There's a selection bias here; the kids who died aren't here posting about how all that stuff never hurt them.

As life gets better it becomes more valuable, and smaller and smaller dangers become unacceptable. That's progress for you.

If you don't know your friends' financial situations then how can you be confident they're unlike your own? The histogram for musical ensembles looks pretty unlike that for the general populace. Heck, if I could guess your race from those of your friends (and statistically I almost certainly could), then there's a good enough correlation between that and financial history that the friendship graph gives useful financial history information that I'm legally barred from getting the obvious way.

What do you gain by owning those things? The value of things is what you do with them, not what they are. If I'm buying the car and I've got a choice of pay now or interest free over three years, you bet I'm gonna take the loan and put the money in stocks. And hell, if it ever gets to the stage where I can make more money by defaulting then why the hell not? The bank agreed to the terms (they wrote them, even), and they wouldn't hesitate to screw me over if there was more profit for them in it.

Also, if you bought your home without a loan then you're already pretty damn privileged. I'm guessing top-5% income-wise, and most likely a similar family background. Tell me I'm wrong.

Ok, but that's not apples to apples. An economist would say you could make up (at least some of) the difference by renting out what would otherwise be their rooms.

If federal bailouts are distorting the markets, that's a problem with federal bailouts. When making a bad loan really does cost you the amount of the loan, people get pretty smart about figuring out who to lend to.

I only carry my less-powerful tablet when travelling, just for size and weight reasons, unless I know I'm going somewhere specifically to do computer gaming. I would expect it to be similar for photographers given how bulky those cameras get.

It's not like they restricted it to men before, they just called it woman of the year when they gave it to a woman. Post switching to person of the year, it's gone entirely to men (except when it's not gone to specific people at all). So changing it to person hasn't meant more people were represented - it's just meant phrasing the title unnaturally. It's a completely superficial change which does nothing to actually address inequality - like political correctness usually is.

I seriously preferred windows mobile as an OS. It was much easier to port obscure windows programs I used over to it, compared to android. If a good modern phone comes out running windows mobile that has as good integration with google/facebook/et al as my android (which may well never happen, MS being MS), I'll be switching.

You can't modify and redistribute things you download from the app store, therefore the app store is incompatible with open source. Of course you might use open source to make the things you put in the app store, just like IE uses open source libraries, but the version you put in the app store isn't and can't be open source.

Microsoft are, and pretty much always have been, where IBM were 5-10 years ago.

My experience is that the programs that started out as open-source are the better ones, while those that were originally from a big corp and then released as open source. Firefox came from Netscape and the codebase was always crap, which is why apple and then google used khtml instead (and konqueror's still a pretty good browser). Likewise with openoffice; very few people not paid by sun ever wanted to work on it.

"crown jewels", sure. But all four companies you list have also made enormous parts of their code open-source. Keep your USP to yourself, but if it's something generally useful and not your core business competency, open it. (And if your core business competency is the hardware, then that probably means open all the software).

/used to work at a pretty big name who ran everything on facebook's open-sourced thrift.

I would imagine they're concerned about air pollution, that's the usual reason why just burning something full of random chemicals is illegal.

Perhaps, but it only takes one to spoil your day; for me, animeondemand.com makes up a significant proportion of my video watching. For other people it'd be different sites, but there are enough barely-maintained smaller sites that use flash videos that I'd expect not having flash to get irritating. (In fact, I know it gets irritating, because I run freebsd on my main machine. Though I guess that also shows it's possible to live without it)

Sure, but that's more fiddly and less practical; with the transformer the keyboard folds snugly together with it and I can put both halves in a single ordinary case, and I can unfold it and have the thing in a natural shape for typing on.

Shrug; I like to write, at length (though even an email is fiddly on an onscreen keyboard), with a machine that I can carry around with me, and the transformer does that perfectly. And while I could probably buy a laptop in approximately the same size for that (though I haven't seen any so small/light with as good a battery life - and wouldn't expect to, x86 being that much more power-hungry than arm), watching videos or reading ebooks is much better with the transformer in tablet form. I think if I had a tablet without a keyboard, I'd still be carrying my netbook around as well, but I never found my netbook comfortable enough for reading ebooks on, whereas the transformer is.

If you were expecting a full-scale linux PC then I can see the transformer being disappointing. But even then, it seems closer to a "real PC" than an ipad is. Not to get into a fanboy argument but I really am curious, what is it the ipad's got that the transformer hasn't?

I found I missed the "HTC Sense" interface when I got an android without it. Agreed in the general case though.