They've been doing that for years and have it down pretty well (though far from perfect). I upgraded my Ubuntu desktop with every new release since Feisty until earlier this year when I switched to LMDE, which is a rolling release and much less of a hassle. Each new update brought along a few problems (especially with ALSA/PulseAudio and WiFi) but they were all trivial to fix. Upgrading Windows is such a PITA that it's better to just format your hard drive and do a fresh install. All in all, it's probably going to be a lot more trouble to upgrade Windows every year than to upgrade Ubuntu twice every year. I could also say that nothing's to stop you from sticking with the LTS releases and only upgrading once every eighteen months, but considering that almost every PC at my office still runs Windows XP, I have to concede that barring some wird policy shift in the future regarding backwards-compatibility and updates, Microsoft has the advantage in that area.

Neither of these is a dilemma. Any righteous person should feel the moral obligation to boycott DRM-inflicted products and inflict physical violence on the people who make them, their loved ones and their property.

And if women didn't walk around dressed like sluts, they wouldn't get raped.

I don't follow you. Assuming time-travel were possible, then, what would happen if I went back and shot my grandparents? Or rather, what I really want to know is, what's wrong with the logical process that leads me into the assumption that it would somehow be impossible to do that?

Performance-wise, what advantage does this offer over just having a faster x86-64 CPU? I don't see it.

But these changes will not transfer into the descendants of the guy who was changed still in the womb unless they're exposed to precisely the same factors and change in the same way. It's not a "lasting" change like a genetic one.

More likely they're not innovative, but still are patentable.

So if I prescribe you aspirin as a blood thinner and you take one for a headache, that's aspirin abuse? Don't pull definitions out of your ass, fuckface.

Yes, it is. It's also what most people are used to, which is important for gaining a large userbase.

I didn't mean to restrict the meaning of "abuse" to addiction. It also happens that most of these pro athletes do not use performance enhancers in doses or with a frequency so high that it ruins their health. Any one of these factors can constitute abuse, but most athletes don't fit in that description, even though some of them obviously do.

Was that "later in life" that you typed there? Seems to me you're not refuting my point at all. One or two people getting carried away because they can't keep up with the younger generation does NOT mean that the "abuse" generalization should hold any water.

Substance "abuse"? It's just substance use - athletes using chemical aids, steroids and hormones to improve their physical performance. I can't imagine why you'd qualify it as abuse in any way, shape or form - it's not like the athletes are hooked on steroids. They use these substances as a means to an end, not as an end in themselves.

From a technical standpoint, the ideal solution would be to include both plain Firefox and Firefox with the most popular security extensions, like NoScript and AdBlock(Plus). But this was a marketing study, so I think they were justified in their approach.

Shipped or not with them is exactly the issue. It'd be a murky point if NoScript were developed by Mozilla, but not even that - if you want to keep your Raw Processing analogy, you'd have to assume that Raw Processing is only available if you root your camera and install a third-party firmware.

What good is a browser safety test that assumes every user is both very knowledgeable about Internet security and very diligent in protecting his/her own data, when in truth the average user is completely clueless and doesn't even care that much? Yet that's a built-in assumption in a test that pretends that an optional third-party security plugin used by a minority of the overall users of that particular browser is in fact part of the browser itself. Besides, if you want to add NoScript to Firefox when testing, it's only consistent that you also add every other extension that's at least as popular as NoScript, right? But why should you stop at that particular level of popularity? Why not install every single extension you can get your hands on? It'd be a miracle if you could get the browser to launch, and even then it wouldn't beat IE 4 on a security test with all those added vulnerabilities.

That's good to know. Thanks for the link.