And people say the free market leads to efficient allocation of resources...

A site is increasing their search engine ranking by... producing meaningful content that people want to link to? I don't see what the problem is here.

RTFS. He's not claiming that there's an almost perfect spam filter being suppressed by a conspiracy.

He's making the very plausible claim that spam filters naturally err on the side of false positives, to the detriment of the users, because false positives are a less visible problem than false negatives.

It's ok to blacklist email received from open proxies. It's not ok to block legitimate email for just *mentioning* them.

Because (if you read the post you're replying to) USB makes it easier to add the drives and upgrade, and it means you can connect a large number of drives at once.

Yes, I'm serious. But if my comment is as moronic as you seem to think it is, maybe you can actually help me. I have a couple of computers here which came with OEM crapware Windows and no clean install media (only the option to create crapware recovery discs). How do I get a free, legal, clean Windows installation?

There is hardware and software which is supported on Windows but has less support, or lower performance, or doesn't work at all, on the other operating systems you mentioned.

This means that for some applications, Windows is superior. Even if Windows is crap, it's simply not true to claim that another OS is "far superior to Windows in every way".

Windows does not give media companies a universal remote backdoor to delete your data. It doesn't make sense to blame Windows for the fact that you decided to buy DRM'ed movies/music/books.

If you want to use Windows you're often stuck with a choice between using the OEM crapware installation or paying for a new retail copy of Windows. Whereas on Linux a clean reinstall is generally free.

> What century is this?

It's the 21st century. You know, that century where not every Slashdot reader has a smartphone, and the majority of smartphones don't come with a built-in barcode reader, and reading barcodes is mostly pointless enough that the majority of users haven't installed a barcode reader.

I live in one of those parts of the world where data transfer actually costs money. The last time I opened my wireless network, the neighbours pirated more stuff in a day than the amount of data I would transfer in a month.

The reality is that, no matter what nice happy communist policy you put on your open wireless network, people will abuse it to download large torrents, and you'll be the one paying for it.

> radiation tends to play bloody havoc with radio signals

Could you provide more details about how that works? I'm surprised, because gamma radiation has a very different wavelength to radio signals, and alpha and beta particles are different things altogether.

Radio signals are used all the time in the relatively radiation-filled environment of outer space, too.

If a piece of software is critical to your business, you test updates and patches before deploying them, and you make sure you have the ability to roll back to a previous version if something ends up not working.

This advice is not specific to Google products.