How do you know if someone is tracking you illegally or not? There's huge financial incentive to do so and many ways of doing it without getting caught. So you put that idea into Washington and you'll get back some twisted, ineffective legislation that puts a huge compliance risk on normal companies/webmasters while paving a giant exemption for law enforcement. Welcome to the land of unintended consequences.

Well I made a few concessions, but it was totally worth it, Windows? Never again.

One of the things I gave up was games, and I never missed them.

... Subject says it all...

So am I.

Your understanding misses the essentials. Ultimately, Childs was too ideological/paranoid/stubborn for his own good; however, the city's prosecution of him was malicious and unnecessary. The jury had to convict based on legal specifics, but judge and jury alike felt that this was an unfortunate usage of the system.

If you can name the process that shows the banner, just kill it. That's what i did under XP when there was an annoying process running. A friend kindly wrote the script for me.

Option Explicit

Dim objWMIService, objProcess, colProcess
Dim strComputer, strProcessKill
strComputer = "."
strProcessKill = "'***filkename***.exe'"

while (true)
        Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
                & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" _
                & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")

        Set colProcess = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
                ("Select * from Win32_Process Where Name = " & strProcessKill )

        For Each objProcess in colProcess
                objProcess.Terminate()
        Next

        WScript.sleep 20000
wend

Look into the syntax of pf, then look into the syntax of iptables. Then look back again. If I can, I damn well avoid having Linux firewalls, and I'm a Linux system administrator.

THEY WILL NOT SWITCH. Got to use what you like good for you.

Folks who live on the festering edge of technology will forever be in reactive mode.

They most likely live there because they don't know any better and have become "accustomed" to wearing their hair shirt.

There are a lot of customers of mine that love windows XP and there [sic] blackberrys.

Sure, and when Blackberry goes belly-up, they can suffer through a protracted outage while they scramble for a replacement. Nothing says success like a decision made in fear in panic. Or, they could start their planning and migration now and move as soon as they're ready.

Oh you are so full of shit.

There isn't a single line of Shakespeare in there anywhere!

;)

China was not weak back in the 80s. China was not weak in the 60s. They were an economic powerhouse even then. Douglas MacArther warned Never fight a land war in Asia".

Its a pity you know so little of the PLA military. I could point out the bloody nose they got from thinking they could waltz into Vietnam. I could point out that to this day they have so little navy worth caring about tha they are essentially land locked. from from Wiki:

I could point out that one of the major reasons that they have never posed a real threat to Taiwan has nothing to do with the US and everything to do with their inability to actually move troops across the strait without them becoming the most drowned army in history due to Taiwan weapon systems and ... wait for it ... lack of landing vessels to even put in the water.

Take then the modern PLA and start turning the clock backward and you will see that China has had a second rate military going back ages. Sure to meet them on their own ground is a bad idea, but mostly due to there being no reason to do so. The fact that they themselves didn't learn their own lesson is proof enough that their military has been more about kowtowing to Party bosses that practical military thought. Saying they were strong militarily in the 60's-80's means you have to cherry pick your sources pretty hard. It is like saying the Soviets had a huge impressive military in WWII. Sure they did, if you discount the 8.7 million men it chewed up to grease that machine of war.

The rest of your points are about as bad, but I am not going to go on at length about them, however in short - Air-Sea as a concept before WWII? I guess, but without widespread wireless it is just coordination of meeting times and attacking set pieces, and bad coordination at that, not real Air-Sea - The Soviets collapse being seen before it happened? Yeah, we knew, but there was good reason to believe that it was going to go down in a blaze of glory, and not the quiet self collapse it did, very, very few saw that, this guy did. Precision weapons by your definition date to the creation of organized militaries with pikemen and slingers. No, what he did was to see the need to put the firepower of a 2000lb laser guided bomb in the hand of one man. The only person to even come close the concept might have been Heinlein in Starship Troopers, and well we are trying to duplicate the rest of that book as fast as we can. Add into this his insight into drones prove that he was worth every cent that was spent on him and the loss of his office will make the Pentagon as myopic and short sighted as big US business is about future needs and long term investments.

c/here is the funny part/ironically/

Running Fedora, a cute hat trick.

Everyone is missing the point. The space program was done one step at a time, finishing each step before moving on to the next. Yes, this is "waterfall" thinking, but in the space program it was the right way to do it. Properly done, the agile approach could also have been used in the moon program, as long as the result is that the final push is composed of fully-tested and vetted pieces. (Could it be that the agile approach was indeed used? People closer to the facts can answer that.)

The reason to have multiple contractors is to allow development of different parts to be done in parallel. The key to success with broad development is a really, really good architect specing the interfaces, and each people/group showing that their stuff works as specified at the interfaces. Then integration testing becomes a manageable exercise. This includes performance metrics -- at the interfaces. Was that done here? I highly doubt it.

And the Affordable Care Act missed a number of elements that would have made health care affordable. It's isn't about insurance, it's about the total experience. And Congress bungled it. At least, those people in Congress who were allowed to contribute did. What was wrong with stepwise refinement?