I'm not in the position to argue the merits of the rest of your post, but this last part seems obvious.

Once you have more than a half dozen passwords, your ability to remember them drastically decreased unless you are some sort of savant. You need a password manager. Once you are using a password manager, there is no reason NOT to use a different, random, difficult to hack password on every site. I have no idea what the vast majority of my passwords are - the only ones I remember are the three I use multiple times a day at work. The rest get created and filled out by 1Password.

And, yes, of course, now I'm at the mercy of my 1Password password and the company's ability to manage their program. Can't be perfect and the current system really does suck but this way seems to be the best of the worst.

One feature I wish Agile Bits would set up is the ability to automatically change passwords on a regular basis. As it is, I manually change some high value passwords every so often (not Slashdot's of course). PITA.

Card Catalog?

Clones of Hasselton? I thought gain of function experiments were on a moratorium these days.

I can tell you're not an American.

Here, it goes:

"In Gold we trust, all others pay cash."

Boo !

If you are just trying to develop the next Unix clone of telenet or ftp, this argument might make some sense. If you are working in any sort of commercial environment, the cost of the PC is just a rounding error.

This entire subthread about the putative costs of a generic x86 box vs. something from Apple is absurd - nobody cares about these sorts of costs except poor hobbyist programmers -- and none of the companies, Apple included, gives a tinker's damn about this demographic.

For mid to upper range laptops*, Apple is very competitive with everybody else. If you like the tight hardware / software integration that MacBooks offer, then great. If you don't care or really want to run Windows, go get something else. I do wish that Apple had a few more choices - I'd love for them to resurrect the 17" MBP, but I'd also like Dell to have English speaking customer facing employees, for HP to make keyboards worth a damn and for Toshiba to simply go away.

But life is hard....

* The Mac Pro, especially the Darth Vader's ashtray version, is really a niche product

AC's seem to have the worst luck with computers. Maybe you should log in and see if things change.

Hell, the magsafe connector is worth that. One Labrador Retriever puppy and one Dell XPS power connector = one damaged motherboard - even though the Dell connector is pretty robust as these things go.

Nothing intangible about that. Sometimes you get what you pay for.

While the premise of TFA is incorrect, Apple certainly has created a quality product - at least as good as upper end offerings from most mainstream manufacturers. Yes, it has a marketing cachet that, to most of us, is kind of annoying, but that is the real world.

You don't need 'a great deal of money' to get into OS X either as user or developer (remember, the development system is free). No, you cannot scrape the components for a Wintel supercomputer out of a dumpster but there apparently is a large enough population with enough money to actually pay for things they use.

Replace 'Hungary' with pretty much any other country and you have a nice truism.

You can stop a pacemaker with a magnet near the chest wall. If you are one of those ** very few ** people who need a pacer to survive, you can get temporarily paced in the ER until they can put a new one in.

Surprisingly enough, people HAVE thought through most of this.

** most pacemakers work intermittently, some people need them all of the time. Pacers do fail, it's pretty rare but sometimes even the wonders of technology aren't enough to keep you alive.

Or maybe, just maybe, the US military (or any functional military for that matter) has the only organization structure, money and manpower to deal with these sorts of major threats.

Don't you watch any televison?

I know!

Let's declare war on Ebola!

Oh, it's much worse than that ...

Perhaps that is why the FBI's approach always seems orthogonal to reality.