I mean, I don't exactly believe in the Star Trek universe which is even more fairy tale than most religions. Where are we in their world order - are we equals, enemies, slaves, pets, food, pests or just a honking big X-factor that threaten their very existence? Since their military power would be mostly unknown it'd be real easy to get paranoid. Just dealing with wacko humans is bad enough, what do you really know about an alien or how they think? Nothing. I think we'd jump right into a military arms race which might end very badly for at least one of us. Perhaps both, if MAD still applies on an interplanetary scale.

'"To quote, or double quote, that is the question'" - Not Shakespeare

That all sounds like things I've had in the past, perhaps not all at once but unless I'd been to Ebola-infected countries lately I might not think much of it. The infected person came from Liberia, but if a Texan that hadn't left the state for ages starts showing symptoms it's a lot less obvious. All it takes is one of those die-hard unbelievers in modern medicine who won't seek help until he's half way down the list of serious symptoms and you're in trouble.

Well, how many times have you seen "let's make our own date/time/number/argument/xml parser"?

Expense has a massive impact on how and why a technology is used. Phone tapping used to be cost prohibitive because you had to have someone review the results in real time, today between metadata and speech to text you can mine the conversations of literally the entire world for less than 0.0007% of US GDP, and so we have. If aerial surveillance of the populace cost as much as 20 patrol cars with officers then few departments will even bother with an air unit and those that do have one will use them sparingly, if it costs less than the fuel for a patrol car there will be a push to use them, and that will open all kinds of abuse.

No, it has limited time caching of a specific small tile area, very different from real offline maps.

They're likely getting a subsidy from MS paid for by future Office365/OneDrive revenues plus I'm sure this has Bing integration so there's some ad revenue to split.

<consultant mode>
Well, I'd put it in a 2x2 matrix with low/high impact, low/high corporate usage. High/highs is stuff like your office suite, a lot of people use it and quite a lot. Low/high are things like time sheet recording, people need to do it but it's a very minor part of their work day. Both of these you generally need to have good solutions for since you'd be wasting so many people's time otherwise, the heavily used of course more so. Low/lows you don't really need to care much about, unless they add up to some extraordinary amounts. The killer is often the high/lows, basically the specialized tools a few in your organization use.

The (strike:problem) challenge is that these tools are different. For example, your graphics department might rely heavily on Photoshop. Nobody else in the business might care about that, but they again have their own tools they care about. Retraining, lost productivity and lower output quality can be significant costs. Existing workflows and procedures must be migrated. Forced migration may lead to employee dissatisfaction and higher turnover as they want to continue their career towards becoming a Photoshop expert. Those costs have to be considered relative to the gains of making a migration. I can do an in-depth study, if you got funding...
</consultant mode>

Seriously though, I think more plans about migrating to Linux dies from a thousand cuts rather than one fatal blow. I haven't done an OS migration but I've seen some others, the major issues are under control. It's all those minor "uh oh, we didn't think of that" issues with emergency band-aids and workarounds that tends to turn it into a fire fighting exercise.

For computer generated graphics custom workflows and creating tools to animate things others can't have has been the driving force. There's plenty of complex interactions between models, textures, animations, physics simulations and various like creating a whole army from a few parameterized models and AI. No tool does everything well and often there's some secret sauce you want integrated into the workflow. Photoshop on the other hand mostly seems like a one-stop shop, you hand a skilled person the image and what you want done and he'll produce an end result. Efficiency seems to be the primary driver, not integration or customization.

Note, I am about as liberal as they come. But I voted for Arnold

There are liberals, and then there are liberals.

Like Clinton, he gets a lot of hate from the right despite pushing a right wing agenda:

1. College costs have doubled despite state budget moving back to black

   Killed single payer health care, which passed three times under Arnie
   Opposed a serious increase in the minimum wage
   Opposes marijuana legalization

And that's off the top of my head. I'm sure someone who lives there could come up with more stuff.

Well, allowing JavaScript gives people who'd like to de-anonymize you:

a) A much bigger attack surface, rendering engines are rather safe while scripting engines are quite risky by comparison.
b) Much more accurate ways to fingerprint users through querying the system.
c) Much simpler ways to use AJAX to create traffic patterns to trace you through the system.

That the TorBrowser developers (Tor is just the transport layer - it speaks TCP/IP, not HTTP) choose to leave JavaScript enabled is more a pragmatic choice so users don't experience a "broken web". But if you need the protection Tor has to offer, then you probably should disable JavaScript and find yourself web 1.0 services to serve your needs. Otherwise you're probably better off just getting a cheap VPN.

No, they're very good at reproducing things and if you haven't got teachers or you haven't got skilled teachers or you haven't got interested teachers then the computer at least give kids a chance to learn. Unlike here in western society for these kids education is a precious resource that they know is essential to have a decent future, first you have to give them the opportunities before you start worrying about motivating them to make use of them.

Also owned by Google =)
Sygic maps is a decent alternative if you don't want to go Google, and they support offline maps which can help if you have a limited data plan or you'll be somewhere with expensive or nonexistent roaming.

Well Kitkat is apparently making good inroads as it went from 13.6% in June to 24.5% in early September, and versions earlier than JB are down to 21%. This move by Google to cut off the bottom feeders that want to push old models without any hope of them ever being updated can only help these numbers. Personally I think they should cut off any manufacturer that doesn't agree to at least security updates for 2 years (typical length of contract in many parts of the world).