All true. But a contractor knows that from the day he/she signs up.. his paycheck could end the next week.

I've been seeing something similar happen to the US Army. They have converted many jobs from military to civilian in the belief that they don't have to increase the size of the army, just get more people out from behind desks and into the field. More trigger pullers and less support folks. So now they have to drag overpaid contractors along to established FOBs to handle the higher level support functions.

The only solution i can think of is hiring these engineers and so on into permanent positions on the condition that they will have to move as the work moves.

Saying that "high taxes hurt small businesses" and saying "the complexity of the tax code hurts small businesses" are two different issues that should be dealt with separately.

Uh, do you work for Apple, or are you just....not that bright?

"don't want to mess with the filesystem" - wait, what? who does that these days, and not only that, how is it a requirement of a Windows computer? at no point is this ever required.
"don't want a browser vulnerable to malware" - you can choose any browser you want on Windows, no-one is required to use IE.
"don't want to mess with drivers" - honestly, when was the last time you had to do this? Since XP and later generally shit just works.
"(or worse, dick around with file sharing over a network)" - uh, since when is this complicated. i open explorer, i click another computer on my network, get prompted for a username, i enter it, and it works - it's so simple it's not even funny, and it's pretty comparable to networking on OSX as a matter of fact.

Your "arguments" aren't really valid, it's as though the last time you used Windows was back at version 3.11. Either that or you just enjoy spreading FUD in service to the mighty Steve Jobs. I'm getting so tired of people parroting arguments against Windows that haven't been valid for many, many years.

It's hard to be a rich white guy in 21st century America.

Actually, the best way to fight piracy is to make a product pirates aren't interested in.

Except that apple is probably much worse than MS when it comes to DRM. You can't even save certain files on iphone, or so I've heard.

At which point, the files are included in C:\i386, and a quick trip to Start>Control Panel>Features and Programs will install them.

Well, I’m currently looking at version 2.6.0, and the layers menu is a menu called Layer.

If you mean the layers dialog window, it’s normally docked in the “Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo” dialog window, and if that isn’t visible, you can open it from the Windows menu.

Um, yes...

They haven't yet banned FCE Ultra GX, which facilitates piracy of proprietary commercial NES games.

This paints faaaar too black and white a picture of security. Factoring the huge RSA key that you're using within the next few days is "next to impossible" (the first pair of large primes I try could be the ones) but that doesn't make it bad security. What you have to do is raise the bar high enough that your data/house/identity is adequately protected. Absolutes do not exist. That said, I'm not making a judgment on this particular hack or its difficulty, just that claiming that the ONLY good security is absolutely uncrackable security is incorrect.

Have scientists been able to throw together basic ingredients of living things and have the resulting pile resemble anything even close to life? Even in perfectly favorable lab settings?

yep

(Depending on how you define "life", of course)

Facebook has outraged thousands of obsessive shirkplace F5-pressers by changing its layout from the layout it changed to after the layout before that.

The change has met a storm of protest from users going so far as to click "Join This Group," with nearly two million people with, apparently, nothing whatsoever to do that they're actually being paid to stepping forward to demand that Facebook switch back to the layout before the last one, or the one before that.

"This new format makes absolutely no sense at all," said aggrieved office administrator Brenda Busybody, 43 (IQ), who had said the same thing each of the last three times it changed. "There's, like, all this stuff all over the place. It's not like the old one at all ... ooh, that's interesting, I hadn't seen that before."

The users vowed to continue their campaign assiduously for at least a day or two, in between working on their imaginary farm or joining "I Bet I Can Find A Million People Who Believe In Facebook Petitions Before June" or observably not giving two hoots about handing their personal details, fingerprints, DNA and probably first-born to Facebook's advertisers if it meant they could get thirty coins on Petville.

Facebook engineer Jing Chen explained on the company blog how the changes had been extensively tested on the 599.5 million Facebook users who hadn't joined such groups, and that he hoped everyone who wasn't a whiny little bitch would appreciate the new experience. "There's really nothing quite like the complaints of someone getting something for free that what they're getting for free just isn't perfect enough. It's what makes Monday Monday."