Well it might if this was cheap commodity hardware. It's not.

Ridiculous that they would expect you to pet this for beta.

They do this every time. Gartner left out almost 4 million Apple sales. Those were actual sales, rather than 'shipped'. This happens every time, and we always find out later that Shipped from folks like Samsung != Sales from Apple.

Apple reports Sales. The others do not.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/03/03/gartner-ignores-apples-sales-numbers-reports-android-marketshare-doubled-ipad-in-2013

A foolish argument, stating that a no-shirt policy should apply to someone with a shirt, no?

As to firing someone for practicing religion while working, absolutely they should be fired, if the employer doesn't allow such. It's still a private company, which company policy and employees excepted to perform and act within company guidelines.

I can't claim one way or another what is or isn't true in the bible, and frankly don't care what book some people want to thump as long as it doesn't interfere in my private life, although common sense shows us that a simple message rarely ever makes it past 20 people in a room and comes out the same. Why someone would expect a book that is supposed to be passed down through generations of corrupt humans to stay true to it's source is beyond me. It was an example of a story they espouse as gospel, not a submission of absolute fact.

You forget that such policies are applied equally to everyone. If anyone comes in with no shirt, then anyone matching that is is denied service. The rules don't specifically say black with no shirt, or rapist with no shirt. The state has also failed to establish how serving a gay customer is substantially different than serving a straight person a cup of coffee. The simple act of purchasing a coffee does not violate anyone's religious freedoms, and the state has yet to prove how such a coffee purchase does so or how it is i the states best interest to protect such 'coffee buying' from allowing homosexuals to purchase it in the same way as a heterosexual. It's not as if the person walking in is somehow demanding that the business perform gay sex acts on demand. It is a public company. The owner opted into the market and as such has to accept both the benefits and controls that come with operating a business in the public domain.

As to the bible, Jesus at with prostitutes and thieves. Apparently it didn't harm his religious beliefs in the slightest. Kind of a hard example to cite when one of the major religious figures supposedly ignored such separation and did the exact opposite.

I saw nothing in the linked article that indicated 'what' information was pulled for these 70,000 'records'. It could be something as simple as IP information. Simply claiming you hacked a site without providing specifics at to what was extracted isn't all that useful. It makes for good headlines and 'clicks', but not much else.

This is what passes for reporting these days?

Then yesterday, after explaining “passive reconnaissance, which allows us to query and look at how the website operates and performs,” Kennedy said he was able to access 70,000 records within four minutes! It was “a rudimentary type attack that doesn't actually attack the website itself, it extracts information from it without actually having to go into the system.”

Kennedy also told Fox News Sunday, “70,000 was just one of the numbers that I was able to go up to. And I stopped after that. You know, and I'm sure it's hundreds of thousands, if not more and it was done within about a four-minute time frame. So, it's just wide open. You can literally just open up your browser, go to this and extract all this information without actually having to hack the website itself.”

You are making the false assumption that when Apple releases a new OS, they stop supporting the old. That is not the case. They continue to path them.

Although a bit flippant, the parent does have a point. Most older Android devices will never see a security update or fix for this issue. It is what it is, and unless that changes, a valid response it to require a minimum level of OS on the device. This is one area where Apple excels and Android does not.

You have a few valid points as some of the GP's examples were a bit out there, and for some of your own points, you would be laughed out of your procurement department. Corporate IT environments care very much about who uses software. I don't know about your IT department, but ours has very strict standards about supportability, health of a company, number of customers and business strength, etc. Those things are key to investing heavily in a software or hardware platform. You don't want to drop millions on a product only to find the company has gone under and won't be supporting your purchase. There comes a point when an OS reaches enough market saturation that it is largely considered a viable alternative that has achieved it's own momentum. Linux simply hasn't gotten to that place yet. Does that make it an invalid choice? Certainly not, BUT it does make many corporate IT shops hesitate to invest heavily in it. We have Linux in our environment. Not a large one, and certainly not widely supported, but it's there.

I don't think the OP was stating it was ineffective or a bad choice, and your defensive post speaks to that, but rather it just hasn't achieved enough market saturation that it is largely considered a viable general use desktop for the masses. No more, no less. That speaks nothing to it's benefits, or it's drawbacks, and you should take such at face value, which is true enough. Linux is more of a specialty desktop. It can do what it does extremely well, but for most purposes, it would require a bit of customization that an OS with better market saturation would probably get out of the box. Not because it can't do those things, but because the vendors who create such products probably also took that market saturation into account when designing their products.

NoScript causes to much impact. I actually tried that route early on with my dad, who is very non-techie. It caused all sorts of headaches by breaking various websites. The idea being that they can still browse relatively freely, use a scanner that doesn't bring the system to it's knees, or destroy the OS with bad AV quarantine, etc.

The above method is what I ended up with after a decade of various tech as it evolved. Not bullet proof, but keeps the re-installs down to one every 4-5 years.

I would suggest this as well. If she's comfortable with Windows, then make it as safe as possible. Security Essentials has far less risk of throwing a key Windows file into quarantine and hosing the install. It's also far better as far as performance. Ensure she knows how to spot when it has not updated in a while (it happens). Ensure it updates when the PC is likely to be on.

From there, you need to use a few plugins that will help keep your mother safer online. WOT is an excellent, and low impact plugin that will warn her about known dangerous sites. AdBlock is a must if she's prone to clicking on things she shouldn't.

If you can swing it, get an SSD, and kill scheduled tasks like defrag, which would no longer be necessary.
DO schedule checks for updates when she is most likely to be on. Ensure you train her to spot the prompt that updates are needed, and how to install them.
If she can't deal with the update process, then you should setup some time each week to remote into the PC to do them, and to handle basic maintenance

For remote fixes, I'd suggest TeamViewer, set to auto-run as a service., with an Admin password setup for yourself.

I used all of the above steps with my Dad who lives about 2 hours away with decent results for quite a few years until the old XP hardware failed. I should note that I eventually moved him to a Mac mini when his old hardware failed, and when I no longer wanted to pay a hundred bucks for Windows. My dad likes playing games for the most part, and the ecosystem on a Mac made sense for him (app store), while keeping him largely out of trouble.

What you've posted stands to reason, since they still require warrants to parse the data in the phone record metadata. They can't just randomly go out and start reading the data in the hopes that they find something useful, but rather must get approval from FISA with a credible threat. In short, the data collected doesn't drive the investigation, but rather re-enforces it. With millions of records to go through, they need a key value to look for (say a phone number from a known terrorist), which they would take to the court to get a warrant to search the metadata for a match to any calls to/from that phone number. Without that key data, the volume of numbers in the collected phone logs is largely useless until something comes along that gives them a target to look for.

That said, I do have to agree wholeheartedly about the 'publicly approved' statement, which is blatantly false. Although the public may have given tacit approval by voting certain members into congress, the closed door court approvals are a far cry from public approval.

Which would be be invalidated if it was ever leveraged.

Far too may on here seem to lack basic knowledge about trade dress. Samsung doesn't even deny that they heavily copied Apple at this point. Their executives state they were in a design 'panic' due to the iPhone.

This was to address lost profits for Apple that Samsung took as a result of Samsung copying trade dress and infringing on various patents. It's also the reason a CPA was noted as a key factor in the amount awarded.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070730-hurricane-warming.html

You misunderstand what the debt ceiling is. The debt is already incurred, meaning we are already obligated to pay for that existing debt. Raising the debt ceiling allows congress to borrow as needed for short term income to pay off incoming debt. It does not authorize additional spending or incurring any new deb (only congress can do that with spending bills). I assume by 'doom', you are generalizing. We've already seen one immediate affect of not raising the debt ceiling the last time they failed to do so. Our credit rating was dropped, costing us billions more in interest, much like your interest rate spikes if you miss a payment. This isn't rocket science. Our credit worthiness allows us to do things that a poor credit rating does not. It's really just that simple.

The root cause of 'spending' is Congress, not the debt ceiling. The right has turned the debt ceiling into some bogeyman without any context as to what it is, and why it's necessary to raise it.

If you are looking to address a spending problem (ex: live within our means), then tell congress to stop authorizing such spending. They control the purse strings. Playing with the debt ceiling is like giving your children your credit card, letting them max it out, and then refusing to pay the bill when it shows up in the mail because you think it was irresponsible to let you children max out your card.

Regarding your 'mentally ill' statement, a mentally ill person could certainly harm someone with a knife for example. but it's unlikely they could commit mass murder without being stopped. They could do the same with a rock, but again it's unlikely they could kill 20, 30, or more people before being disarmed and contained. I suspect you knew that before you put up that particular straw man argument.

For you climate change question, you are making an assumption that the short term result is harmful, when in actuality, one may see an increase in growing seasons. That doesn't mean it's not harmful, but rather shortsighted to assume that those changes will remain beneficial. Eventually when the increase begins to affect planetary ecosystems to such a degree that they break, you are faced with flooding, increased storm activity, etc.

As to short term damage, you need only look at the last few decades of increased storm activity, both in number, and in power.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-10/record-typhoon-damage-shows-aquino-s-task-in-philippine-tragedy.html

Here in the US, we also had two record storms that caused billions in damage. Each considered a 'storm of the century' except they both happened in the same decade (Katrina and Sandy). As the temperature increases, climatologists predict even more increase in storm severity. You are providing yet another straw man argument that says "Look here..short term, this hasn't caused any issues at all". The same could be said for poison, until it reaches a toxic level.

That two week 'vacation' as you call it had a larger impact than simply sending people home for two weeks. Those two weeks without pay affected every business that takes such money in, affecting their bottom lines, which in turn affects the goods that they order and produce. The work that would have been done in those two weeks became backlogged, causing new work when they return to also be delayed. Any fees and fines that would have been collected by the government were lost revenue. Any contacts that the government would have spent would be pended or cancelled, causing more ripples in the business sector. The CBO estimates that the shutdown costs about $300 million a day in lost economic activity. The shutdown was never just about 800,000 people being sent home for two weeks.

When folks like the Koch brothers are found to directly affect local politics across the entire nation, donating millions to sway election decisions, it becomes simple fact rather than fear.

Fear itself is not a bad thing, but Irrational fear is. Frightened people are easily controlled. Although your argument might appear to put my statement in the same class, it only appears that way. For example, death panels were widely used to scare people when health care reform was begin drafted. The simple facts are quite different with specific text preventing the fed from denying any type of medical care or 'rationing'. This would be an irrational fear. In my statement, I indicated that big money is pulling the strings. The fact that these political organizations must often disclose their donors, and those donors happen to be folks like the Koch brothers, puts the statement into fact, rather than irrational fear.

http://philanthropy.com/article/Koch-Brothers-Influence/140227/

Their donations are public record. They spend millions to sway elections towards business friendly politicians. They aren't the only ones. Does this follow the same category that implied the president was friendly towards the 9/11 Terrorists that killed thousands of Americans, that Death Panels would be used to let the Fed decide who lives and who dies, etc. The above fear mongering had no basis in fact. Even worse, it was peddled by both news outlets, and directly from the mouths of representatives of the government itself. Pailin and her anti-immunization rant is a good example of fear based rhetoric with no basis in fact.

The following examples are reports, obtained from public disclosures of donations by various political groups, some loosely defined 'charities', etc.

http://www.lung.org/associations/states/california/for-the-media/inthenews/study-tobacco-money.html
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/05/01/12591/gun-lobbys-money-and-power-still-holds-sway-over-congress
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/11/local/la-me-special-interests-20100712

Are they in the same category?