Now here's something that irks me, although not by fault of the owners/companions. I have had several budgies. One vet told me that standard issue parakeet food is like Big Macs for parakeets, i.e. very fatty, unhealthy and hardly nutritious. So actually, while I thought that I was feeding my parakeets properly, I actually wasn't.

I never felt guilty for keeping parakeets. When properly trained, they are very social and intelligent and they appear quite happy for your companionship. However, in the end it appeared that I have been consistently poisoning them, even while making sure they would not overeat. That made me decide not to buy a new parakeet.

Long story short, even if pets get a proper home with food and protection, it may not be beneficial by definition, regardless of the owner's intentions.

Coding is not hard. Being the one to do the grunt work is. You'll always be on the bottom of the corporate ladder and in the middle of the shit storm, regardless of skill and experience. You can either stop caring or switch careers. At 36, I am still in doubt which one it will be.

Another thing making it hard to be a (non-freelance) coder, is that most of the time is spent on either trivial stuff or uninteresting problems. I know several coders who would love to work in innovative projects, but are forced to do something spirit crushingly boring like generating excel sheets from a software package from 1997 or something.

Metro apps need to come from a store. Desktop apps do not. Win 8 on x86 has a desktop anyone can use. WinRT does not (it has a desktop, but it's only available to Office). So WinRT is restricted to store delivered applications.

A bunch of hardware (think Cisco routers, load balancers, etc.) only generate CSRs with 1024bit keys.

It's not censored in the pictures of the slogan that neowin has or SCM Magazine.

It wasn't that hard to search for either. However it was probably harder than the knee jerk reaction shown above.

If you want to maintain your relationship, do not force feed her Star Trek. There are many SciFi series out there that appeal to a wider (and more female) audience.

I'd agree, but please note that the battery life on a first generation EEEPC is horrible. If the battery is still good (which it probably isn't), you get three hours of battery life. Also: the SSD is way too small for a decent-sized distro, and the Celeron 900 (!) tends to run hot over time. Perhaps I'd buy a slightly newer model, and swap the HDD for a SSD.
That being said, my EEE900 is still going strong and very portable. I even carry it in my tank bag on my motorcycle.

Of course Apple and Google do the same things for their phone OSes. And then there's those god damn open source commies who want an authoritarian government - they must do, there are rather a lot of Linux based forensics tools. Microsoft is giving away technology at no cost to help law enforcement gather data from computers? So is open source. Get over your bad self.

What sport would that be? Binge drinking?

Here's another non-piracy explanation: nowadays, people increasingly buy their stuff from the artists themselves, cutting out layer upon layer of middle men. Hopefully, now they actually earn something from their music sales.

Other OSs achieve better security by DESIGN

Then perhaps you ought to look at the Windows Phone design. Aside from the limited ability to do stuff that each app is constrained by (and the checking of those permissions by the marketplace publishing process) applications are isolated from each other, both in terms of memory access and file system access. What it does lack is full device encryption.

MS Whitepaper on Phone Security

We can expect to see the same news story every day for three days? (Then a correction entitled Dupe?)

For setting it's run time parameters. I have a friend with a brain implant (from the same company). It sits on a nerve bundle and shocks it in order to stop cluster headaches. However it needs adjusting, both under his control and then it also needs proper recalibration every couple of years. He has a remote control, and the doctors can recalibrate without having to open up the back of his skull again.

However it's not wifi (and I'd be surprised if the pacemakers were either), but it does have remote connections with, ummm, yea, seemingly no authentication whatsoever,

Client side authentication? Funny, there already was a standard for that with SAML, Microsoft's CardSpace. Now Mozilla are trying to force their own tech down? At least MS, at the time, opened CardSpace (and SAML) to a full blown standardisation process, and it was usable (with a plug-in) in both IE and Firefox.

Or you use remote administration tools. This isn't exactly new anyway, Windows 2008 has had "Server Core" installations which haven't installed a UI layer at all. Those tend to be used for AD boxes, or Hyper-V hosts or IIS servers.