I remember when software was like hardware where at least some people were focused on delivering cool new shit people will want to spend money on.

Today everybody just wants to be an asshole and play marketing games to sell their bullshit. You can only install software we tell you to from our store. Use our "cloud" service because we won't even PERMIT you to maintain a local list of contacts on your own device... They are openly hostile to their customers in a bid to maximize dependency on their platforms.

The future isn't about progress it's about metering out as little value as possible for as much as possible.

Apple pioneered lack of choice and single vendor dominance over whole of hardware and software infrastructure. Congratulations.

Interesting NSA is able maintain such a dominate position when it comes to employment of mathematicians in todays "high technology world".

I can see professional cosmologists not wanting to piss off NASA yet something seems quite wrong with my world view for there to exist such a lack of demand for mathematicians across the board.

Asking scientists questions about topics for which they are not domain experts is misguided at best.

This was retrieved today from FCC website:

Why does the FCC continue to define broadband as 200 kbps for the purposes of service provider reporting requirements when it is 100 times lower than their current definition of broadband?

OP's comments are worthless because it cherry picks a specific example to speak about a general category.

Your comments are equally silly..

Dude, man that Big Mac was awwwwefulll... Mc Donald's blows...

Why is it that "you people" all come out and mock it while ignoring the equally awful food served at Burger King?

As if it the commenter had some kind of duty to enumerate their disposition to everything else just to be "fair".

This is a worthless generalization that may be true or false depending on quality of specific systems under comparison.

What is basis for your assumption FOSS is automatically more secure just because it is FOSS? Please cite a study or statistical information supporting your assumption.

I give up... how many?

There is also downside in possibility next time media and or government freaks out about a genuinely dangerous storm they will be ignored.

I don't even bother with commercial PC games anymore. Nobody can make a fun game today without treating users like shit once they purchase. Just isn't worth it.

I've seen this happen to friends with various puzzle games. Vendor either went out of business or sold out to someone else and games stopped working or couldn't be reinstalled after a computer crash because the registration servers no longer resolved.

Predict a coming wave of surprises in the future as people begin belatedly realize the strange wording on the side of the box saying vendors assert the right to abandon the game and deny access anytime they want isn't just an idle threat or legalese to be tuned out.

Follow Bert the Turtle's example and you will be just fine.

Did this nonsense also come from the federal civil defense administration?

This is just an excuse there are ways of architecting systems or adding strings and pressure that would have avoided these completely **predictable** unpleasantries from the start. This is like building a bridge that collapses during a wind storm and the builder/architect say hey not our fault we didn't cause the wind.

While mobile carriers and more importantly mobile vendors who unsurprisingly refuse to support their one-off creations are assholes iPhone and WP8 users don't have this problem. When Apple releases an iPhone patch it gets distributed.

A most dangerous category of automation is overly assumptive reflex actions based on incomplete knowledge of the situation.

What happens when I want to change lanes to avoid an accident and a computer has already decided to hit the breaks or apply them harder than intended? Now vehicle is turning and breaking at the same time probably in less than ideal conditions contributing to an initial event.

Only thing grosser than eating Cheetos and licking your fingers while texting and driving is making others pay for your cheesiness.

I don't believe in real quantum computers because they require operating on the premise you can just sit there and extract whatever unlimited amounts of computation from the universe for a cost exponentially approaching free.

No doubt at all these machines given enough time and effort will work and they will provide the world with useful benefits only those benefits will look nothing like:

"Problems that would take a state-of-the-art classical computer the age of our universe to solve, can, in theory, be solved by a universal quantum computer in hours."

Make your websites a PDF file. It will always look and print nicely without wasted time quibbling over screen size, browser compatibility, fonts, CMS security patches or complaints from clients who need your help changing x, y AND z by themselves for free.

The nice thing about PDF files creating them is just a click away for most WYSIWYG publishing systems and by withholding source document your clients will have no way of making any changes without paying you.

If you object to my response with reasonable arguments it may be better to consider a different approach better addressing your (customers) specific needs.

How many unauthenticated remote exploits in a HTTP stack does it take to lose a customer?

Never understood how Oracle is allowed to continue to operate like this. The only thing worse than a multi-billion dollar software company failing to exercise any discipline over their systems unauthenticated attack surface is length of time they must have sat on all of these exploits just so they could package it up and release all at once.