Burning Man has become my Christmas, New Years, 4th of July, Halloween and most other relevant holidays, rolled into one. I do my Burning Man shopping after traditional holidays, especially Christmas and Halloween. I remember years gone by, by the theme of that year. And even the two years (out of fourteen) that I haven't made it, the end of August was my memorable holiday. And the people I've gotten to know in my local community certainly rank as "family".

So, yeah, Christmas, bah. It's still amusing to see the combination of pagan celebration and Christian fairy-tales. Christians, of course, were particularly successful at appropriating other people's holidays. "You have a celebration at the winter solstice? Wow, so do we - so you can still celebrate yours, but ours is even more special!" Combine this with the out-of-control consumerism that runs from late September, the incessant muzak, the "need" to buy gifts for everyone you know, and double-tip everyone you run into? It's nice to have dinner with family, though.

New Years is just a regular challenge to find a decent party - which will never match the desert party. Combined with the worry of drunken drivers? Besides which, it's just another arbitrary date as well - the Y2k/2001 fiasco seals the deal.

Give me ten days in the desert with 50,000 of my closest friends.

...or parts of it, at least, like the shared data/soup model. In fact, it's surprising no one has built a good NewtOS emulator for the iPad.

Because you're racing a cargo truck in the Dakar? In which case you need more like 1000bhp.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatra_T815

And vice-versa. If they do give you access to their server - FAIL.

I code to spec. The product and marketing departments write the spec (what little there is); the QA department amends the spec with overly specific test cases. I suggest that the spec is incomplete and won't handle...but I'm told, just code it to spec. I recommend changed, but we don't have time for edge cases. I point out potential problems, but we're unlikely to get any of those. I warn of potential compatibility problems but we don't care. Are you just trying to be difficult? If there's a problem QA will catch it. The project is overdue already, and by the way here are some new requirements that need to make it in, and we can't change the release date because we already promised the stockholders. Why is your code so complicated, my twelve-year-old kid could write this.

It's not my fault. I code to spec.

When you enter the working world, you have to use whatever operating system (or other equipment) your employer has arbitrarily chosen, and frequently you'll have to pay for your own equipment.

Of course, I'm a fanboy/apologist, so I think the Macbook is a great choice since it can run OSX, Windows, or several flavors of *ux, either with BootCamp or Parallels. Then again, so can a hackintosh - and that's an even more valuable lesson (don't let arbitrary rules by distant companies get in the way of your education aka if you don't get caught it must not be illegal).

This (and other reasons) is why I believe public school textbooks should be free/open source (as in speech, as well as as in beer, aside from a nominal small printing/distribution charge - which will not be needed once all schoolchildren own iPads or other e-readers) and wiki-editable with review before publishing. Get the textbook companies out of the business of making massive profits off the backs of our school system, and involve the public in the education process. Find a way to review that will weaken agenda-driven edits.

"PC LOAD LETTER"??? What the f does that mean??

Oh, there it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER

Not to mention the fact all these protections makes it more difficult for legitimately licensed users, to use the products. With Dell machines we used to use, it was a lot easier to install pirated copies of Windows than the legit copies (that were in any case crammed with unwanted bloatware).

One of the reasons I like OSX - no product key complications, and the "family edition" or corporate licenses aren't outrageously expensive.

Cookies are often used to store user variables when they go from one page to another - patching holes the stateless web protocol forces on the user experience. Session or server-side variables may also be used for this, but that's more work for the web designer, who usually is up to his neck trying to support different versions of IE misbehavior.

Sites I've worked on have never used cookies to send back personal information, but they have used them to improve the user experience.