Can't comment on exactly _this_ plan for doomsday, but my Dad was a highly-placed official in the Post Office Department/Postal Service during the 60s-80s, and there was a CoG (Continuity of Government) plan, at least for leadership.

Don't ask me who they thought was going to deliver the mail.

Dad was supposed to abandon the family and head for a specific place in the mountains 90 or so miles west of the city. (There was plenty DC traffic in the '60s, but it wasn't anything like it is today - and the exurbs weren't crowded with townhomes, Costcos and Ferrari dealers).

Dad had his instructions, and while he was a good soldier, I seem to recall he told me he couldn't have left us. Knowing the man, I think that's right.

Besides, the plan was destined for obsolescence once MIRVs and multiple H-Bomb city-busters were developed. There's just no way to survive something like that and have remaining anything like the civilization we enjoy.

GAME OVER

on a MACHINE!!!!!

I mean a heavy Western Electric Bakelite phone with a corded handset, a dial and a bell. Makes a magnificent clatter that ends with a ding. Nothing quite like it.

Broken DAAP music server playing - can no longer play music with iTunes from my streaming server (since like iTunes 10).

The rest of iTunes - plenty more comments detail this.

Usability: removal of the scroll arrows from the UI. If you're not on a multitouch pad, or a wheely mouse, hey, just get used to it. F.U. Apple.

Intentional removal of their OWN Fax Modem (yes, a software issue, as the Fax Modem dongle did its processing on the Mac CPU). Only found out about this item I only kept around to receive rare faxes when I suddenly needed to receive a fax. Doesn't work, and doesn't say why: upgrading the OS was enough to break it forever. Would've been nice to hear that BEFORE I upgraded.

Apple Mail: steaming pile of turd. I've had Apple Mail mistakenly associate emails with an account identity, then when I delete that identity, all the mail goes away with it. Have had Apple Mail silently mangle emails for months before I found out. Wish there were some other option other than this featureless pile of feces, but there's really not anything that's both better and less buggy. Eudora was, but it's been out of maintenance for maybe a decade.

Breakage of their legacy software: In the last month I've been moving a huge pile of offline CD and DVD stuff back to magnetic storage (since it's cheap now), and am amazed that so many presentation/multimedia/game/video titles will never run again, because Apple has dropped their Classic and Rosetta emulators. Stuff of a similar vintage could probably be at least opened on Windows (if not actually run well).

AppleLink>eWorld>iTools>.mac>mobile me>iCloud: Apple has shown a complete inability to focus on maintaining online services. They announce an infrastructure, allow users to build something significant on it, then shut it off without a thought. #epicfail. I wouldn't trust Apple with any of my data online.

There's plenty more wrong. The list goes on...

Ham/Hamburger

There is nobody, in any party, who I see on the horizon that I'm excited to vote for.

Can't give the electorate something to run from - got to give 'em something to run to. And I haven't seen it yet.

Mood pareant down for poro spleeling.11!!!

Good point - I stand corrected.

No. Really, no.

VW owners with a VAG-COM can do a number of tunes, mods and adaptations with just the software and the cable.

Modern cars run a CAN BUS (Car Area Network) and you can probably do a great deal on a number of vehicles. Certainly VW and Audi, but I can't imagine the rest of the industry is sitting still.

A VAG-COM is just about standard equipment for a VW owner who does his/her own repairs. Wouldn't think of doing more than regular maintenance without it. And for some of that (flushing brake fluid, f.e.), it's still necessary.

I was actually in Junior High at Williamsburg JHS at the time - 8th grade. The "Dialcom" name is familiar - I could be wrong about it being a CDC machine.

Our math teachers were pretty baffled, but trying to put a brave face on kicking off our computer education. There was a lot of "hope I don't break this thing" hesitation. There were a few hardy souls there who really helped us get started.

It appalled me when I got to college in '77 that I had to go backwards to punch cards and JCL for Fortran. Ugh.

I spent a lot of time on the "Career Center" time shared HP (IIRC) in high school at Yorktown, via an ADM-3A glass tube terminal, and on their HP 9830A "Calculator" (really, a low-end mini/microcomputer). Loved that 32-character dot-matrix display!

I learned my first line-number BASIC (*ptui!*) on an ASR-33 teletype via time-sharing on a Control Data system in public school in Arlington, VA in 1975.

I wrote dumb exponentiation loop programs about Ben, and how his rats would take over the city.

If you don't need other training or certification classes, and actually are learning from your conferences, have your manager use her education budget to send you.

If she doesn't have an education budget, why the hell not? Their investment in you is probably large enough to warrant it, and they'd BETTER be budgeting for it, vs. throwing the occasional wad of cash out there. You're cheaper to train up to a new internal position than to find someone new and start from scratch.

Provided you're not going to the Shriner's convention for the water balloons and the little cars (unless you're in the water balloon or little car industry) education and conferences are normal, expected business expenses.

If you're in the US and the company won't send you, you can deduct your own purchase of the conference and associated costs from your taxes as "unreimbursed business expense" - BUT NOTE that there's a threshold that has to be met: I forget the number, but I think you can only deduct unreimbursed bix expense greater than 7% of your salary. So if you are $5 higher than that 7% mark, you deduct $5.00.

The begging thing might make your taxes complicated...

Look, where would ./ be if posters read TFA?

Looks to me like the ./ summary is claiming something that the ZDNet article does not. So yeah, not a lie on Cook's part, or not one the ZDNet article demonstrates anyway.

I still wouldn't trust any company not to hand over my information to the government. Lavabit was one hell of an exception, and one geeks the world over should be proud of.

Neither would I trust that email content I didn't personally encrypt with my own keys couldn't be seen by others.

Apple doesn't have to be relaying email for others in order for Apple to be able to see the contents of all SMTP traffic that transits or terminates at their mail servers. SSL for SMTP means nothing if the mail server is pwned or intentionally logging stuff due to a business mandate or government subpoena or pressure.

So Tim Cook didn't tell that particular lie. Good. But "We don't read your email" is an assertion, and one generally impossible to prove true (though more easily possible to prove false, given a certain amount of evidence).

Since when is anyone's SMTP email secure in transit, when is anyone running a mailserver unable to read the mail?

Since when is any company immune from subpoena or contempt of court?