For everything that doesn't move, it should be wired anyway.

Strange as it may sound to you there are actually reasons to have stationary things connect to the network through a wireless adapter. One good reason would be the simple fact that some of us live in areas where lightning plays havoc on infrastructure, especially telephone lines. If you connect to the 'net through ADSL you'll start seeing the wisdom of having as few wired connections between your modem and your network. While it is more or less impossible to protect the modem from a direct strike and usually inconvenient to protect the router, all other equipment should preferably be connected wirelessly or suffer the wrath of Thor.

This is no idle talk, I have personally lost three modems, two routers, three Thinkpad T23 network adapters, one Intel SS4200 server network interface and one HP Jetdirect card to lightning strikes. The damage always came from the telephone line and was carried through the wired network to the victims. Nothing ever happened to any wireless device, ever.

Not having a CLI and forcing developers to either limit their applications to what could be pointed at and clicked, or implementing their own application-specific CLI is one of the reasons why the Macintosh ended up being a niche platform, derided by some as having its manual 'printed on drool-proof paper'. If there is one thing Apple did right when they introduced OSX it is their decision to 'allow' command line access.

Oh well, there is plenty of malware on the Apple app store as well. The Windows store is also full of malware.

These statements are just as unproven as the one you just made. If you back up yours with some evidence, I'm sure I can find some for mine...

Both the money issue - iPeople are very much wont to shell out for the next craze - as well as the rather high audio latency on even the latest incarnation of Android. With a bit of luck the latter problem will be solved when the new Android runtime (ART) goes mainstream. The former problem is unsolvable as it seems to be part of the target group's identity to want to show others that they *can* spend money on basically unnecessary things.

Here they are! Get them! Squash 'm! Eradicate 'm! Rid the world of this vermin!

Hear, hear... I only subscribed to this site when it became hard to contribute anonymously. Were it not for that I'd be gladly hiding behind the AC banner still.

Even more generic lesson: don't go to that cinema, ever again. Or any other cinema for that matter, there are better things to do with your time. Better things to do with your money as well.

In reality three words would suffice when it comes to translating any policitian's words on covert monitoring:

'bridge for sale'

Knowing the company behind this boondoggle I guess the reason the code is not open source is to protect the innocent developers who might otherwise happen to get a glance of said code to their eternal detriment and damnation. Snow crash for real...

The mere fact that many sites host executable content does not mean you need to execute that content. Calling people 'luddites' and 'clueless' when they recognize this is... rather clueless.

Most sites hosting executable content work partly without that content. Some things might not look like they would had that executable content been given free reign, but so what? Some sites overlay the static page with warnings about the lack of functionality when you block their executable content. Right-mouse-button-click on 'Remove this object' and voila... the site works fine. For those sites which really, really insist on having their scripts run there is always CTRL-w.

Apart from lowering the expletive count in your prose I'd suggest those 'hot shots' would have been much better off paying someone 'a few hundred dollars an hour' to cobble together a new boot image minus all the cruft which had accumulated in all those years. They could have run this boot image in parallel in a simulated environment for a few weeks to months to iron out any glitches, then run it live on a number of 'hot shot' seats, then roll it out to the floor. It would have cost money but it would have been money well spent. It is possible to interface to older systems without needing to run 'DOS TCP/IP 1.0', especially since those older systems are much more likely to talk some SNA-related dialect than that new-fangled 'internet protocol'.

...they should ask for donations to buy power-generating equipment. PV-panels, a wind generator, anything which fits the budget and is a feasible option in the area where they are active. The generated power can either be used directly to keep those servers running or it could be used to run the meters backwards. If you give someone a kilowatt hour she runs her server for a few hours. If you give him the capacity to generate his own power he will become free.

And this, dear reader, is why you don't give iDevices to children. If you insist on giving them a touch-screen thing, get something running Android, don't activate a Google account on it - or even better install an alternative Android distribution and keep the thing Google-free - and side-load a few free games which you downloaded on another device through the Play store. Android runs fine without Google, you do not need anything else than the device and some software to run on it. No credit card. No 'iTunes gift card' equivalent. No Google account. Just hardware and the software you want to run on it.

Any computing device which comes with a mandatory credit account is off-limits in my opinion. It is the equivalent of a slot machine or a pay-to-play arcade game, not a personal computing device.

Well then, keep that thermostat but install another in a supersecret location. Disconnect thermostat number one and let her twiddle it to her heart's content. Problem solved.

Apple? What do they have to do with this? Apple is a hardware vendor, Google only tangentially so. Google does advertising and web services, making most of its money on the former while spending it on the latter.

In what way would Google 'fall behind' Apple? Google's products are mostly operating-system and hardware agnostic, running equally well (or poor) on all supported platforms. For Apple to change this they'd have to exclude Google from their products. They tried, and failed, miserably. They might try again but even if they succeed in booting Google from iOS and OSX they'd only have limited impact given the (declining) market penetration of their product lines. Apple is good at serving its target group, but that group is only a small part of the entire market.