You have reading comprehension problems. The person you replied to acknowledged that there are many flaws with China's dictatorship. He did not say we should clap for them, nor did he imply that what they have done is morally good. He merely pointed out a relevant fact in a debate about economic policies.

In the short term it shouldn't have much effect on BroadBand HamNet because the BroadBand HamNet project replaces Ubiquiti's proprietary software with software based on OpenWRT. In the longer term this could help BroadBand HamNet. If this results in Ubiquiti releasing the source to their software, that could make it easier for the OpenWRT and BroadBand HamNet developers to add additional features/performance/reliability to their builds that target these devices.

I was expecting him to say something along these lines, but I got the impression that he didn't have enough technical knowledge to ad lib something like this and it wasn't in his prepared script.

I received one of these calls a few weeks ago. After the scammer informed me that my computer was compromised but he was going to help me solve the problem I thanked him for his help and asked him which of my computers was infected. He seemed surprised by the question and said, "You have more than one computer?" I replied that I have several and surely he must be aware of that because he had just described the extensive monitoring Microsoft was doing. He said it didn't matter which one; just go to one of them and follow his instructions to get rid of the infection. I said that surely I need to go to the one that is infected to clean it, but he again claimed it didn't matter which one I went to. I pushed the point that if his monitoring was able to detect an infection then surely it must be able to identify which of my computers was infected. He started becoming beligerent, almost shouting that it didn't matter which computer had the infection but that I needed to go to one of them immediately so he could help me clean it. At this point I called him a liar and asked how he felt about lying to and stealing from people. He really started yelling at that point, and I just hung up. I haven't heard back yet.

I've never seen any version of Word or PowerPoint since 2003 take anywhere near that long to load except when there are one or more slow-loading addins installed. Check your list of addins and disable or uninstall any you don't use.

I work for a company that creates applications that store and process our customers' data in the cloud, so I'm biased. But in the vast majority of cases our customers' data is much more secure in our systems than it used to be when they stored it on their own on-premise systems. Most of them are medium-sized businesses with IT staffs that are competent but don't have training or much time to spend focusing on security issues. As a result most of their in-house systems have nowhere near the level of security that our systems have.

Would you care to provide a citation to one of these well documented cases?

You're suggesting that some used the store without knowing it existed. An impressive achievement.

Wrong. If someone is posing a clear and present danger to me or my family, and if the setting is such that shooting him doesn't pose a danger to others in the vicinity, then shooting him would absolutely be justified.

Obviously that wasn't the case in this incident.

Same here. I've used an iPad and an Android tablet in the past, but my Surface Pro is far more useful because it runs Office and all my other Windows apps and yet is as portable as other tablets. There are only 2 problems with it: 1. The battery life is much shorter than an iPad or Android tablet. The Surface Pro 2 should be much better in that regard. 2. It costs too much. I got mine for free, but otherwise I wouldn't have bought it. Microsoft is NOT solving that problem with the Surface Pro 2; they're going with the same pricing as the original. It needs to be at least $200 less.

I have a nephew who has very poor judgement. The first time he asked to use one of our computers to check Facebook and his email I was very concerned that he would download malware. Then I remembered the Chromebook and handed it to him. Problem solved. It let him do everything he wanted to do and prevented him from causing any problems. Now every time he comes over he asks if he can borrow "that cool laptop that goes directly to the browser".

Portal is the game that first got my son really thinking about concepts like conservation of momentum, even though he didn't know that's what he was thinking about.

Take a look at NetDocuments. It's SaaS, so you don't have to maintain servers, and sharing documents between multiple offices is trivial. It includes digital signature functionality.

There's this island somewhere in the Pacific where they still use Apple II's to keep the world from ending. From the screenshots I've seen they don't appear to be running the old Apple OS on them, though.

Take a look at NetDocuments. It's a SaaS (Software as a Service) document management system. It handles millions of documents, can be accessed from anywhere, and is relatively inexpensive compared to maintaining your own servers.