Love how you just can take a single message, completely out of context, quote a bunch of text which is perfectly true, and claim it says anything about your use case.

It was a release announcement, it wasn't out of context, and it was entirely relevant.

Your bullshit is old, has been debunked multiple times over

How could you debunk the point I'm making when all I have to do is link to their own release announcement and point out what it says directly disagrees with you?

nothing but hot air from the camp of the other, abandoned desktop

Nope, I was using KDE from the 1.0 betas all the way to the 4.0 betas. I only switched to GNOME after the KDE 4 debacle, and I found that even worse and ended up moving off Linux altogether.

KDE 4.0 was pretty much the same way. The developers proclaimed quite loudly that it was not meant for everyday desktop use. A few Linux distributions took software that they were clearly told was not ready for end users and gave it to end users.

There wasn't a single hint of this in the official release announcement and they were pushing it like crazy to end-users. Quote:

The KDE 4 Desktop has gained some major new capabilities. The Plasma desktop shell offers a new desktop interface, including panel, menu and widgets on the desktop as well as a dashboard function. KWin, the KDE Window manager, now supports advanced graphical effects to ease interaction with your windows.

KDE 4.0 is the innovative Free Software desktop containing lots of applications for every day use as well as for specific purposes.

The idea that KDE 4.0 wasn't intended for end-users and that the developers were clear about this was just an excuse they fell back on when it became apparent 4.0 was a miserable failure in the eyes of end-users.

The cause of the problem was a piss-poor attitude towards release management compounded with a complete inability to take responsibility for their choices. Yes, I'm aware of all the excuses, but they don't hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. Read that press release. Can you honestly say that's warning non-developers to stay away?

It's a release candidate, so it's meant for testing and preview purposes, like the developer preview of Android L.

If you label something as a release candidate, what you are saying is "we think this has been completely finished. Everybody check it out, and if we haven't screwed up, we'll rename it as the final version". Hence the name - it's a candidate for release. "Release candidate" is not another name for "preview" or "beta".

This is the kind of crap that gave KDE 4 such a bad reputation. Labelling things as done when they are still major works in progress. If you don't think it's finished, don't call it a release candidate. Don't label it as a new major version. If it's not finished, then it's neither of those things.

I could sit in an empty room for days without issue.

So could I. But if I was sat in an empty room with a button that gave me a shock, I'd definitely press it - not because I couldn't handle the boredom, but just to see what it's like. I'm not sure this study really measures what it intends to.

there's no way to tell if this is significant, or if it's a problem the average person is likely to run into.

I spent approximately 5-10 seconds typing phone theft statistics into Google and it led me to the Office of National Statistics, which says that 4% of 14-24 year-olds were victims of phone theft in the 2011/12 year.

It seems pretty obvious that this is being pursued because it gives the semblance of government helping consumers while at the same time giving government one more tool they can use to control the population.

It seems pretty obvious that people carrying small, expensive gadgets around with them are a prime target for thieves, that this is a legitimate, pervasive problem, and that this solution is effective in combating this crime.

Stop making excuses for a shitty UX. Android development is an utter pain in the arse in a lot of ways and as long as people like you make excuses instead of complaining about it, it's going to continue to be an utter pain the arse for years to come.

Consistent experiences across mobile platforms is not useful. You want consistency across the applications on the platform that the user actually uses. Normal iPhone users aren't going to care if Android users get a different UI to them, and normal Android users aren't going to care if iPhone users get a different UI to them. But both groups of users do care if the application they are using works differently to the other applications they use on their phone.

The point of the web is not so that resources are dynamically loaded from servers every time you access them. The point of the web is that you have a decentralised set of resources that are linked together.

This was clearly a tongue in cheek remark. He put a bit of mild ribbing in to get a laugh out of the audience. Calling it "berating" is a complete mischaracterisation. See for yourself, it's 45 minutes into the keynote video.

When you start comparing crime rates, violent crime rates, gun deaths, or any other socially important data, you really need to pay careful attention to terminology. It matters little that the UK may experience only 1% of our gun deaths, if they also experience 800% of our violent crime rate. After you are mutilated or dead, is it really going to matter to you that you were killed with a gun, or a knife, or a stone, or you were choked to death? Violent crime is violent crime.

You're half right. You are right in that you really need to pay attention to terminology. You are wrong when you say "violent crime is violent crime". Why? Terminology.

"Violent crime" in UK stats is a very wide term that covers a lot of things. "Violent crime" in USA stats is a very narrow term that doesn't cover a lot of things. The terminology means different things in the two countries, so what is being measured is different.

Read this for more details, including links to the definitions being used. The fact is that the UK is less violent than the USA once you look at what's being measured instead of assuming "violent crime" means the same thing in both cases.

What on earth is the point of publishing the story days before we know for sure what will happen?

That's nothing. In previous years, Slashdot has quite happily published stories about Apple products while the presenters were still on stage announcing them. Hence the discussion is useless because everybody is talking about things that are shown to be irrelevant five minutes later and the stories invariably leave a bunch of things out, necessitating updates and subsequent articles. It's a real clusterfuck sometimes.

The $649 iPhone 5S costs Apple about $199 to build. And of course, that doesn't account for things like the cost of developing the software, or operating the servers that supply service to these devices.

Also unaccounted for: royalties of around $120-$150. So in total, an iPhone doesn't cost Apple about $100, it costs them upwards of $350.

Apple sells phones with cheap hardware worth about $100 for $600.

The $649 iPhone 5S costs Apple about $199 to build. And of course, that doesn't account for things like the cost of developing the software, or operating the servers that supply service to these devices.

why is paying by phone so much better than with plastic?

One less thing to carry around. No need to hunt for the right card. Fingerprint sensors rather than having to enter a PIN. The ability to incorporate new features with a software update. The ability for your phone to keep track of your payment history instead of relying on what your bank tells you. All kinds of features that are possible with a proper CPU and data storage behind it.

Cards are essentially dumb custom hardware that do a job in the cheapest manner possible. If cards weren't already pervasive and somebody came along offering the choice between cards and phones, everybody would be questioning why on earth you would pick cards.

USB's installed base is in the billions. Thunderbolt's biggest problem is a relatively small installed base

If they are changing the connector type, there is absolutely no reason to consider the installed base of USB. USB-with-C-type-connectors has an installed base of zero, not billions.