Strange, the original article only mentions religion in a single sentence, to caution that it's only one of many contributing factors. Yet the ill-informed, hating first poster goes on and on about religion. Huh? "It's all the fault of religion". Totally unrelated to the article. Not related to any real issues that have been in the news lately. (Unless you assume everyone who is a skeptic of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is so because they are "religious".) Totally ignorant of philosophy, history, and probably has never actually done science themselves.

The two actual factors we have to address are: 1) decades of emphasizing self-esteem rather than learning, and 2) the Wall-street-ization of our jobs. US students are very confident that they're "good at math", but in fact are not, and we're busy churning out business students and many of our students who actually are mathematically talented spend their lives inventing increasingly dangerous financial derivatives.

1) Microsoft has backstabbed almost every "partner" it has had, which means it only gets voluntary partners that are: a) stupid, or b) greedy.

2) Microsoft could go over the heads of the carriers, just like Apple, if it actually had something compelling for consumers. Instead, they used their default strategy of pushing carriers around while assuming that consumers would be drawn in by the fact that "It's Windows!". They didn't want to stand on the boat, and they didn't want to stand on the dock, so they ended up in the water. Windows 8 may be an attempt to get on the (consumer) boat, or it might turn out to be an attempt to stand on both the boat and dock in which case they will also end up in the water again.

"... theoretically this technology could allow a grocer to put a picture on the store package of the pig you are eating."

Yeah, that would sell so many more packages. Reminds me of the friends who decided to raise their own Thanksgiving Turkey. (Who did not get eaten at Thanksgiving, and is now spending its retirement years in the country, at the friends' expense.)

Sounds like the famous Yogi-ism: "No one goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

Huh? The iPhone and iPad have been competitive on the price front, and in fact it's taken two generations of the iPad for a viable challenger to emerge based on cost. Heck, Apple's the only manufacturer to stand up to the carriers and demand a better experience for users. All the other manufacturers -- including Google -- treat the carriers as the customers and please them first.

I fear for the level of self-loathing that Anyone-but-Apple fanboys will be subjected to as a result of this. The desire to be cool is strong... will it overcome the desire to hate Apple?

As others have said, if you're mainly doing reports, stick with Excel or a database solution. Excel lets you look at your data from a variety of angles (pivot tables, etc), and has usable graphs. As usual, Microsoft has numerical issues, so you may get wrong answers under certain conditions, but hey, it's Excel.

What is it that "anything complicated" means? Fancy graphs? Fancy partitioning/aggregation of data? Modeling and forecasting? Summary statistics? Graphs that aren't fancy, but Excel doesn't provide?

An open source option that I haven't seen mentioned is gretl. It has a reasonable GUI and can make nice graphs (though not terribly customizable), give summary statistics, sample data in various ways, and do basic modeling. (It comes from an econometric world, so has quite a few time series capabilities.) If you need to do some things with time series, it would be helpful. (Though if you don't know what you're doing, it simply makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot.)

Insightful? Seriously? I think if your store were looted and trashed, you might be singing a different tune. Or if you lived across the street from a car that was set on fire. Or if one of your family needed emergency medical service and ambulances were held off because of the rioting.

Your comparison to Farenheit 451 is ridiculous. The book had people looking for someone whose "crime" was to read, not for someone who stole and vandalized property.

But Newell was talking about games, not... Oh... I see... some people consider Farmville a game... Nevermind.

(On a more serious note, I assume that Farmville "players" who get unfriended because they bug people would be penalized, just as Team Fortress players who harass other players off of a server would be penalized.)

I was also a CS major, and I did in fact take Diff Eq and Partial Diff Eq, and I'd have to say that other than recognizing the symbols I haven't really retained much... or needed it. On the other hand, I did poorly in Probability & Statistics -- pretty counter-intuitive stuff in many ways -- and I've been painfully whacked by that deficit multiple times in graduate studies. I finally feel like I'm getting it, but much of what I know now is self-taught so I have blind spots in my knowledge that will still embarrass me.

In fact, I'm using statistics more and more, and wish I'd been a statistician. Of course, if I were a statistician, I'd say that so much of advanced statistics is MCMC and other techniques require programming to be tractable, not just running single commands in R.

In the end, you are thus depriving that SOMEONE ELSE the ability to use the software at all. You're defending "their" rights by denying them the access they need. Sort of destroying the city in order to save it.

As far as I can tell, there are two different classes of "SOMEONE ELSE": average users and programmer geeks. In order to preserve the rights of the programmer geeks, you are denying access to average users. Just like Gnu GO on the iPhone. I can't have it at all because a "freedom" advocate believes allowing me to have it would cause them some kind of harm... sounds suspiciously like proprietary software, really. They think they're different because their demands don't involve money.

Some people see cheap laptops as bicycles with their wheels and seat removed and a higher price. Makes about as much sense as the OP.

No one thinks tablets will replace laptops for things that laptops do well. Especially not quality laptops. However, cheap, tiny laptops -- many of which were purchased to essentially do tablet activities -- will be replaced. The laptop form facto is essentially a clever way to attach the traditional desktop keyboard to the monitor, making it nicely portable. You get a larger screen, more CPU power, and a physical keyboard, but trade off battery life, form factor, and a free-form interface that allows you to interact and share it more like paper or a book. Tablets (so far) are the reverse, and for many people they are superior.

Nokia has 32% of the cellphone market (down from 36% the year before), which is not bad. Unless you consider that at the same rate of decline, they'll be at less than 25% of the market in two years. Which would not be so bad, if their share of the market were highly profitable. But Apple -- which currently owns only 4% of the overall cellphone market -- currently earns over 50% of the profits, and Nokia earns less than 30%, so Nokia doesn't really have a profitable niche into which it can retreat. Android and Apple look like they'll continue to siphon up most of the high-end profits, and the Chinese will make the low-end untenable, so exactly where will Nokia survive?

I got a Marware cover for my iPad and love it. One issue it had though, was that the iPad's compass simply never worked. It always gave me the Figure-8 Shake warning, and I eventually thought that perhaps my iPad was defective... Then one day I noticed that the flip out "foot" in the cover is held in place by two magnets. Whoops. Really only an issue if you use a compass app or if you want to figure out directions while not moving, but an interesting design issue none-the-less.

This reminds me of the Madoff clients who didn't make money ("victims"), who are now going after Madoff clients who did make money ("co-conspirators") in order to get back money -- and perhaps "profits", too. Greed is still evidently good, for those who can afford the lawyers... or at least for the lawyers.