...two months is all you need to cross from one year to the next, which, under the %m-%d-%Y scheme, would still fail to sort in the expected chronological order.

Need I point out that %Y-%m-%d sorts properly, whereas %m-%d-%Y does not? When's the last time you needed releases sorted by month but not year?

I once repaired a computer with no fewer than 250,000 copies of a particular virus (don't recall which) installed. With each virus .exe weighing in at 12KB, that was 3GB of virus code on the laptop (given that this was about 6 years ago, that was a substantial amount of space).

The machine was a new laptop with XP SP1 installed (so no firewall). On its first day, it was connected to a university LAN for 8 hours non-stop, while a virus was running around the network. The virus did not have code to detect an existing infection, so it simply reinfected the machine many times.

It ran fine until the owner shut it down. Upon restarting, every virus .exe tried to start, resulting in a hung system on boot. It took a commercial antivirus program over 10 hours to finish clearing the machine.

The soap box is censored, the ballot box is a sham, and the jury box is rigged. Maybe then you see why some would resort to force?

I didn't realize using a standard audio format, with tons of support from tons of software and hardware, and with better licensing terms than MP3 counted as "lock in".

You are also drawing an unfair comparison between Microsoft's desktop operating environment and Apple's mobile environment. Apple runs iOS like basically any game console; if you think that iOS is evil, then you probably also think Nintendo is evil too for making their platforms locked down.

On the other hand, Apple's Mac OS X operating system is far more open than Microsoft's ever was. On OS X, the kernel (Darwin) is open-source, the browser (WebKit) is open-source, the compiler (LLVM/Clang) is open-source, and the company employs developers who maintain and contribute back to these projects.

Apple also sits on several standards committees, and actively participates in standards development and promulgation.

In many, many ways, Apple is not nearly as "evil" as you seem to think.

Python never had shell backquotes. The code snippet is highlighting one way that shell backquotes from other languages can be handled. (The "backquote" operator in Python 2.x is equivalent to "repr", e.g. `3+4` yields '7'; it is now gone in Py3K for obvious reasons).

In Python 2.7 and 3.1, there's now a convenience function for capturing program output:

subprocess.check_output('ls -l')

I doubt your claim that Py3K has made things more complicated. If anything, it has made things simpler: less language "burrs" (e.g. / now does float division, eliminating the need to stick float() on one argument or use weird constructs like 1./3), a cleaner standard library ("io" is a great idea), and proper Unicode/8-bit distinction.

That works out to an effective resolution of ~16000x9000, which is pretty damn high (it's a 144 megapixel display). I'm sure we'll eventually get to that point, but seriously, a 144 MP display is still a few years off.

Also, at normal viewing distances, I doubt a 360 dpi display has any significant advantage over a 120 dpi display (1080p on a 52" screen is about 42 dpi, so 120 dpi seems like a more reasonable goal).

Most Android phones also have a battery cover, so in these cases you just pull the battery: problem solved.

No, to turn off an iPhone/iPod touch the proper way, you hold down the sleep button for five seconds, and slide to power off. It's really not that hard.