"I don't get paid for work I did two decades ago. Why should you?"

Because the express purpose of the constitution establishing the authority for copyright is to promote the arts and sciences. To do so, you must induce people and companies to take a substantial risk of failure by dedicating time to creating. Your job paid you a living wage; creative works does not. Copyright duration has become abusively long, but that doesn't mean the basic concept is wrong. Too short of a period of protection would cause the development of intellectual works to stagnate and choke the economies of the first world countries. If you work in anything related to computers, it's very likely that the fact you got paid a decade ago has everything to do with the same protections you're railing against, just the risk was undertaken by an entity other than yourself.

If copyright is an easy ride on the gravy train, why haven't you become wealthy with it? What great works have you chosen to contribute to the public domain?

(HEY Barnes and Nobel! If I could extend a nook account to include my Gentoo laptop as one of my five allowed clone devices, I would have bought the thing. Just Sayin...)

You do realize that the cost of supporting one of the more obscure and arcane Linux distributions probably outweighs the income it would bring in, right? If you want to advocate for desktop Linux, you'll be far more effective if you ask for Fedora or Ubuntu support. Even that isn't all that likely to happen in the near future, but it beats tilting at windmills.

There are many beneficiaries when flash eventually bites the dust and becomes a pariah like Java Applets.

The problem isn't just Flash, the problem is complicated and interactive ads, which is what advertisers push for (because they work). It doesn't matter which technology is being used, be it HTML5 or Flash, it's still going to suck up CPU time.

No, you need evidence to support your assertion, I don't need any to question it.

My point is that Apple considers the iPad to not be a computer. Again, I don't care either way.You didn't like the way I stated it the first time around; I clarified (APPLE DOESN'T CONSIDER THE IPAD TO BE A COMPUTER AND WILL FIGHT TO KEEP IT RESTRICTED RATHER THAN THROWING IT OPEN TO ANY OS, which is the assertation of the parent of my initial post), you presented nothing to the contrary. Either provide evidence to the contrary or go away. Apple's opinion is the main one that matters, because they control the firmware. Would you care to make a wager on whether Apple will happily allow alternative OSes to iOS on iPads? AGAIN, WHICH IS WHAT IS ASSERTED BY THE POST I REPLIED TO.

What do you believe are the definitions of those terms in this context?

Device - a thing made for a particular purpose; an invention or contrivance, esp. a mechanical or electrical one.
Appliance - an instrument, apparatus, or device for a particular purpose or use.

The iPad is designed for a specific purpose (to consume media and use apps per Apple's desire), as above, as compared to a general purpose computer. Apple will fight tooth and nail to maintain control over this.

I personally don't care, as I will never buy an iPad. If I want a tablet running Chrome OS, I'll buy one that's designed for it, not one that the manufacturer will engage in a running hostile battle with users over. I was responding to what I presume was an Apple fanboy's loving statement that Apple will happily allow Chrome OS on the iPad. Apple does not consider the iPad a computer.

Don't take my word for it, take Apple's:

A magical and revolutionary product - note that the word computer is never used to describe the iPad.
The Mac is designed to provide the best computer experience you can have.

See the difference?

Or from their meta description at apple.com: meta name="Description" content="Apple designs and creates iPod and iTunes, Mac laptop and desktop computers, the OS X operating system, and the revolutionary iPhone and iPad."

See how they have the iPhone and iPad away from the computer section and emphasize that they're different than anything else?

When Steve Jobs introduced it, he referred to it as a "third kind of device". It is not a general purpose computer, it is a device or an appliance - whatever new term you want to give it - that includes the fact that you WILL use it in the way to Apple says you will. My microwave and digital cameras could technically be called computers but that's not the way they're used. The iPad is like that - locked-down and specialized. My previous generation "dumb" phone had a faster CPU and more RAM than my college computer, but it wasn't usable in the same way.

Go read some of the billion articles that have been written about the shift that the iPad has caused. They're selling like crazy because people don't want a computer, they want something pretty to consume media on, and lock-down is part of how Apple provides that experience.

I'm quite familiar with Apple and their shift from a computer company to a media consumption/delivery company. Maybe you should have some evidence before you label something bullshit? Perhaps a quote from Steve Jobs referring to the iPad as a computer?

My car stereo has a CPU, memory, display, and I/O capability. So does my microwave. So does the Kindle and iPad. They are not intended as general purpose devices that the modern use of the term computer connotes. They are intended to be used exactly as the manufacturer says you're going to. You can hack some of these devices just like you can run MAME on some cameras, but that's going against the intended use and the companies that make them will fight to keep control over them. That's why they're not computers.

Don't take my word for it, take Apple's:

A magical and revolutionary product - note that the word computer is never used to describe the iPad.
The Mac is designed to provide the best computer experience you can have.

See the difference?

If you have to use an exploit to install your alternative OS, that means the vendor is not receptive to you doing so. And do you have a 6th generation iPod running Rockbox or the like?

You can run Windows or linux on Mac computers

The iPad is not a computer, it's a device. Apple has a much different attitude about their devices than their computers.

There's been a working version of Android in the iPhone since April and Apple has done nothing about it.

You are aware of what the term jailbreak refers to, yes? How about the long running battles to keep alternative OSes off of iPods or keeping iTunes as the dominant force for managing them?

I'm a little puzzled why your clients pay you for advice on Windows when you don't use or pay attention to it. PowerShell has close to 4 million hits with a Google search and was much discussed on slashdot.

NT derived Windows have some amazingly powerful command line tools that in some cases are far better than *nix tools. Check out Ed Skoudis' many articles and podcasts on command line kung fu.

Too bad they did not build on Xenix, and save everyone much grief.

As someone else noted, the NT kernel is really pretty good. It was buggy third party drivers and bad non-kernel decisions that created the vast majority of the problems. Any OS that allows a wide range of hardware is going to be vulnerable to buggy drivers.

Imagine where Apple could have been in the 90s, had they switched to Unix a decade earlier.

They did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX

A suggestion for your wife (and just about everyone) - using a single good password salted with the name of the website's initials will help her remember passwords while greatly increasing security.

For example, if my core secure password was '^hU@8c#}]2', my password for this site would be '/^hU@8c#}]2.' while my password for Bank of America would be 'B^hU@8c#}]2oA'. This is enough to keep simple password theft from a website with weak security leading to widespread compromise without having to memorize dozens of difficult passwords. I still use specific and unique passwords for really important things, but this helps keep the unimportant passwords secure but easy.

I don't know about the VOIP portion, but Google Voice is https only for me. Maybe it's that I have the "always encrypt" option turned on in Gmail, but I thought that was deprecated at this point and they required all connections to be secure.

Honestly I don't see how a normal person could possibly care about Afghanistan given the way it's reported.

Long ago, Adam Smith wrote a nice little summation of why most people don't care about Afghanistan:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Adam_Smith#Far-away_disasters

Would you be willing to give up your computer in order to save the lives of three strangers in Africa?

Even with this WikiLeaks story, the overwhelming focus of most of these stories are about whether WikiLeaks is doing something dangerous.

Because, as I said, there's not much new in them, mostly just additional pieces of information about what we already knew. The Washington Post, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, and NYT features on it right when it was released had lots of non-meta reporting.

Here's articles on civilian casualties: http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com?date=2000-07-27&zoom=3&subs=anews.afghanistan+civilian+casualties%2Cperiodical.Time%2Cevent

A good reporter would find a story that really matters and then look for a way to tell the story so that people will care.

Have you read the actual leaked reports? Most of it is so dry that very few people would sit around and read them. The fact that you know what they discuss is most likely because reporters took the time to read them and explain them in interesting terms.

If you think there was anything in the recent leak that was novel reporting, then you haven't been doing your job as an informed citizen. The mainstream media has covered all of the major points. We've known for a long time that remote strikes have collateral damage and that the Afghans don't like it. We've known for a long time that portions of the Pakistani military and intelligence community work against our interests. We've known there's black ops teams, we've known that Afghanistan has massive amounts of corruption.

The problem here is not lack of journalistic work, it's that the public doesn't care.

The numbers don't actually support that. While there is certainly corruption and bribery associated with prison and prison labour, it's not enough to cause wide scale incarceration. For example, it's estimated that CA will spend $15.4 billion in 2012 on prisons - roughly $47,000 prisoner/year. It would take an extraordinary amount of bribery to justify that. In fact, they're already starting to release prisoners early in an attempt to bring their budget under control.

What causes the gross incarceration is the criminalization of drugs which remains something that virtually no politician can go against, a culture that places an emphasis on punishing inmates rather than rehabilitating them, and the fact that politicians get more benefit from selling themselves as "tough on crime" than trying to create structures to break the cycle of poverty that causes high crime rates in the inner city (which their opponents would spin as throwing money at welfare queens).

But the real issue with any CDMA phone is, that you are simply screwed for international travel.

FYI, there's a few CDMA phones from RIM and HTC that GSM capability as well.