Or have I been trolled by a pro?

I'm sorry; I fail to see the point you are trying to make. By your logic, I should ignore any good things that anyone ever does because of a differing perspective on how things should be. Of course, I may have interpreted your statements incorrectly as they seem off topic and rather aimless and confused. I'm sure I have some tin-foil around here somewhere that I could make a hat out of and send to you. Consider it a gift from the "dood" who blindly "obey[s] the master corporation[s]".

Shouldn't there still be some sort of program to further their knowledge if they should deem necessary? If a child wins the contest, and shows potential, then why give them a $1000 and end it there? You are right about possibly not winning a Chrome/Firefox bounty, but lets get them there.

Glad to see they are encouraging white hat hacking. I hope they remain effective. Thousand dollars seems a little low. Surely they can do better, and put it towards their future education needs.

Its hard to make an umbrella that small fit over such a large territory isn't it? Nearly everything you said pertains to just a few states in the south eastern region. Please if you will make fun of this awful country, do it properly!

Except I think it mightn't be necessary since there is another, more efficient, idea that seems to be promising.

Which rightly represents a good portion of Windows Partners/Users. Microsoft rarely (if ever?) presents logic to their false-promises, because they know that people are prone to blindly nod and continue. Its unfortunate that I have to admit that I do like using Microsoft's products, even if I do have a problem with some of the ways their company operates.

Not enough.

Maybe I should have used a car analogy. This IS slashdot, of course. Cars blah blah blah OBDII blah blah blah get new car blah blah blah left without easy diagnostics.

Good point though.

Then the company chooses to spend an extra 6% to 7% on online purchases. The user shouldn't give a shit less about it. Its not his money and if his superior said to order it and if he/she informed the management of the charges, I don't see the problem. Eventually people/businesses will catch on and either A) Switch Browsers or B) Upgrade/Switch OSes or even C) Both 'A' and 'B'.

Should you be shopping on PCs you don't manage? If its work related, then I think they may allow for a browser upgrade to save a 6.8% fee. This is how you finally push businesses to start keeping up with progress. Are they still stuck on XP? Well then download fucking Chrome/Opera/Firefox/Safari!

Public school systems in the USA require students to have certain vaccinations in order to enroll in the student-body. Is this fair? For the benefit of man-kind, vaccinate your children and educate the bastards. Its the same thing. For the benefit of the tech industry, we need to enforce certain things. If that means forcing a browser upgrade/change, then so be it. Continuing with old tech is harmful to more than just the people using it. The website could kindly suggest upgrading to the newest version of IE. If that is not possible given the version of the OS, suggest an alternative until the OS can be upgraded. This keeps the anti-competitive levels low. I would suggest the same things for old versions of other browsers as well.

As for the ADA? That's besides the point.

I wasn't sure how to moderate this. I'm pretty sure its a super-effective troll. Yet some part of me suggests you might actually be serious so I opted out of wasting a mod point.

It would take 30 seconds to dial-out a request for water to shower with. Then you have to wait for the heat to download. Once you finally have hot water, it will randomly shut off and there you stand, shivering. So you decide to give up and get out but when you reach for the towel, its only partially there and corrupted. So you make a request for the rest of the towel, wait 30 seconds for the connection again, and realize that you have to start the download over so you try to make the partial towel work for your needs only to realize that its just not going to work. So you go ahead and restart the towel download but it instantly shows complete, but yet there is no towel. Now you have to wait on AOL to clear your cache, start the download again, and get disconnected once more. You would jump out the window but a request to open it would just be futile.

Exactly my point! Yet I still get comments stating the backups are deleted. These must be the people who are running these servers.

I may be wrong, but is it not a standard procedure to rsync files to one backup location that is not directly accessible from the original data and then have a backup of the backup in an offsite location? The backup-backup should contain a pool of data that is no longer on the original drive but is kept for such purposes as this. I may be missing some piece of the puzzle here, but in the scenarios I have been involved in this was the setup and has greatly restricted the ability to lose ANY data. Of course we dealt with small businesses and may not have been subjected to such a large attack.