http://definitions.uslegal.com...

"A public place is generally an indoor or outdoor area, whether privately or publicly owned, to which the public have access by right or by invitation, expressed or implied, whether by payment of money or not, but not a place when used exclusively by one or more individuals for a private gathering or other personal purpose."

US airports are public places. Just because it is private property doesn't automatically mean it's not a public space. If you turn your home into a B&B, it becomes a public space, even though it is your private property. You can have private clubhouses and private airports but the moment you leave the door unlocked and put up a sign that you're open to the public, the presumption of privacy is gone.

I say, throw a knife into a group of waiting passengers and let the first one to emerge alive board first.

In other words, let the invisible hand of the free market decide.

http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net...

MSDOS also worked perfectly adequately as the centerpiece of Windows 95 and 98.

On the contrary, Win9x crashed all the damn time (and mostly due to the reasons I mentioned: lack of memory protection, etc.) and caught viruses more easily than an immune-compromised crack whore. NT was much better, if you were lucky enough that all your software and hardware was compatible with it.

Oddly enough Microsoft's stock price stopped rising about the time that NT started to replace Windows 9. And the rather widespread dislike of Microsoft started about that time. Just coincidence, I'm sure

Yeah, actually, it was! The stock quit rising and everybody started to hate Microsoft because of everything they did except Windows NT:

• Instead of targeting Windows 2000 to home users as well as business users, they released the buggy, terrible abortion that was "Windows ME" (the last DOS-based, non-NT Windows version)
• They were fucking up the entire Internet by forcing Internet Explorer on everyone (this was when the only other choice was Netscape -- Mozilla was barely starting and Firefox didn't exist yet). It was so egregious that even the US government investigated them for anti-trust violations, for crying out loud!
• They were diversifying into a whole bunch of unprofitable new areas, notably Xbox and assorted failed web stuff.

Even at the time, Windows 2000 was considered to be the greatest thing (or at least, least-terrible thing) Microsoft had ever made. If you ask people today, they'd say XP is best, mostly because fewer people used 2000 (because it didn't get marketed to home users) and because people started appreciating XP more once they had Vista to compare it to.

You're the only person I've ever heard of who liked DOS-based Windows better than NT.

Can you call them "bugs" when they were specific design specifications?

The F-35 is a $300billion dollar abomination. Earlier today, there was a story about a $300million dollar IT mess in federal government and there were howls of outrage.

This useless plane is 1000 times more expensive and unlike the IT mess, the plane's "bugs" are there by design.

I feel that way about the entire tablet form factor. I had a couple given to me. I threw them out because it wasn't worth my time to find someone to buy them.

You claim to be a writer. If you were legitimate, you wouldn't be posting anonymously, you'd be self promoting. I call bullshit.

All other things being equal, I would probably go with NT. But all other things don't seem to be so equal. MSDOS was simple and ran well on minimal hardware. NT isn't simple and doesn't seem to run all that well on slow CPUs.

MSDOS certainly was simple: it was 16-bit, it lacked preemptive multitasking, and each program was limited to 64kB of memory (that other processes were not prevented from overwriting)!

We have a couple of EEE PCs around the house running XT and Windows 7. They are both terminally slow.

Before, you were talking about the mid-90s (i.e., NT vs Windows 3.1 or 95). Other than compatibility with legacy DOS stuff, it's hard to argue that 3.1 or 95 was better than NT 3.5 or 4.0 in any way whatsoever.

Your problems with Windows XP or 7 on EEE PCs is not due to the NT architecture, but rather all the shit Microsoft piled on top of it. If Windows 2000 had the drivers, your EEE PCs would do better with it.

Do you really expect the average user to know about IPs, ports, TCP/UDP etc.? That's not very realistic.

No, I expect users who want to run services that listen on ports (which makes them not "average!") to know about those things.

I don't agree that a safe alternative is impossible - there's no magic power that packets have to hack a computer. Any failings are due to poorly written software.

It's even less realistic to expect software -- especially the crap software the "average user" uses by default -- to become any less poorly written in the near future.

What exactly is "free for the taking"? Water? How much may I have? All of it? Half? Or only as much as I need? Do I get more if I want to take a bath, or bathe my dog, or add chemicals and pump it into the earth at high pressure to extract oil?

There's a problem with seeing anything as "free for the taking". There's always a cost. Always a value. To me, to you, to everyone.

Best to ask your neighbors, "Hey, there's water running under my land, you wanna see if we can put in a well and use it? If we pitch in, we can all use the water. That's more useful than putting up a fence, sucking up all the water and then selling it for $1/gallon. Because eventually, your neighbors will cut your throat unless you can hire some of them to protect you from the others, and that will eat into your profits.

Ain't nothing free for the taking. Think of it as free for the sharing. Even, to some extent, yourself. Do you really "own" yourself?

Former CIA spy and writer Robert David Steele talks about a very interesting concept: "true cost accounting". It means that you have to figure in externalities when you derive price. When you go down that road, capitalism starts to look very different. It's like seeing it for the first time. I recommend his books, especially "Open Source Everything". Not so much because I agree with everything he says, but because he forces you to see things differently.

I got your weasel meat right here.

The problem with that is how many home users know how to configure the firewall? There are legitimate reasons to have incoming connections.

And if your use case includes one of those legitimate reasons, then it's your responsibility to know enough about security to configure the firewall. It is fundamentally impossible for there to be a safe alternative to this!

Even as (currently) a business web app programmer, the more mathematical/theoretical parts of my CS education come in handy from time to time for things like understanding why our decimal and/or floating-point calculations were coming out wrong or rounding funny when such things mystified my much more experienced coworkers.

Okay, I'll concede that if you have an old keyboard (like a Model M) it's possible that it could be good and not have a Windows(ish) key. However, even new Model M reproductions have one these days.

I work in a Windows-based shop where it's an important rule to lock your computer whenever you walk away from your desk, so I've gotten into the habit of using winkey + L to do it... otherwise, I only tend to hit that key on accident.

(pro-tip: not all keyboards have Windows keys!)

Actually, all decent ones do, but the key might be labeled "Meta" or "Cmd" or a funky icon something.