A language that required certain statements to start with a certain indentation? Fortran was pointlessly stupid. As a child learning programming in the 80s, I certainly flourished with BASIC. When I was subjected to Fortran77 in college, I wondered why people were still using this archaic language.

To summarize, previously there was no vertical integration. ISPs didn't own the last mile. And I think that's the model we need to go back to.

Suppose ISPs no longer own the last mile. That's either a government or even any 3rd party. All an ISP needs to do to provide service to an area is to run a fiber to the main patch panel for that area. Suddenly it's easy for more players to get in to the ISP business and offer service to an area.

My main point being is that the last mile infrastructure is a natural monopoly. It's relatively expensive to lay and it's typically not economical to have multiple providers. The reason water, sewer, and roads are typically provided by local governments is that there's no benefit to privatization. You privatize roads, and all you get is a heavily regulated monopoly.

So, I don't want government internet any more than I want a government grocery store. Wrong solution to the wrong problem. I do want to separate the last mile from the ISP/Cable company/whatever. Markets work, but only where there is an actual functioning market.

1. Cop directing traffic
2. A more complicated construction zone with a badly marked detour
3. A snow storm

Things are coming along nicely, but I still imagine these are a decade away. Still, they should be common and affordable by the time I'm ready to plow through a farmer's market.

The problem with that assumption is that a watch isn't a timepiece. At least upscale watches aren't timepieces, exactly. They're principally jewelry. And much like Rolex never made a calculator watch, don't expect them to make a smart watch either. In any event, I don't see much advantage to being an early adopter in this space. Their customers aren't banging down the door asking for a smart watch. The people I know who have smart watches so far are not your typical watch customer.

It turns out I only want to code about 25 hours a week. I'd like to spend more time either outdoors or in my workshop.

I still enjoy getting magazines in the mail. I find them more satisfying than trying to read something on a tablet. Mostly I get woodworking magazines (Woodworker's Journal and Fine Woodworking). I also get the print edition of MSDN Magazine, which I like to take with me when I go to lunch.

That's good, because I only own a metric shotgun.

Try hiring programmers sometime. I've replaced the interview with 2 simple programming tests:

1) FizzBuzz
2) Read a list of numbers, sort it, write it back out.

The candidate is expected to do this in C#. For the applicants that I get, with decent looking resumes, less than 30% pass. A good programmer can do both easily in under 10 minutes. Entry level should be able to do it in under 20 even if they've never used C# or .NET. A lot of candidates look at the screen for half an hour before admitting that they just can't do it. One guy with a degree and 5 years experience took 50 minutes to produce something that mostly worked. So I hired an entry level guy who had never used C# or .NET or Visual Studio, but still managed to finish both tasks in 12 minutes. It took some work to get him trained on MVC and EF and good web security, but it was worth it.

I don't care where they studied or even if they have a degree. If they can pass my little test, they've got a good shot at being hired. If they can't, they should be looking for a different line of work. Try hiring programmers. Give them my little test and then tell me what you think.

You might also find that for 2 employees, switching away from Windows is just not an option. There may be an accounting package or some other piece of software that they're using where changing OS is just not an option. Before you even think about making a change, take a very detailed inventory of the software that your users need. Especially the things that only get used a few times a year. That's where you'll usually find your biggest stumbling block.

You forgot a category:

* Buy it once

I'm completely willing to shell out a few bucks up front in order to not be bothered by irritating grabs for money. Of course, I also prefer single player offline games, so this works for me.

As memory serves, you would want semicolons after lines 60 and 70 so as not to cause a new line. The dangers of posting untested code to the web.

Anyway, I thought I'd share the greatest program I ever wrote: a chat-bot. I was 8 and taking a summer school BASIC class in 1984. Near the end of the summer, we had a group of seniors visiting, so I wrote a really simple chat program - just asked some questions and provided canned responses. When those seniors saw the computer talking about the weather they got up and backed away in fear and I had to explain that it said the same thing no matter what you typed, but they still wouldn't go near the computer again. Looking back, that was totally awesome.

That suggestion is utter nonsense. I have used open source programs that were later abandoned. I don't have the budget to hire 5 programmers to modernize and maintain them. At that point, I might as well hire a staff to write nearly all software I depend on.

By comparison, XP has been maintained as Vista, 7 , 8, and 8.1. Unfortunately, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, and you can't produce a modern OS without sacrificing some backwards compatibility.

Pretty much everyone who has outdated hardware tied to XP has a way to modernize. It's just... very expensive.

Microsoft has always been the lesser innovator. They're always late to the party. But they still have a stranglehold on the business desktop and that isn't going to change any time soon. Too many businesses have legacy apps that haven't been updated in 10 years and that they can't realistically migrate away from. The hard part for Microsoft this time around is that they're having to change their business model - from making money selling software to giving away the software and making money off every stupid thing the user does. Personally, I prefer to buy the software and be done with it, but the times they are a changing.

No, it's not an easy answer, you target the platform that will have the best sales when the product is released (say, 12 months in the future). Further complicated by the fragmentation of the Android platform. So now you've got the Play store, Ouya, Fire TV, and a dozen other Android platforms that you may need to customize for, each with varying hardware specs, so it's hard to predict if your game will perform as expected. Then you compare that to the Steam ecosystem, Windows, Apple, Wii U, XBone, and Play Station.

So, smartass, what's the gameplan that's going to target the greatest number of the right kind of users while minimizing development and administrative overhead? How successful will these various platforms be a year from now, and how crowded will their various marketplaces be? How many other games on that platform will you be competing against? It's a very complicated puzzle to try and figure out.

Well, there are people who avoid going to the doctor if they think they'll be switching jobs in the near future because they don't want to be burdened by a pre-existing condition.

Of course, I think in 20 years, this will all be moot. Everyone will be gene-sequenced at birth and they'll have this database of information to work off of and it will just be the new normal. Medicine will eventually learn what spam fighters already know: dumb beats smart. Which is to say, however clever you think you are, given a large enough data set, brute force data analysis will always outperform.