Oh great let's throw the baby out with the bath water. What moral doctrine do you subscribe to anyway? I'd rather teach my kids some values in the Bible, especially Romans 12 than let them be brainwashed by pop culture and advertising that will preach anything to make a buck including demoralizing women and encouraging voracious consumption to the detriment of the consumer! That makes for a great society with fantastic values especially in America. A bunch of citizens subscribing to the doctrine of debt, debauchery, selfishness and gluttony. So, enlighten us, oh wise one. What should we all follow that will make our countries filled with better citizens and more prosperity?

You are very ignorant. Just because organized religion has its shortcomings isn't a reason to bash a much more sound explanation of the the origin of the universe. Intelligent Design is not the same thing as creationism or religion. You, sir, need to understand meta thinking. You know the system outside the system? Outside the box my friend. :) Our universe has a set of constant properties. Intelligent Design merely asks the question "Where did these properties come from?" Who decided there was gravity, electromagnetism, photons, protons, neutrons, neutrinos, quantum entanglement and any number of different fundamental building blocks that are all finely in balance with each other to allow this universe to have existed for billions of years in amazing harmonious balance.

Let me guess my Atheist friend, it all emerged from chaos. Where did the chaos come from? Report back when you have a better explanation than a very intelligent Architect that has intelligence so vastly superior to ours that we cannot even begin to comprehend it. I patiently await your response.

I don't think that last bit is necessarily true. I would buy a laptop with a touch screen built-in but I'm certainly not going to pay a premium price for it. I think consumers like me are looking at it like "that's cool but it isn't worth the price." Give it to me for free and more discounted and I may adopt it.

The other thing is Windows 8 pretty much kicked the mouse/keyboard user in the balls when there are a plethora of tasks that can be done with a mouse and keyboard but not realistically with a touch screen. Maybe I could do some graphic design with a stylus but who does that with the screen tilted up? Graphic tablets are different.

In a nut shell, Microsoft doesn't understand the market, doesn't understand its customers and doesn't understand its partners. That is why they are failing to capitalize.

Some girls don't like games but here are some to try that the female population seems to be more receptive to in my experience:

Party Games: Guitar Hero, Mario Party, Wii Party, Scene It, Monopoly Streets
Multiplayer Platformers: Mario Kart, New Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong Country, Little Big Planet
Puzzle Games: Bejeweled, Peggle, Hidden Object Games like Mystery Case Files
Adventure Games: Back to the Future (big hit with my fiancee, we played through the whole thing)

For the more girly girls, you might need to go with something with the "cute" factor. Little Big Planet is especially good at this one. You can put stickers on stuff and dress your sack boy/girl. It's also multiplayer. Co-op is usually a plus.

This is what I find funny about C++ zealots who hate .NET and java. Interestingly enough, Microsoft had an incubating effort to build a "framework" called Casablanca that would give C++ developers an easy way to host a web server or a RESTful web service. Part of the C++11 standard is incorporating features in languages like C# and java. It's interesting to watch the pendulum shift back and forth and the philosophical arguments being argued from ivory towers.

I was taking a break from sending out resumes to try to get out of my crappy job where I have to sit in front of a computer having a constant exercise in futility in front of a computer all day. :)

I long for the days to come when I don't ever have to look at a computer screen again. I can't wait until I sit on the front porch of my house with an acoustic guitar in my lap to play peaceful music listening to the sounds of nature far away from the technology landscape. The technology landscape and world in general has been so polluted by crap. It's like the urban development of a city. Everyone who sets out to found a city has the best of intentions. It starts out clean, orderly and well organized but gradually atrophies. Suddenly, scum bags move into town and there are red light districts, neon signs, traffic jams, political fighting and the list goes on and on.

Jesus didn't say not to keep the Jewish Scripture but he did effectively say that His law supersedes all others. (Matthew 22:36-40)

Lets have a look back in time at the history of Microsoft. Windows XP was the first stable version of Windows that was targeted at a typical end-user. Yes, yes, there was Win 2K Professional but it was targeted at business. Windows XP was a very attractive choice for those migrating from Windows 98/ME that were notorious for crashing at least once daily. And that was the incentive to upgrade. The operating system didn't crash repeatedly.

Once XP was released, Microsoft really dropped the ball on providing incentives to keep upgrading at a premium price. If anything Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 are like Plus Packs. They are just adding (mostly useless) new features that no one needs. They created an artificial restriction that in order to play games on the latest Direct X you had to be running the latest version of Windows. This was quite a departure from the older Direct X versions.

Microsoft would be better off selling the Operating System separate and letting people purchase the features they want a la carte. That pretty much would eliminate all of this nonsense. If the features really are worth paying for (which most of them aren't) then they would be able to support the feature on multiple versions of the operating system. Novel concept! Why does there need to be a monolithic operating system will all the bundled crap on it?

You married a keeper. They're a rare specimen but they do exist. This applies to both sexes. If you know anything about dating, there are key tests and questions to put prospective female mates through. They do it to us. The problem with most males is they get so wrapped up in the endorphin rush that they overlook obvious and serious flaws. This is a typical female strategy to attempt to sequester a mate concealing serious problems that would make them unattractive.

In order to be in a good relationship, both people have to approach as first working on themselves to be good mentally, physically and emotionally for a relationship. Then work on finding someone who essentially did the same thing that you connect with. It takes time but be patient and don't settle. Being in a bad relationship is worse than being single. The second time around, I didn't settle and I found the love of my life and we have a great life together where we work together as a solid team.

Basic laws of reality? Isn't science about increasing our understanding of reality? Many theories and ideas have come and gone and been replaced by more refined ones. We would be extremely naive to think our current understanding is even remotely close to all there is to know and completely correct. There is much to learn my friend.

Absolutely not. This is horrible security practice and will not fly even an inch in many industry standard audits. I can give countless examples. A developer sneaks a change into the software to funnel personal information and credit card numbers off to a private database and then sells it on the black market.

The whole point behind the division of labor is a set of checks and balances and reduction in conflict of interest. Quality Assurance analysts validate the code does what it is supposed to. The developer doesn't do this. Developers typically don't care much about that level of quality of their code. They have a different set of objectives. They must complete objectives, they have deadlines. The customer performs user acceptance testing not the QA analysts for obvious reasons. Even the brightest of user proxies cannot replace the customer's direct feedback. The deployment specialists, IT or Operations specialists deploy the software. They are responsible for the production server infrastructure and the environment not the developers. They must exercise great care in what they install, whether its the company's own product, Microsoft updates, drivers or anything else. It's all the same.

I'm shocked this question even gets asked. There is no free lunch!

Beano to the rescue! We can save the world!

I don't disagree that these things aren't without merit but you know what no one likes to think about in the midst of all this debate? The main problem is the rate at which our populate is increasing. All of our technological advancement which has been driven by our primitive instinct to survive and multiply has made us consume the resources on the planet much more effectively. No matter what you do to make it more efficient, it will just cause us to feel like we can increase our population more to consume more resources, making all those efforts in vain. You really just can't win. Wake me up when someone really wants to get serious about functioning better together as a civilization to grow in a responsible way.

Heard that one before. And in other news, unseasonably chilly temperatures suddenly sweep through hell, a deluge of eyewitness reports of monkeys spontaneously flying out of people's rear orifices around the world.