Cue the Joker references.

iPhone 5 preorders more than doubled that of the 4S. Both their stock and profits are at record highs. Care to explain how that is a decline in momentum? I suggest not just repeating the same nonsensical crap tech pundits spew in an attempt to grab a few extra page views.

Google Maps (iOS = 5) never had turn by turn directions. If you care about the public transit directions, bookmark the web app which works nearly identically to the old native one.

I'm seeing apps that are only just starting to require iOS4... so it will probably be a while before 6 is a requirement. Certainly well after Apple sorts out its launch jitters (assuming they finally put a competent engineer on search, which numerous products of theirs over the years indicate has not happened)

Know your audience. As long as DARPA's research comes to the public eventually (we got the internet, after all) it's still beneficial. Quite possibly delayed and almost certainly more expensive than it should be, but slow and expensive progress is still progress.

It would be a false comparison if people switched their 3G (or LTE) phones to use EDGE. They don't.

Maybe you're working in the wrong industry? Everyone's different of course, but I've worked jobs I liked and jobs I disliked (to put it mildly), and also jobs I was merely content with. Someone would have to probably more than double my salary to make me go back to something I didn't actively enjoy.

No - tablets just aren't good for long-form writing (which happens to be very common at schools). I use mine for content creation all the time... just not stuff where I'd want a keyboard (anything more than two paragraphs).

Insufficient funding for public education would be fixed if CA could manage it's budget, and stop pissing away my taxes on ridiculous expenses. As would the awful roads, poor public transportation, and any other number of things.

*woosh*

Sure - but trusting what someone thought they saw over science (very well-tested science, mind you - my understanding is that false positives are far more likely than false negatives, then multiply that by hundreds of tests) isn't necessarily a good approach. It's very common for people to swear up and down that they saw something when reality is something completely different.

I'm not making a statement either way, but I'm much more inclined to trust highly repeatable data than subjective eyewitnesses. People hold grudges, test results do not.

Well to be fair, Macs don't have a BIOS system and UEFI is largely irrelevant to their ability to do their jobs. While I agree with your notion that their title has nothing to do with their knowledge, at the end of the day they're able to solve most people's problems and tend to do so in a way that doesn't leave a sour taste in people's mouths (unlike your typical help desk workers).

There's clearly a blurry line here trying to distinguish crazed ranting from actual threats. I'm definitely opposed to the idea of "thoughtcrime", but if someone is making real threats that they're in a position to carry out (and I'm guessing an ex-Marine is more qualified than most to do so) it makes sense to step in before real harm is done. But that's also contingent on us being able to actually make a realistic distinction between blowing off steam and actually planning violence. We tend to be overcautious here, but that's societal trends at work.

It's a reflection of the fact that people don't want to deal with security. It working silently in the background and staying out of your way whenever possible is absolutely the right decision, or else the protections would all get turned off because they'd be so damn annoying.

If you got a pop-up every time your firewall blocked a port scan, wouldn't you inevitably turn off your firewall?

Thought so.

Prompting users to make security decisions means you have less security. If Defender prompted you every time it was blocking a write to a sensitive/monitored file, most people (the ones that really need the extra security software) would be inundated with requests eventually causing them to hit allow every time just to make the dialog boxes go away.

There should be a comment in the hosts file indicating how to opt-out of this behavior, but I think what Microsoft has done here is both reasonable and a good security decision. People doing local dev work (myself included, although I don't do web development on Windows) would see the comment and how to disable things, and the rest of the world would have a secure, non-compromised hosts file - as they should.