I wouldn't say that's always the case. And is it a problem with the file format or with the software? If web pages don't look right in Internet Explorer, is that HTML's fault? How about if an HTML5 web page doesn't look right in Firefox 2.0? I wouldn't say a program "breaks" compatibility with a file format change unless the new files can't be opened by the older software. If the old software can open the file, but it looks just a little off, I wouldn't call that breakage.

Oh really? So far as I know, nothing has broken backward compatibility for the Office document formats since Office 2007.

Sure, they have introduced new features into newer versions of Office. Older versions of Office that didn't include those features won't recognize them. But that doesn't prevent the documents from opening in the earlier version -- you just get an error message. But if you create a document in Office 2013 that only uses features that were present in Office 2007, it will open just fine in Office 2007 (again, so far as I know; maybe you know otherwise).

In my mind, that means the Office document formats have been pretty much "stable" for at least five years -- which might not sound like a long time, but in the computer industry it actually sort of is. There are certainly worse offenders.

Seems like what they mostly add to Excel are new visualizations, i.e. new ways to display data, rather than to calculate it. They're also adding things like new PowerPoint visual effects, tools to make it easier to edit graphics from right within PowerPoint and Word, etc. None of it is essential, but it's easy to see how someone who uses the product a lot could think they're pretty cool additions. I suspect these are the kinds of things Microsoft will be pushing with their Office updates, more so than anything really significant.

I have no reason to suspect the file formats will change in any way that breaks backward compatibility. But I'd say you're right on the money with the rest of your sentiment, no cynicism required. Note that the infrastructure for these supposed 90-day updates (Microsoft hasn't said it will actually do them every 90 days) is only included in the Office 365 version of the suite. It has a different installation method and its own software update feature. Microsoft has already said that it will be releasing Office 365-only software updates using this mechanism. What it's doing now is trying to plant the idea in customers' minds that if they don't get onto the subscription model they will be "missing out" -- or worse, that they won't get bug fixes and security updates as fast as subscription customers. The latter is probably not actually true, but you won't catch Microsoft's sales staff denying it.

Care to explain the specific context and the specific reason? From the sound of it, they are arguing against having sex-ed talks at conferences because somebody might not be aware that a sex-ed talk might include topics that make rape survivors uncomfortable. Is there something more specific -- your word -- that makes this specific conference the wrong place for a sex talk?

You've kinda got it backwards. They "added the Neo One" because they had already been selling this model of phone as simply the Neo One. Then in October 2012, for whatever reason, they added the iphone part and started talking about how they owned the trademark, etc.

The phone itself is pretty lackluster. Gingerbread, 700MHz single-core processor, altogether pedestrian specs.

LOTS of novels are written about the workplace. The critical point is that they don't get published.

Here's how it works: Some guy (they're almost always guys) goes to university, gets a BA in English, then goes off and gets a dull office job because he needs money to pay off his student loans, just like everybody else. Time goes by, and about ten years in he starts to grow unsatisfied with his situation and he thinks to himself, "Whatever happened to that novel I always said I was going to write?" And he vows to write a novel.

But what should the novel be about? Well, you know what they say: "Write what you know." And what does he know? Well, pretty much since he got out of college, he's been working at a boring, soul-numbing office job. He hates his coworkers and thinks they're all idiots. The boss is the worst of all. Great stuff, he thinks! He has piles of material to work with. And so he sets out to write his book about a guy working in an office.

The problem is A.) Unbeknownst to him, he is not the first person to have this idea;
B.) When you write a book where the main character is just some schlub in an office going around thinking he's superior to everybody else around him, that main character comes off like a dick;
C.) It turns out that the silly little situations that get you through your dreary days at the office are not really that amusing to anyone else -- or witty, or original, or insightful, etc.;
D.) It turns out that the office is not really a very fertile setting for fiction after all, and that the reason a lot of people who work office jobs bring books with them on the train in the morning is because they'd rather think about something else.

I am being dead serious about all of this. I've been told by literary agents that this type of book is probably the #2 submission received by fiction agents/editors from first-time authors, right after the thinly-veiled memoir of the author's college days disguised as a novel.

Like the latter book, the "novel about my suffering and toil at the office" is best seen as a practice run -- finish it if you must, but then immediately shelve it and start your second novel, which might be about something interesting.

The American version sucks, but I still think the UK original -- like most of Ricky Gervais's stuff -- is really quite bitingly funny.

OK, now I think you're intentionally being thick.

Let's recap: You are the one suggesting that this was the work of one man, acting alone. I am the one telling you that this is virtually impossible, and an attack of this kind would never be done without official government sanction. So explain to me what your new argument is now, because you sure as hell sound like you're making my point for me.

I bow before the superior intellect, Khan.

Yeah? And just when would that proof be made public. You mean the kind of "made public" like when the newspapers you attacked run stories about it and the entire world knows about it?

I am begging you ... begging you, now. THINK. Use your brain.

The part they seem to have glossed over is that this is a secure USB key. Most of the storage is AES encrypted, with just a tiny unencrypted boot partition to handle the encryption.

Mind you, I saw this press release on Friday and it didn't sound particularly interesting to me, either.

Here's something interesting, though. Imation, which has been buying up various companies, including IronKey -- because apparently floppy disks aren't selling as well as they once did -- has managed to shed 88.5% of its share price since 2006.

OK, my guess was right. You really don't understand how things work in China. My recommendation is that you go to the library, grab back issues of some reputable news source (The Economist might be a good place to start) and read up on everything you can find about the last Chinese national election. Along the way you'll learn a lot about how free Chinese politicians are to act independently. (TL;DR - China ain't the US.)

Also, just think about what you're suggesting. This isn't some politician giving an order to have some hapless old man thrown in prison. That kind of thing happens all the time in China, and nobody ever hears about it. What you're saying, though, is that some lone politician, acting completely independently and on his own initiative, hired hackers to launch an attack on the two largest, most respected newspapers in the United States. Not even the largest companies -- the largest newspapers. Exactly how was this supposed rogue, lone wolf politician planning to cover up what he did?

This brand of cynicism is dull, and it creates its own form of self-fulfilling ignorance.

If nothing you see in the media is true and every journalist is a puppet of either advertisers or the government, then where do you get your news from, exactly?

There is only one possible answer, and that is: You make it up. You hear what people tell you, decide you're going to believe the opposite, and then you go around railing on the news for not saying what you believe.

In other words, you are a dolt.

OK, did I just read your whole comment to learn that you think there's not "a shred of evidence" that it was the government, but instead you believe it was hackers hired by the government? I think I can smell my brain dying.

Do you have any idea how things work in China? Just think for a minute: Great Firewall of China, ring any bells? Go find some bandwidth statistics and see how hard it is for the Chinese to get access to fast internet connections, compared to places like South Korea or Japan. And if there really were some underground internet hacker movement composed of individuals in China -- and there isn't -- why on Earth would they attack Western newspapers, which mostly tell the truth, and not their own newspapers, which never do?

An equally important elephant in the room is that Apple had been trying to write its own modern OS, with features like preemptive multitasking and memory protection, from the ground up, and it failed. Once Copland crashed and burned, Apple had wasted so much time that it had no choice but to acquire an OS -- or at least the foundations of an OS -- from some other source. NeXT ended up being it.

According to Microsoft, they chose Git because A.) It's the most popular these days, so by targeting that they reach the largest installed base; and B.) Git has not worked well with/on Windows, and they would like to change that.

And why would an American-born doctor be more likely to do that than a foreign-born one? He's stuck working in the same broken healthcare system that funnels profits to insurance companies over doctors.