Ooo I'll do it:

Climate Change Deniers you're as wrong as anti-vaxxers and anti-nuclear power advocates.

As to science being about reasoned evidence defenses. The reasoned evidence defenses of climate change science have been made. The people who deny it don't use science they use a misrepresentation of science or no science at all "Well it was hot yesterday!"

So yes it's perfectly legitimate to slam conservatives who refuse to accept a reasoned well cited scientific paper on global warming and it's perfectly legitimate to slam liberals who think their kids will get autism from a vaccine --not because it's a case of "heresy" but because they aren't practicing science they're practicing belief under the guise of science aka psuedoscience.

Flat Earthers aren't ridiculed because they are heretics. They're ridiculed because they don't have an empirical leg to stand on. Science doesn't say that everybody's opinion is worthy. Science doesn't say (A) is true and (B) is false. But when you have a mountain of empirical evidence saying (A) and no evidence to support (B) but the (B) group uses psuedoscience like "Well we weren't there to observe it on camera. Therefore we don't know God didn't do it." or you have psuedoscience like "My kid got a shot and then developed autism therefore it's a shot" or "The world was warm before so how do we know carbon dioxide is responsible today, we don't" then you aren't exhibiting a critical empirical rebuttal you're just stating an opinion. Science doesn't tell us for a fact that if you jump off of a building without sufficient drag or a soft enough landing pad that you will absolutely die. But if you are a gravity denier and jump off thinking you'll just fly up into the air like a bird we can say "What were you freaking doing? What was wrong with you?"

To expect science to not confidently state things as 'fact' that we pretty certainly know to be true as far as truth can be known is holding science to an impossible standard. Sure maybe gravity won't exist tomorrow. But if we can't at least operate on the assumption of there being facts then maybe you don't exist. Maybe you're a figment of my imagination. And if you all don't really exist then maybe I should be able to go on a shooting spree--after all if one opinion is as good as another and consensus is meaningless no matter how confidently we have observed something then my hypothetical belief that everybody is actually an alien in disguise performing a grand experiment on me is equally valid to everyone else's belief that we are all human on a planet called earth and I should be allowed to defend myself against all the alien overlords.

Science teaches us to be skeptical. But it is ultimately a philosophy based on empiricism. We believe the world to be round scientifically because of all the evidence. It's possible it is flat (or a cube) and we recognize that we will never absolutely know for certain, but we also can say for a fact that the world is round and anyone who disagrees is a nitwit without sufficient proof to overwhelm all of the evidence we have amassed to the contrary.

I know a lot of people hate to "believe" in global warming because it goes against their political ideology. But that's not science. Science is the encyclopedic mass of data that demonstrates its truth (so far as truth can be known).

I've found this to be true also especially in Medical circles. I know a lot of doctors who have taken the fact that they are "Smart" aka studied intensely on a subject who then believe that they are world class economists, physicists, climatologists etc. When they are as much ideologues as your average indoctrinated grunt but have enough intelligence to frame their ignorance well.

It's not even limited to Climate Change. Look at almost any post:
"Scientists discover new form of metal."
"Pfffft, how did they overcome the ion bonding in the alloy. Can't be done."

No matter the subject there are a bunch of idiotic complaints about the quality of the research done.

If they can travel around at relativistic speeds they can pretty easily assimilate another culture's technology which is more advanced than their own. It would take one scouting trip from a fleet behind Jupiter to figure out stealth technology. Stealth + Space = Invisible space fleet. It's difficult enough already to detect things in space. They could visually hide not very far away with stealth technology and clever course planning to ensure they don't traverse any stars visible to us. Even then we probably wouldn't notice 1-2 stars blinking out, eclipsed by their black ships. Or if they could show up at the speed of light and instantly start nuking us from orbit then we wouldn't see anything coming. Or they could just hit us with a rock traveling at near the speed of light 'propelled' by gravity and never show up at all.

The answer is that there is no circumstance where we would spot an invasion fleet that was actually threatening to us. Even if they were in wooden ships held together with sap and twine but could harness the power of gravity we would be goners before they showed up and revealed themselves if that's what they wanted.

That being said, I don't really see a reason to invade earth. There is more water easily accessible elsewhere in even our solar system, no reason to wipe us out. Ditto with Oxygen and every other element which is relatively common and easy to attain. There's nothing terribly valuable on earth that can't be found somewhere else in larger quantities and more easily.

Do they want slaves? We make terrible slaves. Even by the late 19th century when we barely had mastered steam human slaves were becoming obsolete. Nobody who travels through space would have any use for a species who can only do about 8-10 hours of useful work every day. Just make a few robots to do whatever you want and be done with it. Maybe they want our innovation. Well if you want someone to be innovative an invasion isn't usually very helpful. More effective would be to seed some base concepts into the scientific literature through agents. Let our engineers work on it and then 'steal' the results. But disrupting our world by enslaving or even revealing themselves might be counter productive.

Actually it sounds like the Headline should read:

"Microsoft's First Azure Service powered by Linux and Windows"

From Microsoft:

If you actually use Microsoft Office with their collaborative tools enabled (aka saving to OneDrive or SharePoint server) it's much much better than Google Docs. The problem is that people use Microsoft office often in the worst possible configuration and insist that their Office 2003 version "has everything they would ever need" with everything turned off and then complain that it's not as good as Google Docs. Yes, if you use Microsoft Office from the year 2000 and don't use any of the collaborative features like OneDrive cloud storage or Sharepoint hosting it's going to be like using a word processor from the year 2000 without any cloud features. Microsoft can't make your ancient version of office that you refuse to upgrade work any better. Or you could always use the free web version of Office that then is pretty much exaclty the same as Google Docs if that's all that you need.

And as a last ditch effort I would also firewall the problem by enabling Shadow Copy of the file server (assuming they have a Windows Server). Then when someone inevitably does write over an existing document, fail to use the right file name convention or use Office "incorrectly" there'll still be the old version in the Versions tab of explorer.

They could also setup a OneDrive account and that would avoid using Sharepoint. And all you would have to tell them is "save to OneDrive" and you would get collaborative mode enabled without hosting Sharepoint.

Yeah there was a company here in Seattle that I heard about that was a wedding venue. Apparently their building was scheduled for demolition but the company was at best 'hopeful' that they would have a new space by then but in truth mostly just fraudulent. They accepted $1,000 deposits on rentals well past the scheduled demolition date. Then with a few months to go they started emailing people telling them that there had been a fire and that the space wouldn't be available for their wedding in a couple weeks. A newspaper looked into it and there had been no reported fires so even that was total BS. Understandably everyone who was robbed by these business owners gave very bad yelp reviews but since the company had been around for years it was only a few dozen people who were ripped off vs the hundreds who did legitimately like the space. As a result last I checked its yelp review was like 3.5 stars with a mix of 5 and 1 star reviews.

There really should be a weighting system to trend up and down based on the last couple months.

I've been a TSLA stock holder long enough to be extremely happy with my stock purchase. And you're right anyone who is just buying it for short term I think is terribly misguided. When I bought it, I bought it both for ideological statement of supporting a technology I want to see change the market and also because this is was one of those rare opportunities to buy a stock like Microsoft or Ford when their future was still uncertain.

That being said I can see why people would be worried about TSLA. I'm going to hold it until they go bankrupt but there is a pretty sizable risk that the entire automotive industry isn't going to just be disrupted by going electric, it's going to be disrupted by driver-less technology. I have no idea how Tesla is going to respond to that challenge. Apple has a market cap of $750Billion. They had a 4th QUARTER profit of $18Billion. TSLA has a market cap of $25B. Apple could buy a controlling share of Tesla with their profit from just a single quarter. Or they could take $18B from one quarter and start a car company. Microsoft has $92 Billion in cash.

Ford's market cap is $63B. If Microsoft or Apple were so inclined they could buy Ford and have a worldwide manufacturing infrastructure to build self-driving cars. There is actually a pretty long list of companies who if they really put their mind to it could enter the market at nearly a moment's notice. Then again supposedly someone could barge into the smartphone market at any moment but it doesn't seem to happen.

Also at least with .NET it's pretty easy to use cryptography without really understanding how it works. It's a property in the socketconnection. Just tell it to use socket protection level X and .NET will do all of the negotiation for you.

I have far more faith that the .NET team is up-to-date and employing some of the best cryptography experts in the field than to have someone working on an application, network or server to try and implement TLS themselves. As Heartbleed demonstrated, even with the entire security world looking at your code it's still pretty easy to screw up encryption. Trying to roll your own encryption is just a false sense of security since you've probably done it wrong.

Microsoft mostly contributes to making Linux run smoothly on Azure and Hyper-V.

Between 2006 and 2008 Oracle contributed 3% of all Linux code.

Actually apparently Google isn't much of a contributor and still keeps all of their changes in-house.

Yes but you sell a product. That's exactly my point. You aren't selling support. If you were giving away your product but making people subscribe to phone support then the 1,500 customers who don't use it will drop their subscription since they will see that they aren't getting anything out of it.

It's like health insurance. If you don't mandate health insurance but allow people to buy insurance for pre-existing conditions the only people who would have health insurance would be the sick and prices would go up.

Support contracts work really well for businesses since a single IT support contract can solve the problem for say 1000 employees so $80,000 a year might make sense when it works out to $80/user per year. If you called every other day you get your choice of developers from the support company. Having a driver issue, call and get directed to someone who wrote the driver layer. Having issue with an employee's file system, get directed to someone who is an expert on the file subsystem. At $80,000 a year you're looking at less than the price of a full time support professional and you get experts in specific domains since they're being shared between numerous support contracts. Everybody wins.

The business model breaks down for when each problem only affects one person. Where a day's worth of support might fix a problem on 1,000 systems at a corporation and be worth $1,000 in support time without question that same problem solved for one home user being worth $1,000 is just not going to happen.

Relevant quote:

The Coal Miner was paid to mine coal (by RedHat)
The Hydro-Electric generated electricity because it was built by IBM for the US government.
The water was gathered by Intel to sell more computer chips.
The farmer planted the wheat in a public field because it was cheaper to help plant seeds and pick what he needed than it was to buy flour from a commercial farm and was compensated in reduced price flour.
The baker baked the bread for a restaurant and then gave away the extra for free since in computer world infinite bread is as easy to bake as 1 loaf.
Finally the waiter expects a goddamn tip because they deserve to be compensated for their efforts somehow.

Your analogy breaks down because the majority of Linux development is done by people being paid to develop linux. Those developers expect to be paid. The people who pay them reap compensation for their investment in Linux in various fashions (support contracts, hardware sales etc.) So no it's not outrageous that a consumer product company would use a sales model that works for their business: selling things to people in order to also be compensated.

Linux is not a big volunteer effort, it's mostly a corporate collaboration to cut costs and boost sales.

If you rely on a RedHat style support model you'll never see consumer products flourish. Do you know any individual or family who pays for software support subscriptions? No. Out of sight-out-of-mind. The only people who pay for support contracts are CTOs who want to cover their asses. Customer support contracts would be so hideously expensive that no company could afford to offer them. Imagine if your grandpa had a support contract with RedHat. "I seem to have lost my word processor. Where is it?" Each call would probably cost you at least $12. If they called once a month it would be $100 a year in support costs. That's way more than "The Cost of Windows" and people would just buy windows (even though they don't get customer service with Windows).

Apple bundles the cost of technical support into their hardware prices and by trying to sell you shit. "Thanks for coming into the Apple store, are you sure you want us to fix your computer and not just buy a new fancy ipad?"

"Hacker Ethos" isn't what I would describe the average computer user as looking for. This move should be heralded as a great move for Linux. If you want Linux to move outside of gray-beards and corporate IT data centers don't scandalize business plans that are effective outside of those small markets.