Sounds like you have stuck yourself in the "consumer" category. Marketing departments worldwide would be proud. If you realize that you can also be a producer, you'll find there's a lot more to do, and they are a lot more satisfying.

The liberals push nanny-state paranoia about our children to protect our children. The conservatives push nanny-state paranoia about our children to grab power, start wars, award no-bid contracts to their friends/former employers, torpedo universal health care to help their buddies in the insurance business, ... (OK, for that last one they actually use nanny-state paranoia about our elderly...)

Usually the "lowly" task of patching is sloughed off onto the sysadmins, while the developers in their hubris think there's nothing wrong with anything they wrote. OS/app patches are easily obtained and applied because many people use them. In house apps take a lot more resources to analyze and patch, and add the previously-mentioned hubris and you have a situation where resources will never be spent patching the in-house apps, because it's not their problem anyway.

I'll add my voice to the chorus. TiVo is not a patent troll, and the article submission borders on slander. The very definition and reason for getting a patent is to give you rights to an idea and allow you to sue others who use that idea without permission. That is exactly what TiVo is doing. If they had no product and just a portfolio of patents, and only sued people for license fees, then yes, they would be a troll. But that is not the case and not at all what is going on here.

Texting while driving means you're not paying attention. Period. That you think that you are paying attention even further shows how badly you've misjudged yourself. You cannot do both things at once, no matter how many times you've watched "Fast and Furious" or how often you think that the rules of physics don't apply to you. This is not a video game. You are driving a deadly weapon that just happens to be a vehicle. People's lives are at stake, not just yours.

All IE is doing is performing a search for whatever you typed in, if it can't find the domain. If your search engine is set to Bing, it will search there. My search engine is set to Google, so it searches there.

Nothing to see here, other than FUD perpetrated by the ./ community.

There's simply a lot more land to cover in the US, and that is covered by fewer companies than in Europe and elsewhere. Covering more land requires more towers and more expense.

mrsteveman is talking about music that is dynamically compressed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression), not "mp3" compressed. They both sound equally crappy on your stereo because dynamic compression is done by the music companies to make the CD version of a song sound more like the radio version. Since the radio doesn't have the same dynamic range as a CD, they squish the music into the radio range, making your CD-quaility sound like radio quality.

It is unique because while one guy might act this way (finding a bug and stopping), there are potentially millions of others still looking for bugs. For commercial software, the few guys who might be looking for bugs will find them, get busy fixing them, then have to move on with adding features or something to keep the commercial product viable.

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So actually, the point that you are implying (commercial software is better than OSS) is pretty far off the mark.

"I just had to use a version of Office with the ribbon for the first time a few weeks ago, and I had a hard time with it."

That seems to imply that you're only a first time user /of that version of office/. And if that's true, then you had a hard time with it because you are probably used to the old interface, or the interfaces of similar programs. The ribbon is made to be easy to use for people who have *never used Office before*. And if you think no one is in that boat, take a look at your kids.

The fact is that the ribbon IS a much better interface than menus, and exposes options and settings that are easy to reach and understand. The ribbon is a GUI revelation, and anyone who says different is just afraid of change.

Some of us don't enjoy having our data spread out all over the place on multiple systems with multiple drives. I don't want to have to worry about if I'm going to want some file while I'm traveling, so why not just take everything? That's what these allow people to do.

Wow, I can't believe how badly the "MS Windows" "remote access" model has polluted your point of view. X was created and exists for exactly the reason that you can have 1 application running on a big, fast, central server and the display shows up on your local/slow machine. This allows a huge benefit in pooling of resources and management.

When MS Windows had VNC, and finally Remote Desktop, the model was completely backward. You had to connect to the whole local screen and had to see the whole desktop. This makes it virtually impossible to actually *use* the apps on the remote side. As you have noted, the only good use for it is troubleshooting something when you don't have local access. Citrix is a hack on top of that to give the appearance of single application remote access.

So the X model is meant to actually be useful in day to day applications, while the MS model is only useful for troubleshooting or screensharing, and you're complaining that X is broken? You only think that because you don't know a world where things actually work well.

You've fundamentally missed the point. It's not about public vs. private, it's about placing the notice in a place that general citizens would have a reasonable chance of running across it in daily life. Unless your (and everyone's) daily web surfing involves checking government web sites every day, you're not going to see these notices. Even if *your* habits might bring you across it, 99.9% of other people won't. The point of having it in the newspaper is that most people (in the past) would be reading the paper for other reasons, and then just happen to stumble across the notice. THAT is the point.

Vista has no such concept of OEM vs. Retail disks. All Vista discs are the same, and it will also be the same with W7. Some OEMs distribute modified disks that auto-install with a specific license key, but those can be easily modified to remove that behavior. Any Vista disc that prompts you to enter a key will work with an OEM or Retail license key.

Microsoft knew this a long time ago. That's why they are where they are today... everywhere. You don't need something that's perfect and awesome, you just need something good enough so people can get by. The cost savings you get by not putting tons of effort into perfection can be passed on to consumers, who almost always buy on price alone.