Easy answer, don't use ApplePay if you are worried about Apple.

> I'll be DAMNED if I'm going to have every single financial transaction I make, no matter how small, tracked by someone.

Well, banks have been cooperating with the government (or whomever you're worried about) since long before Apple existed. You can of course only deal in cash, but if that's how you work then ApplePay or similar is obviously not for you.

Obviously it is not required. The point the author is making is that if you do have multiple cards (eg, different credit cards, debit cards store-specific cards, etc) then you can use ApplePay to combine them into one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/technology/tim-cook-making-apple-his-own.html

http://www.r-project.org/

NetBSD has already been ported to child hardware.

Star Trek soap and deodorant would probably be enough

Agreed, it's the one thing that I keep using Firefox for. What popular Firefox extension features have been ported for Safari generally don't work nearly as well. For example, I don't want to use a system-wide proxy for ad blocking, and as nice as the web inspector is it's not as good as he Web Developer + Firebug extensions for Firefox... not to mention that most Safari tweaks require input manager hacks which are sketchy at best and prone to breaking between Safari releases.

If Safari had a system in place for writing extensions I wouldn't even have Firefox installed on my computer, it's generally painful to use for any period of time in OSX (it's a bad OSX "citizen" and feels like a ported Windows app). Page load performance I really don't care about, what I care about is the 1+ seconds it takes to open a new Firefox window once I have a bunch (~5-10) already open. Safari is instantaneous no matter how many windows I already have open, as it should be on a quad core system with 8 gigs of ram.

I don't think that's anything new, it just means that you can write plugins that can interact with the page via javascript.... and honestly I'm not sure why/how that's a benefit (plugins are not an area I know much of anything about)

Source here for the curious:

http://gist.github.com/69810

1- "Oh damn, so it won't run any of my software?"
2- "Sure it will, we have Wine and Crossover!"
1- "So *if* it does run my software, it will run about 25% as fast as it would in its native environment, and probably buggy as hell?"
2- "Yup! You just wait, 2009 is the year of the Linux desktop!"

It's not exactly as straight forward as you make it sound.

Yeah, but I don't think any quad-core chips hit the performance/price sweet spot. More likely you'd get a dual core that is easily over clocked.

A laptop stand + USB keyboard is probably cheaper than any dock would be. I run mine closed with an external monitor hooked up.

You're doing it wrong.

So? It's not a list of "new OSS projects in 2008".

"by now"?? It's a list of "coolest OSS projects of 2008", not "things that should be making the headlines on 12/31".

Clearly your expectations are a bit out of whack. I don't much care for the list, but that's because I don't much care for top 10 lists. You don't seem to like the list because you don't understand what it's supposed to be a list of.

The average Joe iTunes user won't eve know the DRM is there.