Syria is an interesting case though, the world doesn't seem to really care what's happening there.

I don't think that's a fair statement to make.

First off, who are the good and bad guys in Syria? You can stage an intervention unless this is established, and it's way too blurred at this point to determine the best side to back. Too many factions mingling with each side, all wanting their own things with a lot of the counter to what's best for Syria and virtually all of them guilty of war crimes. There are no good guys except the civilians caught up in this shit, and they aren't the ones fighting.

What can the world realistically do with Syria? If the US directly intervenes, people will say they're trying to act as the "world police" again and it'll be seen as an Arab world vs USA proxy war, which the US doesn't really need at this point. The UN is useless because countries like Russia will veto any attempt at a UN-backed military intervention due to their interest in selling arms to the Syrian government.

Ultimately the world is tired with wars and conflict all the time and are tired with the Arab world's complete inability to keep their shit in check and in peace. Apparently no-one really wants peace over there so they keep finding ways to push for conflict. The world can't do shit at this point - all that can be done is to wait for the war to finish on its own. It will eventually, even if Syria itself is completely destroyed in the process. Such is the nature of man.

Shithole? You mean the United States? The rest of the world has bullying issues in schools of course, but no-where near as horrific as in the US with their zero-tolerance approach making bulling virtually impossible to deal with. I promise you it's nowhere near as bad elsewhere.

Plus, it's your world as much as it is anyone elses. Keep in mind that the news always reports bad news in dominance, so perhaps you should stay away from most news sites/TV/radio for a while so that you can realign your views of the world in a more balanced way. The world has plenty of great, positive things about it. Being addicted to the news would definitely ruin you without balance though.

Violence is supposed to be the *last* resort when other methods of dealing with a problem have failed. You have to tread carefully with how to explain this to a child, otherwise they'll see violence as an effective solution to dealing with troubling people and will use it at the first opportunity rather than the last. Imagine what kind of asshole he'll grow up to be with this mindset.

Honestly it depends on what you want to accomplish as well as other factors which might not just be about the software.

For example - I don't like to pirate software and will use a "lesser" tool if it still does what I want. Also a lot of the alternative software, being free/open-source, supports Linux when the commercial tools won't even acknowledged its existence. I don't use Linux on the desktop as much anymore, but I do prefer to use cross-platform tools as much as possible so that I have the freedom to use any system I like and still have the same software available. Keeps the same skills available.

It could be for any number of reasons. I remember reinstalling Vista during the release candidate days of Windows 7. I had a reproducible issue in that if you tried installing all the updates available, eventually Vista would bomb out and complain it can't install them and waste time "reverting" the updates. This was after installing basic drivers to get network functionality - no extra software or fiddling.

Gave up, got the Win 7 RC and never looked back.

You're thinking of Unity. Which is still a piece of shit that a failing Linux company thinks will keep them alive.

In my experience the only Linux distro that I've been entirely satisfied with... does not exist. The best I've had is Linux Mint with the MATE desktop, with various other components bolted onto it instead of being out of the box (i.e. grabbing Compiz and doing a lot of shit to get it to work with MATE, installing Synapse to provide a powerful Windows 7/8-search-like tool to launch and find things, but much faster than the same feature in Unity and with more functionality, and etc). All distros have disappointed me more than even Windows 7 out of the box.

Having said that, I always make sure to keep my Linux skills fresh and work and use as much free/open source tools as possible, for reasons of being able to make the transition if I feel things become good enough.

Absolute fucking bullshit. I've once bought a laptop with an Intel graphics chipset because Intel was supposed to be the best supported of all the graphics chipsets in Linux, what with completely open source drivers and whatnot. Yet I discovered they worked WORSE in Linux compared to Windows. Games would often hard-lock in Linux when they worked fine in Windows, and would at the very least run slower in Linux compared to Windows. People still complain about the quality of AMD drivers to this day and the substandard functionality/performance of the open AMD drivers.

Fuck all this shit in assuming that by picking a particular brand of hardware that things will work out nicely. It's no guarantee at all, and I don't care any longer about what the zealots say, I'm thoroughly burnt out dealing with this crap on Linux.

Because the submitter in question always writes very long posts full of content more suited to a blog and is the ONLY one that Slashdot allows such submissions for. As a result, people are suspicious as to why this fellow, who's not known for anything of note in the tech world or otherwise, is allowed so much leeway to spill his guts on a non-blog site.

It's not the content that's the annoyance. It's why he gets away with such power despite being a nobody.

Because despite it being 2014, I STILL encounter the odd program or process that affects system stability or performance on a long enough timeline sufficient that a reboot will fix the issue. Or a badly coded device driver that will behave oddly/slowly after resuming from a suspend/hibernation compared to a clean reboot. It has happened before, and will continue to happen so long as people develop code with memory leaks. Performing a shutdown instead of continually suspending/hibernating ensures that none of this shut can happen or accumulate.

Besides, once you obtain an SSD you realize that you no longer have to worry about slow startups, so you might as well shut down completely since you guarantee a clean slate and won't have to wait particularly long anyway.

Here's what you are missing: Someone will leak the patches and they will end up on torrents or the like. People will be able to get these patches without paying for the extra support.

Never mind the issue of companies using illegally obtained patches they haven't paid a support agreement for (except for perhaps China who don't give a shit), there's also the security issue of obtaining patches from someone other than direct from the vendor. Such a great opportunity to slip in your own code to do interesting things along with the actual patches.

Put it another way - I'd prefer it if Windows Updates were perhaps more verbose, so I'd know what they're actually doing that's taking so long. For all I know an update is taking too long because it's timed out and failed (which has occasionally happened). At least with Linux the longer updates print a fair amount of messages explaining if they're updating a cache or something.

And on the rare chance that it doesn't calling the 800 number has always got me back in business.

It's kinda amazing how the idea having to call someone to basically beg for access to your operating system is seen as acceptable. People really are able to get used to any amount of bullshit it would seem, even if it's "rare". It's not as if it's necessary in the first place, what with Windows loaders being able to permanently activate anything up to and including Windows 8.1 with a single exe.

Depends on the hardware. In any case I've noticed that the .NET updates in Windows Update seem to always take the longest to complete out of all the various updates that can appear, so despite they hyperbole there is some truth to what he said.

Agreed. It's even worse when you realize just how many accessibility features exist in Windows - they've got almost everything, and you can expect them to work given there's high visibility of the operating system compared to most Linux distros. But of course people prefer to joke instead of accept the fact that Linux distros simply don't have the same level of support for accessibility features as seen in the proprietary systems, and that continual joking is why I don't bother with Linux for my own system anymore.

That might be a bonus side effect for Microsoft, but honestly, I think the primary purpose is to push for more Office 365 subscriptions. I mean it's pretty obvious, even my Microsoft's own reformation as a "devices and services" company in that they don't want to sell perpetually licensed software anymore. They want people to buy subscriptions now, and are pushing VERY hard for this. I wouldn't be surprised if the next main version of Office is subscription entirely like Adobe have done with their latest suite of software.