I've managed to avoid pretty much every gadget except a smartphone so I'm sorry I can't offer anything useful. My opinion of the Kin, Zune, Xbox is worthless, being solely based upon the experiences of other /. users.

(laughs) actually in hindsight that's pretty obvious, the AC above mentioned the Kin, the Xbox and the Surface RT which I also forgot about.

I was actually thinking of their peripheral hardware, which I've found flawless, however I failed to make that distinction in my post. About the only 'discrete' computing devices that I've used of theirs (for want of a better term) are the Surface line. The RT is constrained by typical MS lumbering thinking but the Surface Pro line is a superb product in my experience.

I do too; Microsoft have never (to my knowledge) produced bad hardware. I'm sure they probably re-badge a bunch of stuff from other manufacturers, however if so they do it seems that decent gear is all they will put their moniker to. The efficacy of their designs may well be up for debate but the quality of their hardware has never been in doubt for me, even if their software isn't necessarily deserving of the same praise.

I've always found this dichotomy a little hard to reconcile. :)

Well, exactly! Where's the money in that?

Seriously though, you have the issue dead-to-rights here. If we want rehabilitation, there are known methods we could employ to make a considerable improvement to the recidivism statistics. Other countries have achieved results worth looking into.

That suggests revenge is of much more importance to society than an actual resolution to the problem.

We're taught that people who do 'bad things' are 'bad people'. There are precious few of us who develop into adults capable of questioning this. In time a little introspection can resolve this blurry question into a clear focus on the real issue: 'why do people do bad things?' Another angle suggests that 'people are not their behaviours'.

People behave the way they do through learned behaviour. Violent people are enacting learned behaviours that they perceive grant them a little short-term power for a medium-to-long-term loss that doesn't matter because it's not happening right now. Persistent short-term thinking is a hallmark of a being in 'survival mode'. They'll never prosper in this state, nor will they interact well with others.

We must see this for the inherently-correctable behavioural issue that it is, because the consequences otherwise are a steadily-inflating prison population and an ever-widening gap between the attitudes of the average citizen, the police enforcing the law and the judiciary meting out an acceptable form of justice.

"Loser then", if I'm not mistaken.

Not sure it's confined entirely to us 'illiterate Marxist Slashdotters' though. =)

The only way I've found to deal with these questions is to keep a few stock question/answer pairs in regular use. Presumably as competent computer users none of us are re-using any sensitive passwords, so we'll lose no significant security by using common q/a pairs. Examples:

• - Your mother's maiden name: Brelph11ternkar1 (that's "brell-free-tern-carry")
• - Make of your first car: innaw333ni3fudddg ("inner-weenie fudge")

Naturally, I'm lazy and let Chrome store the passwords. Google passwords can be changed very easily, even with a smartphone whilst shivering at night in your undergarments outside the door to your former accommodations. ;-)

No, I do not use toothpaste, but my teeth defiantly continue to develop dental cavities.

Next baseless assertion?

You are right, sometimes decisions *do* need to be made to undo past fails. I think what the parent is suggesting is that these revisions of our current UIs be done with our UI history lessons front of mind.

We've known how to make a fairly decent UI for a while now, even Win7 is fairly intuitive (for varying definitions of 'intuitive'). Going back to Win '95-era UIs or doggedly pursuing a course of action because we've always done it that way is, as you say, not a solution but neither is it what was being suggested if I understand correctly.