And what would make people stumble upon and wade through the thousands of documents? Not everyone has the time or interest to read everything that comes across their path. While I hate editorializing, it is necessary to get most people interested enough to read about it.

I don't know if it was anything to do with Asimov, but there's a study that alleges that Agatha Christie's writing quality got much worse both statistically and critically as she grew older.

And college textbooks are another thing altogether. The incentive for publishers is to keep them fat, because that means:
A) they can justify the outrageous prices they charge.
B) their books look more complete.

There definitely has been textbook bloat. My calculus teacher in HS had unearthed a 1940s calculus textbook. It was less than 100 pages-- probably closer to 50-- and still covered the whole year's material. Without the look-up tables, of course.

I can understand how there may be some Mexican Senators who have their fingers in the Piracy pie. *Any* Mexican street market is guaranteed to have at least one "clon" stand, with the larger markets having 20-25% of their stalls selling warez of all kinds: CD/MP3/DVD/PS2/XBOX, as well as counterfeit clothing and handbags.

A widely believed rumor is that the stands are tied to organized crime. Another rumor is that the Senators are corrupt. It doesn't take a Latin conspiracy theorist to connect the dots.

I call bullshit on your bullshit.

I do occasional work for a Worker's Comp doc who has been working with Dragon for over 10 years. He swears by it.
The work is an hour-long interview, and hours of paperwork. He dictates the report into a MiniDisc recorder while reviewing his notes and then plays the recording back into the computer, watching for errors (few) and reviewing. I've also set up several other docs in the same field with Dragon, and they're quite pleased with it as well.

At first, he had to buy the latest HW and audio cards to get the best accuracy, but now runs Dragon virtualized on a 1st-gen MacBook without a problem. Dragon FTW!

I think the question is not that certain words are evil, but that profanity can be valuable. This value is lost from overuse.

One of my HS English teachers (roughly) described it this way:

If you call everyone a motherfucker, then everyone is a motherfucker and it doesn't have value.
But if you rarely or never use the word and walk into the principal's office and say "LISTEN HERE, MOTHERFUCKER!" then you're making a point."

"In New York, Miami beach
Heavy metal fell in Cuba
Angola, Saudi Arabia
On Christmas eve", said Norad

A soviet sputnik hit Africa
India, Venezuela, in Texas, Kansas
It's falling fast Peru too
It keeps coming, it keeps coming, it keeps coming!

huh-oh

(or however you would transliterate the sound of receiving a message)

"the OS does a good job updating itself with few problems, and the hardware holds up quite nicely."

Tell that to someone with a less than 4 year old G5 that can't run 10.6 or find a legit copy or 10.5 easily.

Umm... yeah...
Most version control is going to go crazy with the type of large binary files used in design-- images, and video in particular.
You have to realize that not everyone is working on code, or even in EPS (which would work in CVS/SVN/Git/Mercurial, etc quite well).

Or do it in software, force it to 10baseT-- 1.25MB/sec-- via ifconfig or system preferences -> networking -> advanced.
Nothing to unplug, and the average boss' son won't be able to figure it out.

Of course! Let's not patch security holes! ...
And then Grandma's email/bank acct/etc is hacked. Sorry, Grandma, you should have spent that extra $600 after all.

It's exactly this issue that pisses me off about Apple. While your typical /.er might be on a 1-3 year upgrade cycle, a lot of people (ie older parents/grandparents) buy a Mac because it's "easier" and are more inclined to be on a 5-10 year cycle. Their machines serve them well and do what they need--WP, email and web. Speed is NOT an issue when you're reading the news online or writing your Xmas letter. As far as my mom is concerned, there is no difference between the versions of OS X-- and why new versions of Firefox won't run anymore will baffle her.

Yes, Apple is trying to be revolutionary and keep themselves at the forefront of technology, as well as maintain a manageable codebase. But this has been coming at the expense of (prematurely) obsoleting still-good hardware in the hands of a market that Apple has decided to ignore.

Not quite, they didn't include markup (ie store profits and overhead) in their analysis. That could run anywhere between 20-50%.

From TFA:

Given TFA's reference to Businesspeople and the current climate of data security breaches and cross-boarder laptop seizures, it is probably NOT advisable for businesspeople to carry around more than 10GB of data with them. Rather, they should access it by VPN or via encrypted flash storage.

For the rest of us nerds though, who like to have hundreds of gigs of por^H^H^H relevant facts and figures with us at all times, will be able to do as you say, self-install.