It certainly has been a horrible experience with OS/X. I don't get to do anything unnatural with the installer. A few buttons and I was done. And the easy on the eye colors. Pathetic! Where are my jarring Gnome schemes? Installers that just work. Where is the fun in that? Tools that don't take days to find out how to use. Everything just works and I have nothing to hack on. This leaves me with the devastating result of working on my actual job assignments. Please, someone take this desktop away! It is ruining my herd reputation. (P.S. I love Linux and open source but the desktop environments are by-and-large inferior human interfaces.)

Not really. Every administration, Dem and Rep, have been using creative accounting with entitlement surpluses to lower the "observed" debt. Add to that the tech (bogus) bubble during Clinton and the budget surplus is basically a false positive. As this remains true today, the debt is much worse than even the current horrible news...

Following in the footsteps of our parents, Great Britain no doubt...

You meanl like every other desktop, laptop, and netbook on the planet?

"It isn't because there are technical shortcomings, it's simply because of liability and privacy. That's it, plain and simple." That just doesn't fly. The number of companies outsourcing their Exchange services and more importantly administrative rights and functions to servers to foreign corporations in countries that have little or no protective laws makes this assertion difficult to believe. In the commercial world, you would purchase a real business support agreement with Google to use Google Apps which would be just as binding as any other outsourcing contract, And IMHO much safer than some of these offshore outsourcing people.

Presidents, mostly Clinton, via executive orders, required Government controlled agencies (read: Fanny, Freddy, et al.) to dramatically relax lending requirements. So a private business, competing with a government controlled mortgage entity, made very bad decisions in order to compete.

So, our wonderful government was

• responsible for creating a mortage system that was completely perverted (Freddy, Fanny)
• responsible for failing to execute oversight on existing rules and regulations to protect us (ex: Madoff)

There are evil businessmen out there but they are far fewer in number than folks like "spun" would have you believe. But it is an abusive government that creates an environment were those few bad apples can florish and spoil the entire barrel. Before the government started interfering with the mortage business no banker in their right mind would have ever taking those risks. Our government should simply be protecting us against the "bad guys" and not trying to manipulate and pervert entire segments of the economy.

You would only be correct for the clients where they are a large enough organization to justify their own testing and deployment infrastructure. However, I suspect a very large number of customers are small enough that they just let the software update itself on a routine schedule and do not have the resources to build a complete IT test and deploy infrastructure. In that regard, the smaller McAfee clients had no responsibility for the failure at all.

If I am standing in the public street with a legal radio receiver and I can "hear' an SSID, you can have no expectation of privacy. How far would you like your SSID privacy to extend anyway? 50 feet? 1000 feet? a mile? Once you start broadcasting on open public airwaves, your privacy ends. Unless as others here have observed you protected and encrypted the transmission.

Right. The US Government has a wonderful record of cost containment and fiscal responsibility.

I would suggest looking at the "Steve" era mostly and I would also disagree with this assertion.

However, the important point was "Apple tries a lot of things". In fact quality gurus often suggest trying 10 things, failing at 9, and having one runaway success is better than trying 1 thing and running the risk of it failing.

The Apple announcement may be a device that will be another Pippin failure or another iPhone hit. I for one am very interested in what it is because we (and they) will learn from it, good or bad.

(By the way, the deafining roar is only the media; move on, nothing new here :-)

Perhaps they should be more concerned with customer friendly than publisher friendly. Even though we like having competition, I am very suspicious of a company that uses phrasing like this. It usually is an indication of an underlying viewpoint and in this case I am led to believe that viewpoint is decidedly not customer centric.

I have software on my computer already that will play WMV, H.264, and a host of other standard formats. So many people confuse a standard file delivery format with software. I do NOT want Silverlight on my computer.