Recent theories suggest that sex is actually more important than survival. Read "The Selfish Gene". An example can be found in birds, where the males have very distinguishing colors. These colors are easier to spot by predators. But they also tell the females, look how nice my colors are -- I can execute my mating dance in the open field and not get caught by predators.

We have this at my workplace. Employer issued ~20 MacBooks and three (two normal, one Pro) just continue to drop WiFi every couple of minutes. We use third-party WiFi USB-dongles.

Sure but that is not what this is about. We are not talking about a payment for 8 hours. If you think that you can trust Paypal with thousands of dollars, then that will come back to haunt you. That is what banks are made for b

No viable alternative? What about a normal bank transfer? I used to pay an Indian guy via Paypal but their charges are pretty steep. So I informed with my local European bank for the costs and it turns out this is much cheaper. Problem fixed.

This is a problem with OSes like Linux as well. Webbased software like Wordpress is often not packaged. Thus when it is installed, you need to make sure to subscribe yourself to the particular mailinglist to receive update notifications. Also, you will need to subscribe to your regular security mailinglist because the vendor will not always tell you pronto when vulnerabilities are found.

The situation described by the orginal parent is partly valid for Linux as well.

I would appreciate it if Chrome took it's default font size/color from the KDE settings. What would even be better is if there was a KDE theme that also took over the KDE look and feel for the browser window and the tabs, and the buttons and dialogues that Chrome has.

That may be a personal issue. Everyone I show the photos on my iPhone, will immediately understand the swipe to left and right movement to see the other photos.

If you think about it, it is almost unbelievable that Microsoft would release a new shell, then mak it not POSIX compliant. Almos defy OS for the last couple of decades has aimed for POSIX compliancy. Then when they build a shell, they ignore that and go on their own way. I wonder what would have happened if they just tried to conform.

A lot of sysadmins who are fluent with shell scripting, could have jumped in and have a huge advantage administering Windows machines. A lot of free utilities could easily be ported. And Windows admins could just pick up any of the gajillion resources on Shell scripting, or visit a local Unix user group to pick up tricks.

I know Powershell has lots of hooks that apps can hook into; that's basically the equivalent of Linux' D-Bus system.

XML is very useful for configuration files:
- All programming languages have parsers for it.
- Since it is so standard, most other programs can read it.
- These parsers can almost always do basic error checking by creating a DTD (file which contains all XML tags in the config file?)
- The config file can be upgraded (to the next version) using XSLT, no need to write a custom upgrade program
- It is very easy to extend a parameter on the XML config file, for instance from a single value to an array of values

My mother managed to get some nearly-impossible-to-remove scareware on her (Windows) netbook. She swears up and down that she never visited any sketchy sites

I know it's your mother and all that but it was probably some porn site she visited.

  Because you're her son, she'd probably never say that but trust me, men aren't the only who visit porn sites. The human race was built with lust inside, and your mom by definition wasn't exempt.

Moderators, I am not trying to be funny or snarky, just pointing out the obvious (for me at least).

Giving up modpoints for this: this is an awesome feature. Basically this will do what the Google Chrome browser does, except now at the correct level.Like managing window size and position, it seems to me the tabbing of windows should be done at the Window Manager level. Currently, each app tries to solve this separately. That is a waste of resources.

OK yes I see what you mean. You have more influence over the software than the PHB or related factors.

Please read my comment. There is no limitation on the number of browsers on a PC. Thus, a company admin could create icons in the start menu that runs IE6 and point towards the legacy stuff.

For the rest, he could use a modern browser.

This argument comes up time and time again. I don't think it is a valid one. Sure, a couple of corporate apps are limited to IE6. So? An admin could just make a shortcut in the start menu that launches IE. For the rest (ie. normal web browsing), the admin could install any of the more modern browsers.

I think the "IE6 lock-in" is a myth.