollars to doughnuts was the hardware itself or the DOS install at fault.

So yeah, excepting the modem (which were expensive) you could run a ripped off version of Windows cheaper, but that was at the same time that people were installing Linux machines whose reboot cycle was more likely determined by the power supply than the OS.

Today, I had to reboot Windows 8.1 so that it could open an excel document...

I could say the exact same thing of many dictatorships. Just as a for instance, it certainly seems that most people were better off under even a certifiable nutjob like Saddam than under a failed democracy.

Western democracy is just failing slower. Hopefully slowly enough for people of good will to right it before it's a total farce, but it's hard to see that as more than wishful thinking when basic things like campaign finance reform are impossible to achieve.

If you're going to just go ahead and assume it works as intended, sure.

By the same token I'd say Benevolent Dictatorship is a better form of government, the tricky part is the benevolence.

Besides, democracy assumes people want a say in how the country is run, most of them don't and of those that do, have you spoken to any of them and thought they should?

I doubt FTTH is as costly in a country with a population density of 120, vs Australia's 3

Not that I don't think it's a worthwhile thing, but to suggest it's an economic equivalency is ludicrous.

I don't even believe Malcolm is against FTTH in Australia, he's just doing his job and hoping to be in a position to be elected leader after the inevitable decimation at the next election.

On the other hand, nothing detected Stuxnet until many years after it was distributed, and it's a horrible example of general public USB virus. It's like suggesting people should build fallout shelters because they have any chance at all against a nation state.

On top of that, AV does /nothing/ for 0-day.

How you act and how attractive you are influence your likelihood of attack more than any other factor. If your behaviour is so risky that you need doubleplusgood AV then perhaps you should be doing that kind of thing in a Virtual Machine on a segregated network instead of the same machine you do your banking on, because you WILL get infected.

Like any other security measure, AV is a layer of protection, and for that reason MS Essentials does an acceptable job for {most|cautious|honest} people. Your grandparents that click on /every/ link and open /every/ attachment emailed to them "in case" may need a paid solution, or better still, an Apple computer since they're still a much smaller target than Windows.

I'm at least 10 years older and have a lot of EDM and some hip-hop on my phone, but it's still full of "alternative".

Current Artist's albums on my phone:
Adele
Deadmau5
Daft Punk
Arctic Monkeys
Green Day
Chilli Peppers
Credence
Eminem
Foo FIghters
Pendulum
Led Zep
Pearl Jam
Nirvana
Faith No More
The Offspring
The Cure
Scissor Sisters
INXS

I'll grant you, there's no Bieber or Swift on there, but that's not because they're popular, it's because they're shit.

I think it's more about the time to discover new artists that limits older folk's listening habits, not taste. When you're exposed by peers to new artists, they can find their way into your rotation, but if your source of new music is the garbage your tween kids are listening to, then yeah, that's not gonna happen unless you're the kind of sad desperate that acts like their teenage kids in the hopes that you can be bestest friends instead of a parent.

I've literally just ordered over $100 of CD's after listening to some free samples on Pandora.. guess they don't want my business, again. They lost me for 10+ years when I didn't have any way to legally preview music that wasn't awful mass market pop.

Every time they clamp down on sharing they lose revenue and then blame the sharing.. hilarity ensues.

And as Hitler said, "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened."

Might make sense once, but you could do:

tar --extract --verbose --gunzip --file=someFile

Except you won't, because that's inane after your first day.

Fair enough, so seriously, how do you do this on an exchange server... /usr/sbin/postqueue -p | /bin/grep MAILER-DAEMON | /bin/cut -f 1 -d ' ' | /usr/bin/xargs -n 1 postsuper -d

Which would build a list of bounce messages and purge them from the queue?

Spread the word about what? How someone has a ridiculous blog that uses logic akin to:

All dogs have four legs.
Cats have four legs.
Therefore, cats are dogs.

?

One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.

- Ken Thompson

Access to a time machine would explain why y'all think the founding fathers are prescient I guess.