Retirement is happiness... plan for it.

Wrong, wrong, wrong my friend. Life is what happens while you're making plans. Your tomorrow is never guaranteed, nor your investments, nor your health. It's the great American lie that you should bust your b*lls doing stuff you hate for 30-40 years just so you can maximize earning for the HOPE that you can enjoy 20+ of in in retirement. Doesn't that sound stupid to you? It does to me. I'm sorry - but one of my life goals was to climb a mountain or two. I can't do that at 70. I can do it now at 30. So I do it - and have experienced something great by climbing a few of them already. It's opened doors to my life that I never would have known about.

You are taking a HUGE risk that your health, investments, happiness and stamina will last until you're 65 and then 'magically' start living life. Have you not listened to all the people in serious accidents or those that get cancer/etc? They all wish they had lived more each day and not wasted so many days. Live your life NOW; don't wait and make the ultimate gamble you'll actually be able to live life later when you're old.

While I love our post office system - this smacks of protectionism and not re-orienting with the times.

We don't have the Pony Express around because the telegraph came along. The telegraph was universally better in terms of speed, efficiency, etc. Should we have taxed telegrams more just to keep around an obsolete system for ???? not sure what. Physical delivery of mail is wasteful from a fuel, resources, and time. Granted, there will ALWAYS need to be package delivery of goods (even more so in an internet economy) and a system that works when crises' happen; but it sounds to me like it's time to do what every business and natural/biological system does when the fundamental environment changes occurs in some way - you must change too. Find the things our society still needs from a postal service.

Yes, this is painful, and all efforts should be made to help transition workers and the systems. However, it's just prolonging the problem and compounding the pain later when this will have to be addressed. It sucks - but life is change. Change is challenging and difficult and we should help ease the transition for people as best as we can. But when gently moving with the shifts in our economy and way people work is MUCH better than trying to iron-fistedly stick to the past.

This already exists - it's called Ikea furniture. I swear - it's DRM is that it can only survive two moves - then totally self-destructs.

I heard you liked an editor in your editor, so we put and editor in your editor so you can edit while you edit!

While funny for slashdot - it's basically like watching people arrange deckchairs on the Titanic. These are tools - tools to get your job done. Use the best tool and stop circle-j-ing about this over that/etc. I use both whenever it suits me; but don't do any serious development in either anymore. There's so, so, so much better tools out there than these tired old things.

...unless you're experiencing a problem expressly fixed by a BIOS patch - do NOT update your BIOS.

As much as I like to upgrade like the next guy - I've experienced far more problems than fixes with most bios updates. The only time I update now is when they specifically fix a problem I'm having.

In the case of your 'really expensive' stuff or essential hardware - if it's just a security patch - get a nice $50 router with firewall and plug your device into that. No use risking or destroying a piece of essential hardware on a BIOS update that is ALWAYS a risky operation.

And shame them. Shame them publicly on reviews and on their forums. Be courteous by not using foul language or being irate - but state the facts and how they treated you. If they don't realize this is super-bad PR, then these guys likely don't deserve your business.

I'm glad someone wrote up an article about this. I'm actually for the kind of transparency he's promoting; and I think his work has shown that governments cannot and should not be allowed to hide from the truth. He's a brave new pioneer into the kind of work the 'free press' should be doing - but do not because of their limitations (should all reporters know basic hacking techniques in the future - question for another time). WRT the article, referring to his org as a cult is a bit much (but I'm sure there's elements in there as there always are), but here's the real problem with his organization:

His organization has and gets very secret information. This information is often so powerful/secret/damning that could potentially bring down banks, companies, individuals, or maybe even countries or at least their regimes. There are a number of problems with a sole person with this much power.
How do we know if he's not 'cherry-picking' information and just releasing what he wants to cause the reaction he wants? Does he fact-check anything he releases at all? We know news organizations Fox/NPR/et al can do exactly this to sway public opinion. Just because he's releasing information doesn't mean he's releasing ALL the information that would paint a full picture. It doesn't tell us if he's at all modified or tampered with that information. Unless the person who's accused comes out with counter-proof (if there is even a way if the leaked info was purely made up anyway), there is no way to know without a LOT of fact checking of likely terribly secret stuff. But the damage would be done by then. At best it turns into a credibility war; and with no transparency on either side - who are we to believe?
With information so central and key to financial and government systems, what is to keep Assange and co from going rouge and extorting or holding companies, countries or people for blackmail? "Just leave me alone Obama or I'll dump all that stuff about those drone strike kills you ordered". "Ok Goldman, give me 5 million dollars/year and a Lear jet or I leak how you knew about the housing collapse and fed into it" He very well could have information right now that could upset major governments and/or financial institutions, bankrupt huge corporations, and plunge the world into chaos/worse recession. With as somewhat unstable as he seems at times - do you really trust one man bouncing from country to country - living in hotel rooms - to make decisions to 'do the right thing' at all times?
These are all the exact same problems that news organizations have. They must fact check, and release information in a way that promotes truth in our organizations without destroying the very things we need to survive in a modern world. He has none of these burdens.

Dang it - now there is a patent on square ships with rounded corners!

I have. I hate using touch on my desktop. I hate going back and forth between keyboard and mouse and then touching. It's just not a good desktop metaphor. Don't believe me? Apple, Android and MS confirm it. None of their IU's for mobile/touch devices have desktop metaphores. Single app open at a time, fixed spacing icons for starting apps, no documents/folder/tree hierarchies, etc. I'm not a lover of Apple at times, but I think they're completely right on this point.

A hammer still works better than the most elegantly crafted screwdriver in the world when it comes to putting in nails. Film at 11!

Chris Weber, the CEO and former Microsoft executive, fired Oleg Romashin stating that "Resistance to our Win7 strategy is futile. You will be eliminated."

They don't appear to be able to keep the power on long enough for anyone to see it broadcast...

| It's pretty hypocritical to criticize a license for requiring that redistribution of the source of that code or derivatives must be under the same license and then turn around and recommend everyone use the GPL instead.

This this this! Finally - someone points out the elephant, the pot calling the kettle black. For once I'd like the GPL community to admit this. The tactics and business models supported by GPL-style licenses is why I never have, and never will, release my software with one of their licenses. It's either free - or it's not.

Either give it away free like you intended, or follow the GPL rabbit hole down and just guess what GPL 4, 5 and 6 will look like...

| User/Device security is no more or less "secure" than it was back in 1995,

I disagree. The amount of compute time rises dramatically each year (Moore's law), it is not good enough to simply 'tread water' and just upping the key length are sufficient. New techniques and systems are constantly being built to attack these methods. While I'm not saying SSH is bad or outdated, I'm saying that cryptanalysis and raw compute has not stopped chipping away at the corners and weak spots. What if at 51200 bit security, we find an aweful and damnin patter appears in the math? We still cannot prove that any of these particular methods for cryptography today couldn't be completely broken wide open with a numerical discovery tomorrow (while we are pretty sure it can't).

We mustn't fall into the trap of thinking that what is good enough today is good forever. Have as many irons in the fire being tested and competing is the best way for your protection today and tomorrow.

I would largely agree. Unfortunately, I believe it is because real security - cryptography and end-to-end security and privacy - are very difficult, and hence, very expensive to develop, implement, and test. My experience with such coding is that it's every bit, if not more, rigorous as code written for medical devices or flight control software. It simply has to be bulletproof. Any one hole in the theory, algorithm, or implementation - and the whole thing comes apart. Learning about all those possible holes and plugging them is a herculean task. One can point to the near constant stream of security patches for every browser, app, and OS on the market. And these are the best-funded commercial enterprises around.

Another huge problem is the 'meh' attitude people have towards their personal information. We throw our data around so willy-nilly on smart phones and social networks. We check in places that tell everyone where we are (or are not http://pleaserobme.com/ ), publicly publish our most intimate family and friend relationships, report where we live and work, we even identify people to image recognition software. One expert I heard said that he could not imagine a more dastardly personal information monitoring system than Facebook. And we WILLINGLY give that information away. Google reads your emails and all the documents you upload to their 'free' services. Websites use everything they can to target ads at you, etc.

The unfortunate part, as my CS security professor pointed out, is that by the time it crosses an ethical line - it's nearly impossible to stop. Even worse, what if the company you gave all that info too gets sold to a very un-scrupulous person in a country with no protections? What if your government is taken over and they raid these databases for information about dissenters? All of these things are real, happen today, and yet we consider it more important to be able to brag to our friends and family what we had for dinner last night than protect ourselves.

| In my experience, Agile projects tend to run longer than they would have under waterfall, but the end product is usually closer to what the customer needs

Great analysis - I would agree.

The other pitfall I've seen of people claiming to be 'agile' is that it's a keyword for "You're about to give your life and soul to this startup". I think a fair number of places claim to be running an Agile process, but in reality use it as a keyword for busting your hump as hard as they can. And run as fast as you can if you ever see an ad looking for someone that wants to hire you for "a fast-paced, dynamic, agile environment".