I mean, I don't exactly believe in the Star Trek universe which is even more fairy tale than most religions. Where are we in their world order - are we equals, enemies, slaves, pets, food, pests or just a honking big X-factor that threaten their very existence? Since their military power would be mostly unknown it'd be real easy to get paranoid. Just dealing with wacko humans is bad enough, what do you really know about an alien or how they think? Nothing. I think we'd jump right into a military arms race which might end very badly for at least one of us. Perhaps both, if MAD still applies on an interplanetary scale.

'"To quote, or double quote, that is the question'" - Not Shakespeare

That all sounds like things I've had in the past, perhaps not all at once but unless I'd been to Ebola-infected countries lately I might not think much of it. The infected person came from Liberia, but if a Texan that hadn't left the state for ages starts showing symptoms it's a lot less obvious. All it takes is one of those die-hard unbelievers in modern medicine who won't seek help until he's half way down the list of serious symptoms and you're in trouble.

Windows Nein just had a wrong sound to it.

Well, since leaving college I've rarely used my Physics degree. He's just taking that to the logical conclusion...

Well, how many times have you seen "let's make our own date/time/number/argument/xml parser"?

<consultant mode>
Well, I'd put it in a 2x2 matrix with low/high impact, low/high corporate usage. High/highs is stuff like your office suite, a lot of people use it and quite a lot. Low/high are things like time sheet recording, people need to do it but it's a very minor part of their work day. Both of these you generally need to have good solutions for since you'd be wasting so many people's time otherwise, the heavily used of course more so. Low/lows you don't really need to care much about, unless they add up to some extraordinary amounts. The killer is often the high/lows, basically the specialized tools a few in your organization use.

The (strike:problem) challenge is that these tools are different. For example, your graphics department might rely heavily on Photoshop. Nobody else in the business might care about that, but they again have their own tools they care about. Retraining, lost productivity and lower output quality can be significant costs. Existing workflows and procedures must be migrated. Forced migration may lead to employee dissatisfaction and higher turnover as they want to continue their career towards becoming a Photoshop expert. Those costs have to be considered relative to the gains of making a migration. I can do an in-depth study, if you got funding...
</consultant mode>

Seriously though, I think more plans about migrating to Linux dies from a thousand cuts rather than one fatal blow. I haven't done an OS migration but I've seen some others, the major issues are under control. It's all those minor "uh oh, we didn't think of that" issues with emergency band-aids and workarounds that tends to turn it into a fire fighting exercise.

For computer generated graphics custom workflows and creating tools to animate things others can't have has been the driving force. There's plenty of complex interactions between models, textures, animations, physics simulations and various like creating a whole army from a few parameterized models and AI. No tool does everything well and often there's some secret sauce you want integrated into the workflow. Photoshop on the other hand mostly seems like a one-stop shop, you hand a skilled person the image and what you want done and he'll produce an end result. Efficiency seems to be the primary driver, not integration or customization.

My ideal endgame is an ad-free world, but that's probably a utopian dream. A little while a go, there was an article about how much each Internet user would have to pay on a yearly basis for all ads, tracking cookes etc. to be eliminated. It was only a couple hundred dollars, I would gladly pay that to be completely free from ads online.

If advertising on a site starts getting too intrusive or annoying, I stop using that site, simple as that. Mind you, they'd have to get through Adblock, Privacy Badger, Disconnect, Noscript and Flashblock first. I see more than enough ads in the real world despite throwing my TV away years ago. It's my web browser and my eyes, I choose what I want to see.

I subscribe to a number of sites already, I don't see the problem with charging a fair amount for your services. Paying customers expect higher quality and are generally much better at giving feedback to site operators, a mutually beneficial setup. I also pay for services like Lastpass and Xmarks because while they offer something I could implement myself using Keypass, Google Drive and a host of plugins for my browsers, they make the whole process streamlined and easy to work with.

Of course not, and they're not meant to. They're limited-input devices made primarily for receiving and consuming media, they're not meant for content creation, and the available tools for creating content are limited and usually simplistic in nature. They're meant for quick changes and fix-ups, not for full-on usage as the only tool for a job.

My private phone is Android (Cyanogenmod), my work phone is Android, I used to own an Android tablet and I currently own an iPad Air that I got from a work-related course I'm taking. It would suck trying to do every part of my job on either of them, and I would hate to try it. But they're great for reading the news or catching up on mail while I'm on the bus, that sort of thing. I have a perfectly serviceable laptop, but when I need to check something, it's so much faster to just pull out my phone and look it up. Not to mention having Google Maps available at a whim, mapping really is the killer app for mobile devices.

As for the tablets, I usually bring it along to meetings etc. instead of lugging along the laptop. That way, I can quickly re-check previous mails if a specific subject comes up, or I can jot down quick notes with drawings and maybe show them on a projector if needed. With laptops, people have a tendency to almost hide behind the screens, a tablet is much more like an old-fashioned notepad in that you're not isolating yourself from the rest of the participants.

Occams Razor says ...... networks like Tor which are incapable of handling abuse by design ...... get a lot of abuse! So not surprisingly networks that have advanced anti-abuse controls in place throttle it a lot. Otherwise you're just asking to get crawled by SQL injector searchers and so on. This is not CloudFlare's problem, it's inherent in how Tor works and what it's trying to achieve. Solving it means finding a way to trade off anonymity against accountability using user reputation systems or the like, but the Tor project has shown little interest in implementing such a thing, so all Tor users get treated as a whole.

Well, allowing JavaScript gives people who'd like to de-anonymize you:

a) A much bigger attack surface, rendering engines are rather safe while scripting engines are quite risky by comparison.
b) Much more accurate ways to fingerprint users through querying the system.
c) Much simpler ways to use AJAX to create traffic patterns to trace you through the system.

That the TorBrowser developers (Tor is just the transport layer - it speaks TCP/IP, not HTTP) choose to leave JavaScript enabled is more a pragmatic choice so users don't experience a "broken web". But if you need the protection Tor has to offer, then you probably should disable JavaScript and find yourself web 1.0 services to serve your needs. Otherwise you're probably better off just getting a cheap VPN.

No, they're very good at reproducing things and if you haven't got teachers or you haven't got skilled teachers or you haven't got interested teachers then the computer at least give kids a chance to learn. Unlike here in western society for these kids education is a precious resource that they know is essential to have a decent future, first you have to give them the opportunities before you start worrying about motivating them to make use of them.

The absolute worst is when carriers disable tethering or hide it behind a tethering plan at extortionate prices. They have absolutely no reason to care whether the traffic coming through my phone originated from the phone or from my PC. If my subscription allows me 5GB of data traffic per month, it should not matter one bit which device it is used for.

Putting the Play Store icon right on the default home screen is a very sensible move. Smartphone equals apps, and people don't want to hunt around for the app store.

At least all of the other stuff is in a single folder that's easy to remove from the home screen. I know the apps are still installed, but maybe I'm just getting older and less reactionary, because I don't really care about the 200MB or so they take up. I haven't even come close to running out of space on an Android device yet.