As best I can tell, the main market for such a device would be keeping your phone in your backpack and letting the watch do all the interface work. I certainly don't have the need for such a device, but I could see some value for commuters. Until they get out a tablet and piss all over the idea that the watch is useful.

Unlike Microsoft, there's no incentive for these projects to drop XP until the number of users gets too low to justify continued development. I'm phasing it out of the office before the EOL, but that doesn't mean home users will. Microsoft wants users to buy newer versions of their products.

Free software projects supporting XP or not supporting XP is a matter of providing your users with what they will actually use. As long as enough XP users are using Firefox, Mozilla has no reason to drop it. Microsoft's decisions are basically irrelevant to that decision except in their effect on OS market share.

As much as I love watching people bicker about political terminology and euphemisms are in the United States, I think the most important thing to realize is that in the United States, political terms have absolutely no meaning, and the parties in the US have no principles at all.

I don't run Ubuntu, but if my present OS attempted to do this to me, I'd jump ship and find a new one.

So you're saying that the providers of luxury goods like home broadband connections should be killed if people don't like their prices? I'm certainly willing to agree that there are excesses and dirty tricks in the industry, but assassination is going too far.

The fact that they choose not to do without is a clear indication that the market will bear it. It doesn't mean the market has to like it.

"Normally the ODM also designs the laptop while the vendor just provides the specs and requirements, so I'm not even sure if Apple even designs the Macbooks."

You may not be sure, but the rest of us are. Like all Macs the Macbook carries the typical "Designed in California by Apple" tag. For all the faults of Apple, having "generic/beige box" design is not one of them. Also, I disagree that it is "pointless" arguing build quality based on brand name. Different brands spec different quality components to the ODMs and the spec is really quite detailed. Obviously some problems and merits are inherit in each ODM and clearly have a large impact on the outcome, but the Brand clearly has a say in quality.

"[T]he content was written at a sixth-grade reading level so it would be as easy to understand as possible."

They really are setting the bar high in Kentucky.

Have you got a citation for that? It would be very interesting (but not surprising) if true. I mean, Rep Peter King is/was a full-blown supporter of the IRA and actually sits in fucking Congress, where he actually was chairman of a homeland security committee. So there is precedent. But I couldn't find anything with the obvious keyword searches.

Hmm. Journalism Degree. Work for minimum wage (or less) for your entire career. Waiters make more money than you. CS degree, sixty grand a year right out of school, most of them will be making at least six digits long before the end of their career. I enjoy being an exceptionally dull weirdo. How's journalism treating you?

The only government interference here would be to make such agreements illegal, punishing companies that tried to limit the competition between them for the best employees.

I would be okay with that.

I guess one of my points is that I don't believe there is a "we, the FOSS community". I used to think so, but now there seems to be nothing but a swarm of multiple contingents jockeying for position to further their project, and dumping on the other projects. I suppose it was ever thus, really. In any case, it guarantees that FOSS goes nowhere.

Discouraged, yes. Though I just installed the latest Ubuntu and this stuff was opt-in, so perhaps the cries were heard. My point is that to award this distinction to Ubuntu in the face of all the crap going down on the Internet is simply absurd, extremely small potatoes, and smacks of sour grapes and/or piling on, which is the norm for the FOSS press.

What's popular isn't always "right" (who decides that?), but we really might maintain a sense of proportion. In over 15 years of observing the FOSS world, it really seems that if you start to get any traction in the wider world, the "community" (as if there were a "community") seems to want to smack it down. For all the talk of world domination and so on and so forth, the "community" seems on some visceral level to want to remain marginal, They are getting their wish.