You forgot:

- Had the "study" somehow concluded that boys were better it would have never seen the light of day, rendering all such studies meaningless due to selection bias.

Systemd is headed towards a horrible slide-show inexplicably created as a PDF?

No Clue indeed. No clue from almost anyone reporting on this piece of news. (it is dissapointing that the BBC headline is so wrong)

Have a read of the Euro Parliament's Press release or (unbelievably better than the BBC) Tech Crunch.

Its a general resolution about online search engines bundling services & about the need to enforce European Competitions laws in the online space.

And tapes can be lost or corrupted, or someone can burn the building down.

This is an old argument, and every time it gets revisited RAID starts to look better. Overwriting / deletion might have been a concern prior to modern filesystems which incorporate easy and cheap snapshotting, but nowdays that part of the argument just doesn't fly. Corruption is still a concern but, again, that's a risk you take with any backup solution too.

There's no such thing as a guaranteed backup. If you're very rich and very paranoid, you could certainly rig up a "backup solution" that involves copying your data every 5 minutes to 50 different offsite locations in 50 different countries, plus having some cheap third-world-labour transcribe all the zeros and ones to a paper copy for storage in an underground vault. And even that's not 100% because a really big asteroid will result in unrecoverable corruption. In the end it all comes down to how much you're willing to spend and what level of risk you're willing to accept. For most of us who aren't running IT departments that equation comes down to something like "ZFS RAIDZ2".

Try this on for size then. My current laptop has 3 x 1tb drives internal, but they only spin up when I need them to. My many OSs (several flavors of linux, 2 versions of windows, plus BSD) all run off of a single 480gb mSATA Crucial M500 SSD, attached to a cheap M-SATA-to-USB-3 adapter.

All the features you're looking for, plus the portability of being able to use your personal setup on any other computer just by plugging in to a USB port.

Ah, yes. Confucius say, the path to mastering pedanticism is paved with low UIDs.

It's obvious to me he is talking about GPL and not Linux itself.

Its obvious to me that he is deliberately conflating GPL & Linux to scare companies. That's the way MS operates.

Not exactly. While there is some truth to that analysis, it completely ignores the much larger effects of marketing and fashion. A Rolex doesn't cost 3 orders of magnitude more than a Chinese knockoff because it delivers 3 orders of magniute as much "quality"; the price is a reflection of fashion rather than functionality. Similarly, a basic Starbucks coffee costs 2-3 times as much as a coffee at the local diner, but certainly doesn't deliver 2-3 times the "quality". And don't get me started on the absurd amounts of money people are willing to pay to scam artists and frauds (eg. Sylvia Brown, "psychic", ~$700 per hour) who deliver absolutely nothing other than vague promises.

tl;dr: people will buy expensive shit for reasons that have nothing to do with quality.

You are twisting his words. Ballmer was not talking about Linux, but about the GPL and it's 'viral' nature.

No. You are totally incorrect. Here's the quote, from it source in the Chicago Sun-Times (via the internet archive):

It must be wonderful to always have racism as an excuse. When shitty things like that happen to me, I have to wonder if maybe I screwed up somehow. You never have to question yourself; just blame whitey!

Maybe you should stop carrying a mop and bucket around with you? Just an idea ...

Dude, that TOTALLY explains why my career in the NBA never even got off the ground. Tell me - who do I complain to?

Because it's obviously off-topic, worded in a way that's intentionally incorrect and hopelessly hyperbolic, and evidently meant to evict an emotional response. It's the intellectual equivalent of saying "Hurr Durr, FOX is teh dumb and Micro$$$oft maeks crappy computers!". The article is about the military trying to plan for global warming, but you're taken it as an opportunity to slag random talking heads on the news and Lockheed Martin all in one stroke.

Or did you mean "why am I posting flamebait"? I'm not sure about the answer to that one, but I assume it's because you have nothing interesting to say about the actual article but are lonely and want someone to argue with. Was there some other reason which I'm not seeing?

The better question would be why is pure flamebait getting modded informative?

We can do better. I bought a DIR-505 router-thingy a while back and it had a default password assigned, but it was a randomly generated string of characters that was then stuck on a sticker on the side of the device. That's even easier than making the user set up their own password initially. This way those who are most vulnerable (ie. people who don't know how to change the password, or would use a weak one if you give them the option) will be protected, while more advanced users will retain the ability to do whatever the hell they want.

Sure, maybe it costs a bit more to have randomly generated passwords and stickers on each device, but it's definitely money well spent.