In countries where the possession of firearms is regulated, the legal owner must keep his weapons in a safe. If he's caught storing his weapons unsafely, his weapons can get confiscated and his permission to own them revoked.

Actually, HTC bet on Windows Phone too, so your example works in both ways.

It's interesting to note that when the prescribed ethical ideas don't match the current values of the middle class, cf. "ye cannot serve God and mammon", "it is easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get into the kingdom of God", "you resist not evil: but whoever shall smite you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also" - then they are happily ignored.

Despite some of the more scathing reviews of Windows 8, ordinary users are getting along with it just fine, according to Julie Larson-Green

"Ordinary users"? I guess they're those who don't use a computer to get work done, and therefore would be better off with a tablet anyway.

How about a compromise, like banning guns for people with mental illness?

This past year over 20 children died the slow death of heatstroke/hypothermia after their parents locked them in cars. A toddler died because his mother was an idiot and let him stand on a ledge at a zoo. Where is your outrage over those deaths?

Where exactly did he say that he wouldn't be outraged over deaths like the ones you describe?
Anyway, if you as a parent "are an idiot", there are laws in place which, depending on your level of "idiocy", can even lead to your children being taken away from you. Law is there to protect the innocent.

More people have been killed this year (including children) by drunk or distracted driving. Since alcohol doesn't benefit society, should we bring back prohibition for the safety of the children?

That's exactly the point. Driving is regulated. Drinking alcohol and driving is forbidden, and if you do it, your driving license can be revoked. Which is exactly what should happen with firearms. Their possession should be regulated, so that you can own a hunting rifle if you prove that you're not a mentally unstable person and that you're not the kind of guy who kills people who scratch his car, but it's otherwise hard to own other kinds of weapons.

How about instead of banning things, we focus our resources on figuring out why people go nuts and try to kill children?

How about doing both? Why do you think the two options are mutually exclusive?

If someone wants to kill people, they don't need guns.

Guns make it much, much, much easier - which is why gun possession is regulated in many countries of the world.

That's their job and function. Have you ever heard a lawyer ask a judge to declare his defendant guilty, because he feels he deserves it? Would you pay for such a lawyer?

Unions are the defenders of one side, and only of that side. Such defense is needed because without unions, the weak part (the workers) gets abused, in the ways we witnessed in Western countries during the industrial revolution, which are exactly the same we see in non-Western countries today: child labour, miserable wages, a discrete chance of dying on the work place.

I believe that 911/119 were chosen partially because those were the farthest spaced digits, to prevent accidental dialling.

Weren't telephones using a rotary dial in the times when such decisions were made?

my ass.

The point is that Apple (and NeXT) took BSD code to make a different operating system. Running a different kernel, with a different binary format, designed to support a graphics environment which is completely alien from BSD's native X11. You can't run BSD binaries on OS X without an emulation layer. You can't run OS X binaries on BSD without an emulation layer. I have the surname of my father, I am not my father.

It has a completely different kernel design and a vastly different userspace. If OS X counts as a measure of the relevance of BSD because it contains BSD-derived code, then even most Linux installations 'are BSD'.

OS X 'is' not BSD, it's NeXTSTEP with code derived from BSD.

I used to be a renewable energy supporter until I saw what wind power farms really look like.

In a place near me, they built 63 turbines, 80 meters high. All the turbines had to be connected, between them and with the existing road infrastructure, by asphalted roads, 5 meters wide, complete with sidewalks, of course supported by concrete infrastructure. All of this has been built in one of the few places where the man's hand hadn't arrived yet, the top of our highest mountain range. A place where, by law, you couldn't build a shed - yet their builders were able to override all environmental legislation, because the energy they are going to produce is "green".

All the mountain tops were smoothened and replaced with a backbone road, and in particular one of the highest peaks was completely flattened and replaced with a power station which gathers the wires coming from the turbines. The tons of rock and dirt that were extracted during the leveling, were dumped inside the nearby torrents' beds.

An untouched, virgin environment (one of the few remaining around here), was irremediably destroyed for good in just a couple of years, after lasting for aeons. All of this was done in order to produce a grand total of 56.7 MW! For comparison, that's just 4.4 % of power produced by the nearby decades-old oil power station - when the wind blows.

The local population obtained virtually no jobs from this whole project, getting instead a royalty of 1.5% over the power production. I find ironical that their economy possibly gets more income from the tourism made up by hunters.

As a true environmentalist, give me nuclear power anytime. Perhaps in large countries such as the USA and Russia, there's plenty of space to build huge wind farms without losing much of value, but here in the old world, forms of energy collection with such a low density would be the coup de grâce for our territories.

...what does it taste like? Scientific progress aside, food should always be a pleasure, that's why we don't eat astronauts' food unless we need to.

Then here's a message for those folks: you can keep staying away from Windows, there's no need for you to try it. My copy of Windows 7 still gives me a blue screen about once every ten startups (ATIKMDAG gets upset for something), and the OS has become slow and bloated with plain usage, even if I've been very cautious about installing software (not that there'd be anything wrong with that in principle, one would think that one of the purposes of buying a computer would be to install software on it, and at least on Linux it just works), to the point that after less than one year of usage now it takes me 30 s to open the "downloads" folder.

So bloat and blue screens are still here in Windows, at least as late as Windows 7; nothing to see, move along.