Windows is a legacy support platform. The old stuff doesn't just get jettisoned at the earliest opportunity because it's not shiny shiny enough. The platform as a whole is not under the tyrannical control of Microsoft to the same degree as Apple products. So people are much more free to use older equipment.

The user is in control.

I can choose to use 10 year old programs. Try that with the App Store model.

You're funny.

Are you seriously suggesting that Apple migrates their desktop machines to hardware that's about 10 years behind the curve in terms of performance when compared to x86?

Stop swimming in the kool-aid.

You're an idiot. Debian doesn't distribute source to users.

It's all binaries wrapped around the best package manager on the planet. It's something that Apple can't even touch despite their best attempts to try and sort of copy it.

I did. The whole thing is nonsense. You don't have to enforce a single architecture to have common code. Neither do you need to have a virtual machine running the same bit-ness as the host operating system. This is just the usual kind of cluelessness that comes from a community that is proud of being stupid.

Yeah. 64-bit BS.

>> A 4TB SDD is USD$29k.
>
> Not if your 4TB SSD is an array of 512GB SSDs.

For some reason I am reminded of the very first IBM hard drive.

> Who the hell needs 4TB in a single SSD?

Anyone that doesn't want to mess with an array to handle a simple use case of having a lot of stuff.

It's not 1988 anymore. There's ton of multi-media content out there. You can buy it or you can create it yourself. As tech and formats continue to improve and the "problem" only gets bigger.

Not everyone is a passive couch potato content with an anemic iPad.

OTOH, the price difference makes even the less extreme cases of a 1TB or 500G drive problematic.

What exactly are we in the West supposed to do about it really? Play globo-cop? Encourage our governments to meddle in the affairs of other countries?

Really? What's the point of being fixated on other people's business?

> Probably because stuff that matters to nerds is often (not always) related to stuff you mostly find in the richest 20% of the world (population).

You mean people are most concerned about what's around them?

STOP THE PRESSES!

You have to wonder if it goes back even further than that. Do these techniques predate computer networks entirely? Were they being used for similar reasons in the phone networks that predated all of the computer networks?

Is this another example of adding "use a computer" to some old well established (even patented) method?

> while most legal people are not conversant in technology, all patent attorneys are - the proper scientific or engineering background is a requirement to sit for the patent bar exam.

You're effectively trying to claim that ANY engineer is qualified to be an expert witness on ANY engineering discipline.

There are many types of engineer. Pretty much any of them are going to be completely unqualified to deal with anything outside of the very narrow discipline they were trained in.

The fact that some guy has an EIT certificate says squat about whether or not he has any hope of understanding the relevant Cisco patents here.

Although it doesn't really matter so much because each side will argue whether or not the relevant legal principles apply.

> I don't see it that way... So people should be allowed to infringe patents and blame someone else?

This isn't patent infringement. This is using a product that infringes patents. It's a meaningful distinction and one that should have already been settled in favor of consumers a long time ago.

Patent infringement by "network configuration"?

Sounds like a feature of the device they bought from someone else.

> Me, I treat all media as about to fail.

That's a whole lot easier when you haven't 10x more for the media.

> I installed a SSD for the OS on my Windows 7 DVR. Boot up time was almost 5 minutes with the AV drive.

My cold restart time with MythTV is under a minute with a conventional drive. Some problems are just self inflicted.

> As soon as you make this an insurance problem (calculating and recovering loss) you change the pricing formulas for air travel. It becomes either unprofitable or unaffordable.

That is total bullshit. It's already an insurance problem and the airlines do fine. Airlines are already responsible for getting you safely from point A to point B in a flying Cathedral.

Securing the terminal is a cakewalk in comparison.

The 9/11 attackers were a combination of people of interest and those that could be linked together using public records and 12 year old data mining techniques.

That's why the no-fly list is such a joke.

That kind of nonsense didn't stop 9/11 to begin with.