That contradicts the idea that God does not deceive, which most Christians believe.

Oh, really? You'd better inform these guys, then: http://cpusa.org/

This already exists, and it's called Bodega. It hasn't caught on. There's also MacPorts and Homebrew, which are popular among devs but have no presence among regular users because they're for *nix command-line tools.

I believe the reason open app distribution systems like APT work so well on Linux is the "open culture": the vast majority of software Linux users want to run is Free Software. But can an APT-like system work as well with proprietary, for-sale apps? I know there are proprietary drivers and such on various repos, but I'm talking about stuff like Photoshop, Office, or the thousands of little paid apps you can get on iOS.

Yes, it'd be great if Mac users embraced FOSS more, but they won't do it as long as FOSS lags in ease of use and polish. And it will continue to do so because polish is hard work, and devs working for their bread are more willing to dish out the elbow grease. I'd love for this to change, but I don't really see how it can.

Failing to put out a fire is not arson. Please stop calling it that.

Or you could try working at a place that doesn't treat you like an elementary school student. Look at small businesses in particular (though there are many such large businesses as well). And don't give me the excuse of a poor job market, either-- if you can't find work, it means you need to loosen your job requirements to fit the market. Accept a lower salary, consider relocation, diversify your skills, or become self-employed. It's all a matter of priorities.

There is no such thing as "real probability" in this case, unless you're suggesting we run a few thousand universes just like this one and then count up the ones in which aliens make contact with Earth in 2010.

You don't really need to understand pointers to use ObjC, though. You use object pointers all over the place but you never dereference them, just send them messages. It amounts to the same thing as Java's object references, just with an extra asterisk in the declaration. You can of course use raw C arrays and pointers, but there's little reason to do so in most cases.

Manual memory management, though, that I'll certainly grant you. Mac OS programmers haven't had to deal with that since ObjC 2.0, but ObjC on iOS doesn't do garbage collection (supposedly for performance reasons). Autorelease pools ease the pain, but obviously not having to deal with deallocation at all is easier still.

Writing header files can be a pain, but they're not hard to grasp once you understand what a function declaration is, which you need to do for any language. Different from Java and a bit of extra typing, sure, but not particularly hard.

These are just personal aesthetics.

Looks like an iced latte of some kind, maybe chai?

I wouldn't consider putting a session ID in the URL to be "user-unfriendly". Maybe a little ugly, but how does it actually impact users?

Did you just use three paragraphs to say "the U.S. is OK now, but declining at an accelerating rate"?

Of course the SEC would "admit" to being understaffed and underfunded, regardless of the actual cause. That's how you get Congress to throw more money at you.

This could be related to the previously-discussed 'bug' in how the number of bars is calculated. As I understand it, the bar count is/was heavily weighted such that you'd still get 4-5 bars even when the signal strength was actually marginal. So even though you previously had 5 bars, you may not have had that strong a signal to begin with. See here for more details.

You know, it's entirely possible to have a Facebook account without spending excessive amounts of time on it. Nothing forces you to play these insipid games, update your profile every day, or respond to every message you get.

I've never heard an argument that free markets always produce some idealized, perfect outcome. What is argued is that markets tend to allocate scarce resources very efficiently. NOT perfectly efficiently, nor with perfect consistency. You are simply putting up a straw man.

Again, you are the only one calling the free market a "perfectly self-correcting mechanism".

Of course you can only prove theorems about an idealized form of the market. But the welfare theorems are a much stronger form of the argument that markets tend to allocate scarce resources efficiently, and as such need not be assumed to apply perfectly in the real world.

If you want non-GM products, then buy ones that are labeled as such. Nothing forces you to buy a product that is not labeled in the way you require. And if not many products are so labeled, it means not that many people actually care about having that information (e.g. Kosher foods). Besides, even without such labels, you can visit sites like this to get the information you require. Seems like the market is functioning pretty well to me.

Are you serious? Friedman was a monetarist. Monetarists advocate monetary intervention in the form of a central bank, which is directly contradictory to a laissez-faire approach. Try Rothbard, Mises, or Hayek instead.

Then please point me to the economics book that claims markets need perfect information to function.