Most of the boot improvements created since then have done nothing but irritate the experienced users. Honestly, I wish some of the "improvements" to GUIs were undone too.

Indeed. Also, Amazon's prices are among the lowest. Another big selling point of Amazon is that we already have our shopping data saved on Amazon (credit card, address, etc). In theory, if I cross shopped for typical items I buy, I could have saved a few bucks by buying from other vendors, but this means I have to spend time entering my credit/address data, and then deal with yet unknown to me return/support policies.

The dollar used to be a receipt for a certain amount of gold that you owned in the federal reserve. But starting from 1971, the government defaulted on this commitment and the dollar became just a piece of paper.

It's not just a piece of paper. Only the only the Federal Reserve can legally create it, so the supply is tightly controlled. That's a big difference between the dollar and a stack of empty sheets sold at Office Max.

The government and the bank cartel known as the federal reserve can and do print insane amount of money every year to finance government spending

That's absolutely not true. The US Government is financed only through taxes and loans. The government and Federal Reserve's balance sheets are separate. Federal Reserve does create money, but strictly for the purposes of controlling the money supply. In a recession, the goal is to increase supply of money to decrease the chance of deflation and to lower interest rates. In times of high economic grows they normally do the reverse in order to reduce inflation.

The gold standard is completely obsolete. For it to work, the gold supply _has_ to grow at the rate of economic growth. It can't of course. Instead, the amount of inflation or deflation will depend on the rate of gold extraction.

I find the GPS navigation ok. Actually very helpful and safe, as long as you input the destination address while parked.

The slow speed of Python 3 adoption is surprising. I just started learning python last year, and it seems like some porting effort between Python 2 and 3 may be necessary but the changes between 2 and 3 are pretty small.

My understanding Microsoft now dropped ALL C support. It's now official.

I don't know what's the goal of the course, but there already exists a free online book that surveys C++, including the latest revisions. It's called C++ annotations:

http://www.icce.rug.nl/documents/cplusplus/

So how do poor men get free sex when the available women have all been sold into harems of rich men?

This question gives an explanation to the ages old tradition of waging wars on neighbors, specially the infidels, for the purpose of capturing women (and men of course, to be used as slaves).

What a bizarre post. Honestly. As if many people have to face the choice of choosing a country in the region. Anyways, I disagree.

First, Afghanistan's government is one of the most corrupt in the world. It would suffice to investigate what happens to the aid money they get from the west to rebuild the country. As I query google for "Karzai", Google kindly suggests a bunch of auto-completions. The first one is "Karzai corruption". Enough said. Karzai is hardly a democrat. Just look at the recent elections. He will make sure his clan will remain in power in future. Second, the prospect of political instability is real. No one knows what will happen once Americans fully pull out of the country. The economic prospects are bleak. This is a land-locked, agricultural country surrounded by, as you imply, "not so bright" neighbors.

I would certainly rank Iran higher than Afghanistan. At least the people living in Iran can enjoy a real rule of law without having to sleep with an AK rifle underneath the bed. Iran is much more technologically advanced society, blending old and new, with a significant Christian minority that lives and practices its religion without fear. They have oil. Yes, Iran's rulers are a bunch of crazy theocrats, but what's new?

And then China.. it sort of does not belong in comparison with the rest of Afghan neighbors. For one, it's not muslim. I am certain though that China's economic success will continue. It's a huge market and an emerging economy, ripe with business opportunities. The western businesses are willing to invest tons of money there and even do business on the terms of Chinese government, which are not always nice. Certainly, the Chinese government will have at some point to revise its "social contract" as well as the policies pertaining its economic growth (including environmental policy).

I am sure we'll see a few pictures of these crashed by spoiled sons of Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes.

The _last_ thing you want is to arrive to school already burned out. Realize that you will have plenty of opportunity for burn outs in school. Trying to look up and study something right now is probably a waste of time. Once in grad school, and under a watchful eye of your advisory, you will have the judgement on what to study and how to prepare yourself. For now, just take it easy and do something fun. I'd visit music festivals, national parks, travel abroad, etc. Enter the grad school well rested and ready.

I agree 100%. At the same time, I just can't see how the open source community and companies would allow a non-free library a monopoly on the Linux desktop. Well, maybe RedHat or some other big Linux backed should be made a deal with TrollTech, instead of spending money on Gnome.

Another bad decision about Gnome was the choice of programming language for implementation as well as the main API. The GNU people hate C++.

But to be fair, Apple's hardware pricing does suck. And while I appreciate that Macs cost less than they used to 20 years ago, it almost feels like they haven't changed pricing since about 10 years ago. 10 years ago an PowerBook would cost about $1700 for a stripped model to $3000 for a loaded model. Same thing today.

I really marvel at my newish Sumsung Series 7 laptop bought from Best Buy. Intel I7 processor, beautiful screen, long battery life, plenty of memory, and slick industrial design. All mine for $1000. I would have to spend well over $2000 to get the same package from Apple. I was really wonder how apple is able to do business in this environment, but once Windows 8 came out, I made up my mind to get a Mac next time around.

Apple is a hardware maker not an OS maker. They only make OSs to support their hardware.

For an non-OS maker, they made a damn good OS. OS X is what Linux should have been IMO. *nix kernel, runs all the standard *nix/GNU software, great _standard_ gui, API, applications, etc. They got the OS X desktop right from the start. Linux community and companies on the other hand, apparently still can't decide what their GUI should be like.

The guy who launched GNOME as a counter to KDE is complaining about "the fragmentation of Linux as a platform"? Tthe guy who made the decision replace GNUstep (which was the GNU project's official toolkit/framework in 1996) in favor of GTK Ã" he's fled to the Mac?

This does make him sound like a hypocrite. The criticisms of Linux are valid. The question is, what was he thinking back around year 2000? I was a full time Linux sysadmin also with some experience in working with a more "stable" OS, like Solaris, and it was clear to me back then that Linux would remain a mess of incompatible Desktop environments, distributions, package formats, ABIs, etc, that it was back then and that it is today. Clearly he should have seen this back then. I interpret this all as Miguel actually liking the "moving target" nature of Linux early on, then got older and now wants something that "works" without tinkering with the OS too much.

All I have been hearing about Linux for the last 14 year or so is desktop this and desktop that. Everyone crazy about writing new desktop environments, the braking what they made earlier, etc. And yet after all this time I ask where is _the Linux desktop_? Microsoft got its desktop right in Windows 95, and they just kept tweaking it since then until Windows 8 happened. Mac OS X desktop is mostly the same as I saw it in year 2000. Why couldn't Linux people copy the Windows 95 desktop, and then put their efforts into something more productive. I don't just understand that.