An OEM copy of Windows XP Pro goes for about $40 these days. I don't know where you got that $70 figure, unless you're talking about the OEM version that you get on TigerDirect, which no actual OEM uses.

"Kids are brighter than you think". Exactly.

I have three kids, ages 15, 13 and 4.

When I first became a parent I was all for old-fashioned discipline having seen the mess that most parents seemed to have made of their kids. But although I was always careful to keep control of myself when applying discipline it wasn't long before I realised that the "harmless clip round the ear" and the "bend over you're going to get a smack" routines, whether applied coldly, sadly or with apparent anger, were only terrifying and confusing my toddler son. If I'd kept it up I honestly can't say whether it would have succeeded in making him obedient, but I do know it would have caused him a lot of suffering and emotional torment and driven a wedge between us. So I abandoned this approach and began using calm reasoned explanation backed up with nonviolent sanctions.

That son is now 15, a grammar school student at the top of his class. He has a polite and friendly nature, a wide and diverse circle of friends, and he is a credit to himself and to his family.

My 13 year old daughter, whom I've never smacked at all, is a balanced and well-mannered young lady with a kind and loving nature and many talents including stage acting and music. She picks her friends carefully. She's quite happy just being 13 and doesn't get up to any of the disgusting nonsense that so many of her cohort do who dress like tarts and can't seem to wait to get boozed up and lose their virginity.

My 4-year old daughter, also never ever smacked, and almost never even even shouted at, is brighter than either of them. When she gets upset or naughty all I have to do is speak to her quietly, she always gives me her full attention, and then she is calm. And why? Because the most important thing to her is that her Daddy is so very, very proud of her.

As time has gone on, experience has made me a better father. Just about the very first thing I learned was that smacking is counterproductive, at best. Since then I have concentrated on learning what *does* work. Positive reinforcement, sympathy, understanding, and most of all, love.

Beating infants is a symptom of a primitive society in which children are merely another resource to be controlled and exploited. But as we all know, child abuse has a tendency to repeat from generation to generation. STOP AND THINK WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

OK so what do we learn from this? That the Old Testament was just plain wrong, and attempts to retcon its meaning are nothing more than sad acts of self-deception.

Installing the average Linux distro is no longer hard either, and hasn't been for a few years, but that doesn't stop idiots from claiming it is when they're trying to come up with arguments against using that OS. Funny how that works, eh?

BSODs are caused by bad drivers and/or bad hardware, nothing more. Fix that and they go away. It's that simple. I'd feel stupid if I claimed my car sucks because I was putting in the wrong transmission fluid, so to fix the problem I just bought another car.

the Blue Screen of Death

1996 called, he wants his meme back.

Did they also push an evil midget through teh intertubes that forced you to code in C# at gunpoint? I must have missed that the last time I ran Windows Update.

Java isn't as an independent technology.

Independent of whom? Sun Microsystems? And have you established that absolutely none of the Java source infringes on anyone's patents?

not very successful proprietary virtual machine and framework

So .NET is not successful? Can you please explain why, exactly, a technology that counts millions of active developers and thousands of products is not "successful"? What exactly constitutes success, in your book?

has been partially abandoned by its own masters

Uh, abandoned how, exactly? Please be specific, you were modded up for your comment so I assume you have more than just a Slashdot-style FOSS advocacy blurb here to back it up.

You might recall Microsoft spent like three years rewriting parts of Windows in .NET

You might recall that they did indeed rewrite parts of Windows in .NET, like the management console subsystem and several tools like PowerShell. Were you expecting them to rewrite the whole thing in C#, and is that why you claim .NET is not successful? And please, I'd like to see some evidence that they didn't do something they claimed they were going to do in Vista with .NET, because as far as I remember they did exactly what they said they would - nothing more and nothing less.

Maybe we can learn from their very expensive learning experience?

Maybe you can cut down on the impressive-sounding hyperbole a bit. I feel liked I just walked into the Slashdot Spin Zone(TM) here.

So flocktard, let's see all the content you shared without receiving compensation of any kind and don't really mind - in fact it made you positively happy to do so. Let's see it.

Why don't you take a seat over there... those nice gentlemen want to have a word with you :)

Rimshot! :) I guess it's OK. Finding what does what on the runtime is complicated, but the docs are good. And I suppose if you're careful you can write secure apps with it. Wikipedia and a ton of other high-traffic sites seem to do well. It is kind of weird to be back in an ASP-like environment... except without a decent debugger.

So I don't even go there, even when it might make sense. On the other hand, when it does make sense and the conditions are right, I rarely hesitate. Especially when it's on my dime.

Not in a million years. Regardless of the underlying philosophy, I'd hang myself before being seen managing a large (>100K+ LOC) codebase written in a language without compile-time checking.

I took your post, replaced "KDE" with "Vista" and had a good chuckle.

I don't think anyone would blame Microsoft for user-installed malware.

People do, in fact. They simply lump those into the "Windows is insecure" mantra. Statistically the number of actual vulnerabilities that have not been patched and have an exploit in the wild (which would be a good example of security breakdown) are rare.

But like many a Windows trojan/malware that relied on user intervention to get its foot in the door, I don't see why this cannot be blamed on Apple's "sloppy code" (to draw a parallel with the same things that get blamed on Microsoft).

A Unix-like system with a root account is not superior to an NT box, even when used by someone who runs under a non-privileged account but cannot be bothered to exercise some damn common sense wrt what they put on their computers.

As their numbers grow, I expect masses of stupid Apple users (probably the same stupid Windows users that migrated to OS X to be "safe") to do things like enter their root password into browser add-ons because they are asked for it, and download "cool" screensavers and pirated software like this, loaded with malware. Membership in botnets cannot be far behind at that point.

And then when Apple machines get hit by exploits to vulnerabilities that have been patched for three months which users can't be bothered to install updates for, all will be good.

And guess what OS will be next up.

That's funny, the first time I saw KDE I thought of Windows 98.