Not necessarily. If you were looking to establish a business relationship and emailed inquiries to a half dozen companies, why would you bother to follow up with somebody who, from your perspective, didn't make an effort to reply.

"Spam is a problem where false positives generally cost less than false negatives"

This may be true if you are a basement dwelling slashdotter but out in the real world a single false positive is one too many. Try explaining your position to a client or executive who missed a million dollar inquiry due to your overly aggressive spam filters.

I would happily recommend non-technical users purchase directly through Apple even with their premium pricing model based solely on their excellent post-sales support but for the fact that they only sell Apple products.

I call bullshit.

Judging by your previous posts, the politics you appear to embrace are much too aligned with the United States tea party types to truly represent any western European citizen I have ever known. First of all, Ive never seen any European refer to California as "Kalifornia" and there aren't many European global warming deniers either. If you do live in western Europe as you say, you are likely an American abroad, not invested in the social contract of your host nation, and simply projecting your provincial misunderstandings upon your current home. In this case, my guess is that there are very few around you who would share your opinions.

I've always considered Best Buy a terrific example to illustrate the quote "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

The obvious failings of Politifact have actually caused me to consider what it would take to create a forum for debate where fact and substantive debate would drive the content. What I envision is a website where you could check the accuracy of not only public officials but also media broadcasts and other reporting.

As far as election debate, I could imagine each candidate for example having their own section. Within this section, it could be divided into broad policy areas such as Security, Economic, Social, and Environmental. Each of these could be subdivided as necessary and within these divisions every statement made by the candidate or campaign could be independently analyzed against on a set of predetermined measures of accuracy and level of content, Anybody would be allowed to provide feedback and analysis but this would be moderated and scored against some type of "reputation index" where authoritative sources are primary followed by respected scientists or leaders in the field all the way down to anonymous sources (whose voice will be heard but whose analyses would not impact scoring). The candidates would be allowed to expand and clarify their positions and even respond to the analysis and these responses would themselves be scored. The scores could then be aggregated and averaged to provide a wider perspective view.

Of course this is all total speculation. I neither have the time or resources necessary to realize a project of this magnitude but would be thrilled to provide feedback to anybody considering implementing something of this nature.

You just nailed the greatest problem with political discourse in this country. Most of the major news organizations have decided that impartiality requires they provide an equal platform to both sides of any issue regardless of where the facts lie. Rather than informing their audience, this type of "balanced" reporting only clouds the debate by giving the appearance of credibility to science deniers and conspiracy theorists.

Fair enough but then there is the issue of readily available, fully supported, Industry specific software.

But it isn't just office. Active directory is much easier to deploy and manage than an assortment of linux servers running ldap, DNS, etc. Business isn't just email, word, and excel. It is about effortless collaboration and communication.

In the handful of malware cases I've seen on a Win7 system, the have been limited to userland and easily cleaned. As to rebooted they are primarily reserved for software updates and installations requiring drivers.

Actually I have to correct myself. I have had servers crash but that was primarily due to being improperly configured.

Yes I know you trying to be funny but as an IT consultant for small and midsized businesses, I haven't seen a Windows system totally crash since XP and even then rarely saw any crashes after SP3. For all the haters here on Slashdot, Windows is still by far the best desktop environment available for use in a business setting.

I use a unique email address and randomly generated password for every single website to which I register. I don't know if I am a member on this forum but even if I am, I'm not going to bother with changing credentials because frankly, if somebody wants to impersonate me on a forum I may have joined simply for advice on a particular product I say go for it.

You don't get it. The "mandate' or more appropriately described tax penalty is accompanied by tax credits which means if you truly cannot afford the premiums, they will be partially or fully offset by a lower withholding from your paycheck or even a tax refund beyond withholdings for the extremely poor. If you can afford it, you should have insurance lest you offload your emergency care costs and overall higher cost of servicing to those who do. You are not required to but if you don't, it is entirely reasonable you pay a tax to support the higher cost of service you are imposing upon the rest of us.