The basis of your premise is wrong.

iCrap isn't any more popular than Android despite your whining.

> When there's a new version of Windows, I get it the day it's released.

This is just unwise.

> When there's a new version of Ubuntu, I get it the day it's released.

This is really unecessary.

The idea of cramming a new OS on old hardware automatically and without any care for the process has always been stupid. This idea is primarily an artifact of a particular company that lowered everyone's expectations.

Shoving new IOS on an old router doesn't even automatically makes sense.

The big problem with Patch Tuesday was that most exploits from the following Wednesday on wouldn't get fixed for a month. MS should get rid of that.

A person has to be willing to learn them. This seems to be even more of a problem then "innate ability". Even following the most rudimentary recipe can be a problem for the same kind of "special snowflakes" that should be kept away from your source code repository.

Again, some people know just enough to be dangerous. It's not that they are less productive than "Rock Stars". They are a net loss.

I don't have to buy a home PC. I've already got one. And I have no plans to get rid of it, since neither iOS nor Android is even close to replacing it.

Because everyone knows you're selling a myth that it "happens constantly." That's why you can't point to a list of examples of it happening "constantly" and instead go right for the race card in order to distract.

Yeah, even if you have 5 years experience in Language Y, which is very similar to X. :-P

I see. You live inside a bad television episode? How many hacker apartment door breakdowns followed by "hailstorms of bullets" can you cite from this month, here in this country of over 300,000,000 people? Please be specific.

I can't even get a device - of any power - to recognise my voice beyond the very slow, pronounced basics and I have to train myself to it (not the other way around).

Would love to know how the NSA have access to technology that the top voice-recognition specialists and software can't manage, let alone dealing with noisy backgrounds, masked keywords, variety of languages, etc.

"Acres of datacentres" don't help for the simplest of obscurations in the phone call and guess who has a reason to mask their intentions behind innocent words? Terrorists.

Why the hell should that be Facebook's job?

The problem here is not lack of schools, lack of teachers (though they are problems, that's not the driver behind poor education), it's LACK OF PARENTING.

If you're kid is not learning because they're on Facebook (or Xbox, or the iPad, or whatever) all the time, you've FAILED as a parent. For some reason, that's accepted nowadays.

I work in schools.
I work in "elementary" schools (we don't call them that, but similar age range).
I work in private "elementary" schools.

The kids there don't learn because the teachers are infinitely better, or because the school buys a thousand iPads. They learn because they are ENCOURAGED to. They have to perform or they fall behind and, if they fall too far behind, the school will ask them to leave.

The schedule for a child is - to my state-educated mind - insanely busy and active. They are literally doing two things at once at all times and barely stop all day.

Because they are given a work ethic, and the parents have the incentive (money) to enforce that work ethic, they achieve much, much more.

I've done back-end and end-user support for 15 years.

For at least five of those years, the machines I used myself only had Open/LibreOffice on them.

It wasn't a hindrance.

As I say to my users all the time: No, I only manage this stuff. I don't know how to use every obscure feature of every random bit of junk that you've made me install, nor what your working practice usually involves. I'll help and advise, sure, but that rarely consists of more than a Google for "where the hell is the X button in the new versions of Office?" for most things.

Finance, especially, are lost by this. I know how to install their software, manage it, connect it to the banks, authorise the smartcards with the bank and everything else. I do the annual rollovers and the reporting and lots of other stuff. But I don't even understand what the terms mean for the rest of the stuff. I have no idea what code you should be using for that purchase. No, I don't know why your figures don't tally.

Almost certainly I can work out and dig into things and get the answer. I've never not been able to when it matters. But, it's not my job to know the ins and outs of every single detail of HOW the software should be used, every feature it has, and automatically know every click necessary to do every task. (This is my bug-bear with rote learning of things like Windows Server on courses... no... just no.)

As such... MS Office features? Basics, I'll show you. One-offs, I'll help you Google (basically, I'm Google-by-proxy for those users who want to do something quite simple that they've never done before). Everything else, I'll either know, or we'll have to find out. If you're doing it regularly, I suggest a training course or learning yourself.

MS Office isn't on my radar. At home I use LibreOffice. At my previous workplace - in the same position - I used Open/LibreOffice throughout their 2000->2003->2013 transitions.

Sure, I'll help. But it's Office. Unless it isn't activating or you need a normal.dotm reset or similar (Outlook profile reset etc.), chances are it's not high on my list.

The energy of the thrust effect is basically lost in the measurement error. Hell, the device measuring it could be affecting the measured thrust.

The problem is that there's a TINY, TINY effect and we're not sure of the origin. It's therefore useless for propulsion, for decades at least, and certainly until we know where it's coming from and why. Because it might not be something that can ever be scaled, and that amount of thrust is absolutely minuscule.

We're used to dealing with tiny thrusts - you can "push" a satellite with nothing more than light and we have measured that effect in some of our own objects in space. But we can explain that bit, because we know about the interaction that it undergoes.

However, this is barely out of the measurement error. It's nothing more than a blip at the moment. As such, it's infinitely more important to put this through the wringer of "what the hell is doing that" - which requires independent testing, and that's not being done.

Fact is, this may never be more powerful than it is, and we can barely know it IS there, even in a vacuum. Until we know more, any headline about its origin or potential usage is PR bollocks.

It doesn't imply the power range to be infinite. Everything has a working range. But, although the claim that it's a necessity is dubious, it's pretty well universal. If you supply an LED with less power, it will light less. We tend to PWM them in order to do this digitally with only one voltage on a digital circuit, but - for a certain range - their brightness correlates to the power supplied to even LED's, yes.

If you can't frame your rejection of an old person in terms other than age, then you are an incompetent PHB.