Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but your example really doesn't have much bearing. The US has 30X the population of Belgium. 40X the GDP, 56X the military personnel and probably 100X the impact on world events -- all of which means there are perhaps four orders of magnitude more people interested in killing the US President than the Belgian Prime Minister (these things scale non-linearly), even when the US isn't actively trying to piss off a lot of people. Which, unfortunately, it has been for several decades now.

Though on second thought, the fact that "Belgium" is the most offensive word in the galaxy (off Earth) may mean that there are more people annoyed at your country than we think. Perhaps Mr. Di Rupo should be more cautious. At the very least, he should keep a towel handy.

More recent than that. Until the New Deal the federal government was actually smaller than most state governments, and definitely had less impact on most peoples' daily lives.

It sounds like he was also recently employed, though, which is the easy case. Employers generally have absolutely no clue how to screen for competence, so go almost entirely on resume. If the person you're mentioning has 5 years of recent experience with "a large vendor of telecommunications equipment" and didn't leave because he was fired, he's got a nice resume, so won't have problems finding tech jobs.

The people who have trouble are those who have a big gap in their employment history. Even the people who are really good at what they do have trouble finding interviews, compared to the seat-warmer who has N years of experience at a big company.

I suppose, though I, at least, have never had a situation where I needed to reboot and make sure the kernel doesn't change. I've had mucked-up bootloaders aplenty, but the solution there is to fix the bootloader (and to keep a boot floppy / CD / DVD / USB stick handy).

Meh. It's just a slightly-faster reboot that's only usable when you don't need to change the kernel.

What do you do that makes you need kill -1 regularly? I think I've only used it a handful of times in 30 years, and not at all in the last decade or so.

Though, if memory serves, US presidents have an amazing record of not getting shot over foreign policy issues and instead being taken down by domestic opponents or just plain nutjobs.

It's honestly a bit surprising: I'm not sure if we just watch the foreigners better, or if they know that basically any failover president is going to adhere to very similar policies(only more so, because they'll have greater support for Doing Something) and so it really isn't worth the trouble, expense, or risk...

But, but, what if the guy on the lawn had secretly been a super ninja assassin? Or an android from the future with a 50 kiloton nuclear failsafe embedded in its torso? Why aren't you busy hyperventilating about all the hypothetical threats that are somehow unimportant on one side of a fence but are Super Terrifying if they make it to the other side?

America's Lawn was in existential danger here, and the secret service did nothing!

(In all seriousness, if you have some sort of cool exotic agent and/or heavy weapon that would let you frag the president from the front lawn the fence around the lawn isn't going to stop it. Wind will blow right through, and it's just a fence, not some sort of 18 foot blast wall. If you don't, isn't playing the 'jump the fence and hope that nobody manages to shoot you as you cross a giant strip of grass' plan about the worst possible one? It's not as though politicians don't come out of their lairs to kiss babies, eat at America's Small Town Restaurants, and assorted other things that make it much easier to get close...)

Yes, the bad choice was as Lisias said, catching the attention of Microsoft.

Nah, it's the squirrels.

Neither does Android. Oh, there are millions of apps, but most of them are completely uninteresting on a desktop or laptop and the rest won't run well. Oh, there will be apps, over time, but there's no huge number already available, developers are going to have to start more or less from scratch.

The index is new-ish, yes, but I still don't think it's going to provoke the sort of sea change the GGP supposes. If that were all it took, the Chrome store would already be doing it (there's also an index of apps).

No, what's really going to happen is that Microsoft is going to continue its slow, gradual slide into obscurity, unless it finds a way to create a new market for itself (which is likely, frankly, though no one knows what it'll be). Android apps on Windows may even play a role, but a small one. Phones and tablets are becoming the dominant computing platform for the masses, a platform they don't participate in meaningfully, and a combination of web apps, cross-platform toolkits (like Android, but also including Java, their own .NET, Qt and Chrome apps) and maturation of free/open source offerings are breaking their stranglehold on the rest.

You are confusing "state capitalism" with "socialism".

Well to be fair the deep-red state Kentucky had a very successful rollout of Obamacare (rebranded as "Kynect"), including it's own health insurance exchange AND medicaid expansion -- the whole Obamacare enchilada.

Under Obamacare, the federal insurance exchange was never intended to serve the entire country. In fact ideally nobody would have to use it, because states were supposed to set up their own exchanges that would better reflect the needs of their citizens than a federal one would. If you are forced to use the federal exhange, it's because politicians who run your state made that choice for you.

Of course some states have had their own exchange rollout disasters -- including blue states like Maryland and Oregon. If you're experienced with this kind of project you'd expect that. But others have had very successful rollouts, including a handful of red states like Kentucky.

In fairness, that implies that you currently don't have anyone with design experience looking at your product designs. Maybe getting some input from a designer, even a student, could be helpful? Admittedly, a student might make things worse by trying to push silly ideas.

Especially in the context of this (which I agree with):

The sort of design that Apple does is not just about beveling the edge. Because first, you need someone capable of understanding whether the beveled edge will make it more or less attractive than a nice, clean, straight edge. Will it look dumb? Will it feel cheap? But then also, because you need someone who can look at the whole package and evaluate what effect that beveled edge will have on the usability of the device. Not just bare function, i.e. it successfully performs [function X], but usability, i.e. it performs [function X] in a way that's intuitive, easy, understandable, and pleasant. It's not easy to balance form, function, and usability.

To some degree, I think it's an implied response to the latent, often heard criticism that people who use Apple are a bunch of idiots who don't know anything about computers. Especially in the context of responding to someone calling Apple fans "sheep", which implies that they're stupid followers and that their opinions are thoughtless and uninformed.

I've found that if you say anything positive about Apple in a public forum like Slashdot, there's a decent chance you'll get a response that implies that you don't understand computers very well. As a result, I'll admit that I sometimes feel the need to throw out something that explains that, yes, I'm very familiar with other systems and can provide praise and criticism of all of them.