Change the subject to house keys and the company to Master Lock. Does Mr. Comey, who is employed by me and my fellow taxpayers, also disagree with strong locks on houses? "What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law." Yes. That's one application, of many, for locks. They can also be used for securing my person, house, papers, and effects, as is explicitly protected by the Bill of Rights. I want to lock my house at night, not just to keep out the police but to keep out everyone who doesn't live here. I want to lock my phone at night for exactly the same reasons. Pity if that's an inconvenience to someone; frankly, I don't care.

Bullshit. First, "shellshock" isn't a privilege escalation bug, it's a remote code execution bug. Second, an overly liberal /etc/sudoers is a time bomb waiting to happen but has nothing to do with the kernel. Combine the two - say when a dev has something like httpd ALL=(ALL) ALL so that users can change their password via a web interface or something insane but common like that - and suddenly Johnny Cracker can hack the Gibson with only a single authorized setuid() call.

Netflix certainly isn't perfect, but they're Pretty Darn Good (tm). I haven't experienced any more glitches with streaming Netflix than I have with Comcast breaking other downloads.

The whole idea behind Chaos Monkey is to make sure there's no such "the wrong thing" single point of failure. Having talked to their SREs, I think such outages are exceedingly rare.

I've thrown in the tau'l.

Netflix goes so far as to randomly kill services throughout the day. Their idea is that it's better to find systems that aren't auto-healing correctly by testing recovery during routine operations than to be surprised by it at 3AM. It's successful to the point that you generally don't know that the streaming server you were connected to has been killed and a peer took over for it. That is how you make reliable cloud services.

Fixed that for you. You're conflating vertically scaled monoliths with "serious systems". That's quaint. While there are certainly still use cases for that kind of bulletproof all-your-eggs-in-one-basket architecture, that's a niche compared to the number of applications where horizontally scaled eventually consistent architecture is more appropriate.

Undoubtedly, and the distributed clusters I've used where you can make progress as long as at least some reasonable subset of nodes are still alive have similar uptimes. When was the last time you heard about Google being completely dead in the water? Their software was written with the expectation that failures happen (and a lot at their scale) so that clients need to intelligently reconnect to unresponsive servers, etc. That design seems to be working out pretty well for them.

That reeks of sour grapes. "I don't want to play the games I can't run! I don't want to download the apps that aren't available!"

My iPhone is **not** a toy, I use it for doing business. I have roughly a zillion apps, for very precisely described needs. Only the bare basics were on the phone when I got it, and I was able to pick a great SSH client, slick personal finance app, excellent public transit apps, a nice RPN calculator, my bank's app (so I can deposit checks by taking pictures of them), Yelp for when I want to take my team to a good dinner on business trips, a few instant messengers (because I can't get all my friends to "upgrade" to the ones I like), a document scanner with OCR, our corporate chat client, an outstanding GTD system (wassup, OmniFocus?), and a passel of games for idling away downtime at the airport.

I'm sure a BlackBerry would meet my needs if I had very few needs. But then again, I use Unix as an IDE and drive a minivan.

I don't think there are accurate market share numbers available, and most of what you see are educated guesses. Here's a link to mobile usage which shows Android at 45.01%, iOS at 44.34%, Java ME (!!!!) at 3.77%, and Windows Phone at 2.69%. BlackBerry at 1.18% comes in behind Symbian at 2.61%.

As I can't think of a good reason why Windows would be disproportionately undercounted compared to iOS (unlike Android which is widely available on dirt cheap phones in developing nations), I'd say Windows Phone is a whole hell of a lot very far behind iOS.

But if you and I are using the same library, why make the visitor fetch and store it twice? That's a slower startup for both of our sites. Multiplied across hundreds of thousands of jQuery-using instances, it adds up.

The fastest GET is the GET which need not be made.

Since Apple reports sales to end users, approximately 0 and 10,000,000, respectively.