I have anecdotal evidence to offer as well. I've had a 120gb vertex 2 for two years as my primary desktops primary hard drive which gets used daily. Never had a problem with it, still runs great.

The solution to this is simple. Start out with a very small "officially supported" range of systems, such as the latest ubuntu install, default installation, with a small range of graphics cards, and a small range of motherboards or even specific computer models from various brands. Everyone else has binaries or source available to them, but support is up to the community.

I got it, I just chose not to ack your bad joke.

There is a difference between saying "an inexperienced coder shouldn't experiment and learn code", and saying "an inexperienced coder shouldn't write production code for a software company that distributes software to clients in mission critical production environments that has to be supported and maintained"

I disagree with your using "intended for use by one person" as a key defining point of PC. The revolution of the PC was that the physical size had come down enough to where it was plausible to have one in a personal space such as a home, opposed to a space such as a business or university, and did not need to connect to a mainframe to function. Much like the early days of the TV, you would have one per household, not one per person.

The phrase you need to be concluding on is "general purpose computer". Tablets and Smartphones are, by design, NOT general purpose computers. The companies making and selling them do not want you to use them as you would use a PC. They want you to consume media, which they can charge you more money for, and then share that media with others so that they can in turn charge them as well.

PC is not redefined based on how people use their PC. Just because the majority of the people today who own a PC only use it for browsing webpages, listening to music, and watching video does not mean that any device that can do these things is now a PC.

Not only this, but the biggest improvement to overall responsiveness of a machine right now is an SSD. If you purchased or built your computer 1-2 years ago and are looking for a significant speed boost, all you need to do is buy an SSD, not an entirely new computer or even a new motherboard and cpu. I doubt their methods to track purchased PCs even include hardware sales that could indicate home-built computers, and are only tracking numbers from the larger pre-built companies like apple, dell, hp, toshiba, etc..

Can anyone explain why KDE was able to squeeze out better performance than XFCE?

I am not familiar with the defaults for Ubuntu's XFCE package, so I am unsure if they have some kind of composting engine configured that would be slowing it down. I was quite shocked to see that they found KDE to land higher benchmarks than XFCE.

I'm a bit confused about how a hash would help. I assume that all information except for the salt would be plainly visible on the bill, or else there would be no way to confirm the contents of the hash are correct. If you had a reasonable collection of bills with all of this visible information then you should be able to derive the salt eventually. At that point there is nothing stopping a counterfeiter from producing passable qr codes on their bills. I have my doubts about the salt remaining secret for even that long, as any device made to verify the qr codes would have to have the salt embedded in it somewhere, waiting for hacker eyes to reveal it.

Is it so hard to imagine that these things could have been formed on another planet, or even a non-planetary celestial object such as an asteroid, which then traveled near earth while carrying these critters,before breaking apart causing fragments to land on earth? After thousands of years of life on earth evolution caused them to lose some of their space-rigidity which is why they now only fare a 60% chance of survival. Perhaps their survival has little bearing on the duration of their space travel; it could be like hdd failings, where if an hdd makes it past a certain point in usage then it's probability of premature failure is slim. Thoe 60% that survived may have been able to survive 100 days.

The bug described in CVE-2012-4681 affects Java SE 7. OS X uses Java SE 6. It would be a little weird if they patched Java SE 6 for a bug that doesn't exist in Java SE 6.

Just playing Devil's Advocate here, but couldn't God divinely cause a mutation in a specific direction which would then work itself out in evolution to become a dominant trait? Or even that God created the evolution process and let it run, similarly to how a software programmer writes a function and calls it?

Frames per second in video games are not all about what you can see. The FPS that a game plays at is in direct relation to input delay. A game that runs at 30fps is going to have twice as much input delay as a game that runs at 60fps, and 4 times the delay of a game that runs at 120fps. In highly competitive multiplayer games having an additional 20ms delay on all of your inputs compared to an opponent can make a difference.

Can I put a camera on my front yard that records license plates, and then feed that into a computer system that creates similar logs?.

Can I put a camera on the roof of my business to do this?

Can Starbucks or McDonalds put a camera on top of every store location and track vehicles nationwide?

What if the library didn't serve beer, but had a section dedicated to people who wanted to bring their own beer. But one beer company decided that even though the library lets you drink the beer in there, they don't want you drinking THEIR beer in a library. So if Blizzard catches you drinking their beer in a Linux environment, they are going to ban you from playing Diablo 3.

From FBI PDF http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/november/malware_110911/DNS-changer-malware.pdf

What Does DNSChanger Do to My Computer?
DNSChanger malware causes a computer to use rogue DNS servers in one of two ways. First, it changes the computer’s DNS server settings to replace the ISP’s good DNS servers with rogue DNS servers operated by the criminal. Second, it attempts to access devices on the victim’s small office/home office (SOHO) network that run a dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) server (eg. a router or home gateway). The malware attempts to access these devices using common default usernames and passwords and, if successful, changes the DNS servers these devices use from the ISP’s good DNS servers to rogue DNS servers operated by the criminals. This is a change that may impact all computers on the SOHO network, even if those computers are not infected with the malware.