One can argue that an OS is infrastructure, and not a product. Like water pipes and electrical wires, other services depend on them.

One could argue the same thing about Lorries and mobile phones... that doesn't automatically mean that MS should be forced to support a product, or release source code, when they don't want to. If the government takes a view that OS are 'infrastructure' and thus source must be released, support must continue for x years etc then it should apply to all providers and should only apply to products they release after that is decided.

Not in my last 6 flights they haven't, at least not without trying to be incredibly covert about it which I seriously doubt. All these flights were within Europe or SE Asia, I don't know if head counts are more common in other regions.

The reality is people are really stupid when they go outside their field of expertise.

No. People are uninformed about things outside their expertise. They are only stupid when they try and comment on other fields. I'm not stupid when it comes to combustion engines. If someone asked me if a V8 or V10 were better I'd say I had no clue, stupid would be going V10 on the basis that 10 sounds better and I heard of a good V10 car once. In a way it's our own fault that our representatives express uninformed opinions: the politician who regularily says "I don't know" would be judged as ignorant or stupid.

This is a fair point. Blackberry's were not the first smartphones, there was an extensive period of clunky win phone devices etc before this that were much harder to use and less convenient. I'm not sure that smart watches will follow the same path but it's pointless using smartphones as evidence they will fail.

I don't wear a watch and as I wear glasses I'd much prefer an enhanced pair of glasses over an additional wearable device. A watch doesn't provide a good input interface and it doesn't provide that much in terms of output to make wearing an additional device worthwhile over pulling a phone out of your pocket.

Fad doesn't mean that it ceases to exist entirely after the fad ends it means something that goes through a generally short period of intent interest before largely disappearing. That is certainly the case with the Wii which had huge sales initially, and was seen as the future of console gaming, but within half a console generation that view had evaporated.

If the atheist was supporting efforts to outlaw religion, I, an atheist as well, would be supporting his removal.

You're welcome to, but it really isn't a very helpful analogy. Eich didn't support outlawing homosexuality. He was doing something more equivalent of opposing state recognition of religion, which certainly isn't something I would consider it reasonable for people to hound him out of his job for.

There's not much you can do about Jobs, Balmer, or Cook being assholes, but we probably can force Mozilla to kick Eich to the curb.

Using Firefox isn't acting against gay rights. Eich donated to an anti-gay marriage proposal, there's no evidence or even reason to believe that this is going to influence the company and its stance. Google on the other hand actively partakes in aggressive tax evasion and by using their software we are directly supporting that.

As to the logic that what he did was pretty assholish. I don't agree with it but I doubt we'd be supporting a campaign to get an atheist kicked off the board of a company in a highly religious country. There's a reason why it's better if we don't persecute people for holding views we disagree with, which is that it sets a precedent to persecute those whose views we agree with when they are in the minority.

Stop making apologies for them.

He was explaining what the service was to someone who clearly didn't know, the difference between that and apologising is pretty vast so I'm surprised you couldn't spot the difference. Believe it or not, one doesn't need to defend a service provider in order to wish to help inform people of what the service is.

I wasn't aware MAD doctrine had actually been abandoned and the US was now willing to sell its own territory

Well then I suggest you catch up, or at least think a little more broadly. The point of Nuclear weapons in MAD is to ensure that nobody else uses Nukes against you because it would result in both sides being destroyed. If Russia invaded Alaska (unlikely at best) then America wouldn't retaliate with Nukes because it would be moronic to do so; it would use its conventional military. Even if America couldn't retake Alaska for some reason it wouldn't make sense to use Nukes in response because that would result in vast, or total, annihilation of America as well as Russia. Better to use economic and alternative military options to target Russia until you can force them to back down.

I'm actually quite surprised that eastern European nations, who appear to be both concerned about Russia and frustrated by Europes response, haven't started hinting that they might begin developing nuclear weapons so that they have their own nuclear deterrent now that the west has shown how little a promise means. Putting Europe in that position might force them to be more aggressive in their sanctions against Russia in order to stop it.

I'm really not sure if I'd be more worried to find out that most of the posts like this were cyber-shilling by pro-Russians or just naive/argumentative people who genuinely believe it.

occupied the Crimea after an internationally monitored referendum with a secret ballot

The election was not internationally monitored (look into the group they refer to) and the result is obviously false (the turnout figures and result are absolutely incompatible with prior voting trends in Crimea). I have no issue with the view that Crimea may have voted to join Russia in a truly free and fair referendum, although I am not fully convinced, but that doesn't mean I have to parrot Russian government messages and nor should you.

Per 2001 census

2001. Is Friends still the most watched show on TV. Is the population of America still 280,000,000 and the approximately 40 million new citizens can be ignored? A 13 year old census is a piss poor source, what is especially amusing is that the same wikipedia page says that demographics in Crimea are shifting from ethnic Russian to Crimean Tatar by 1.5% a year. So if you just blindly follow your 'source' without applying any critical thinking you'd actually conclude that Crimea is 40% ethnic Russian.

You do know it isn't 2001 right? You may as well say America has a Republican president because Bush was President in 2001.

I find it amusing that you demand evidence from the parent poster when your own 'source' gives it This is particularly apparent in both the Russian and Ukrainian ethnic populations, whose growth rate has been falling at the rate of 0.6% and 0.12% annually respectively. In comparison, the ethnic Crimean Tatar population has been growing at the rate of 0.9% per annum.[13]

Your own wikipedia page from which you've quoted a 13 year old survey shows that there's a yearly 1.5% shift in demographic from ethnic Russian to Crimean Tatar.

Ethically, it is unsound to punish.

Perhaps a point on which we disagree. I think there is a case for arguing that 'punishment' can be ethical and in fact necessary. If someone cannot be punished for stealing then there are a proportion of people who will make a rational decision to steal. Fining someone is after all a punishment, barring someone entry is punishment and treating the person differently in a way they don't like is punishment.

To me, the issue of punishment and ethics is a far murkier one. If the motivation of punishment is a rational response to minimise the amount of crime, is proportionate and is minimised as much as possible that's about the best we can do.

I didn't come up with the title or wording of the summary which I chose to use in my response to it. I'm not disturbed, or surprised, by you lacking the maturity to consider that before putting together misdirected rebuttals.