So, I see this as rationalization.

The fact is, you took a leadership position, and later turned your coat for reasons that perhaps made sense to you. But they don't really make sense to anyone else. So, yes, everyone who supported you then is going to feel burned.

You also made yourself a paid voice that was often hostile to Free Software, all the way back to the SCO issue. Anyone could have told you that was bound to be a losing side and you would be forever tarred with their brush.

So nobody is going to believe you had any reason but cash, whatever rationalization you cook up after the fact. So, the bottom line is that you joined a list of people who we're never going to be able to trust or put the slightest amount of credibility in.

And ultimately it was for nothing. I've consistently tried to take the high road and it's led to a pretty good income, I would hazard a guess better than yours, not just being able to feel good about myself.

Right -- only a communist country would attempt such shenanigans. Western democracies are totally above that sort of misbehavior. ;^)

Meh, it's easy to find people with skill. With values, OTOH...

You have a point.

I always wonder about the psychological mechanism they are trying to exploit with that -- do people really gravitate towards blood-in-the-water scenarios like that? "Oh goodie, finally I can find out the way to put my local grocer out of business!"

I can't speak to old-fashioned soda fountains (with a soda jerk, etc), but modern American-style self-serve soda fountains might be a problem as well -- in my experience at least, when a person can walk up and pour himself another refill "for free" without even having to ask for it, the amount of soda consumed in a single sitting tends to double or triple.

What really causes my eyes to bleed is the new "flat" buttons that don't really look like buttons; they look like text labels. The top of every window now looks like someone gave a junior high student a screenshot of a Mavericks window and told him to reproduce it using construction paper, scissors and glue.

And the frosted-glass semi-transparency effects are just a pointless and unnecessary in Yosemite as they were in Windows. I get the feeling that the Apple UI team has run out of useful work to do, and now they are just changing things because they're bored. The next OS/X release will no doubt change them back, and then add in some other dubious changes that be reverted in the release after that.

I don't see why a browser-base app could not, at least in principle, be as reliable and secure as "real software". As an example, say I write the real application you recommend, and then I also find a way for it to run inside a web page. Will it become insecure simply because there is now a web-browser window wrapped around it?

JavaScript is the 'bytecode' to compile to these days.

Not saying that's optimal, but if JavaScript is what the world's web browsers run, then JavaScript is what people will target to get onto those web browsers. At least you can still use your language of choice to do so...

I don't think it's a real problem. Any laptop on the market today can go from sleep mode to fully usable in less than a second; barring implementation bugs, why shouldn't the electronics in the Tesla computer be able to do the same?

Booting up is something that only needs to happen if the batteries ever completely drain.