It demonstrates that car industry has failed. We should be designing systems that don't need seatbelts and don't care if user decides to slam into a tree at 100km/h.
This analogy is flawed because car safety mechanisms are constrained by the hard limits of physics. If someone slams a car into a tree at 100km/h, that kinetic energy has to go somewhere; car manufacturers already try to ensure that as much as possible is absorbed by the crumple zones, and protect the passenger compartment with airbags, but there's only so much they can do in the face of this kind of catastrophic failure.
On the other hand, the fact that malware is so rampant in the IT world has nothing to do with the laws of physics; it's due to poor legacy design decisions and bad coding. We could design a system that is secure by default, but for the most part we don't.
The breakdown of votes is very different to what I'm used to seeing on Supreme Court cases – you've got Breyer, Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor, and Kagan in the majority, and Scalia, Kennedy, and Ginsburg in dissent. That's really weird; usually you've got Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts on the conservative wing voting together, with Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor as the liberal bloc. Kennedy is a bit of a swing vote, though he's gone more with the conservatives recently, and Scalia used to occasionally vote with the liberals on civil liberties cases, but he doesn't any more and is now pretty much an elderly partisan crank. Roberts occasionally crosses the line (as with the decision upholding PPACA) but it's rather unusual to see so much intermixing between the liberal and conservative blocs.
Just goes to show that copyright as a political issue doesn't neatly break down along existing partisan lines.
Yes. Windows 8 is a Windows Vista. Like Windows 7, Windows 8's successor will just be a tweaked version of its predecessor, but sheeple will insist that the predecessor was worst evar and the successor is a ginormous improvement.
The primary reason why people dislike Windows 8 is the forced exposure to Metro and the loss of the Start button. Unless Microsoft gives an option to get around this, Windows 9 will be just as disliked as Windows 8. Power users and business users aren't suddenly going to decide that a tablet interface on the desktop is a good idea.
Windows could have been sandboxed too making it impossible to edit system files, access files outside the installation directory too. Also autobooting at start should be something only the user can choose and can't be automatically checked. This would have rendered most viruses useless. This should have been done circa 1995-98 when the Internet was just going mainstream.
The problem is that circa 1995-98, the average home PC simply wasn't powerful enough to handle this kind of sandboxing while maintaining acceptable performance. Windows 9x basically ran on bare metal (one bad app could easily bring the whole system down) and there was no such thing as security. It was crude, but it was the best you could do on a Pentium 100 with 8 megs of RAM (16 if you were lucky). A modern smartphone leaves these old systems in the dust. The Windows NT series has a Unix-style security model, though it was undermined by the need for backwards compatibility forcing regular users to run as administrator (UAC was a belated attempt to fix this). But this also means that NT needs a faster processor and a lot more RAM than 9x. The first home version of Windows based on the NT kernel was XP, and people were all up in arms about its "outrageous" system requirements back in 2001.
Nowadays, you can usually get away with running as a limited user and escalating only when installing or updating a program from a trusted source. I agree that sandboxing could be more sophisticated than it is on Windows, but this isn't a unique flaw; in fact, it's a result of copying the outdated Unix security model, which assumes that the program is the user and would do roughly what the user wanted (maybe true in the 1970s on shared university systems, but obvious nonsense now).
Samsung's smartphone hardware is superior to Apple, and their own user experience is pretty good. But one of the big advantages of the iPhone, which Samsung hasn't been able to match yet, is the fact that the iPhone comes clean: no crapware installed by default, even if you buy it through a carrier (which almost everyone in the US does). Samsung lets the carriers jam their phones full of crap, some of which runs in the background, and it seriously degrades the experience and wastes your limited storage space. It's even worse than an OEM PC, because you can't remove it without rooting. Samsung may not have the heft to force all of their phones to come crap-free, but they should at least be able to enforce that on their premium lines like the Galaxy S and Note series.
That display is awesome, AMOLEDs are getting better and we're finally beyond retina density for AMOLED displays (the S3 had a pentile display which lowers the effective dpi a bit)
The S4 also has Pentile, though at 1080p on a 5" screen the effective DPI is still very good.
The EPA tests aren't exactly a paragon of realism, either. There is at least as much fudging there. And to complicate things, the MPG figure you see on the window sticker is not the same figure used to calculate aggregate fuel efficiency for CAFE requirements.
Incidentally, one US-specific cause of MPG shortfalls is the use of ethanol. The cars are tested with pure gas, but regulations require a certain amount of ethanol to be blended into the real-world gasoline supply (up to 10% and the lobby wants to raise it higher), and this drastically hurts efficiency.
When Consumer Reports wants to test a product (including cars), they don't go to the manufacturer, much less let the manufacturer run the testing process! They buy the product anonymously at normal retail, and then test it in their own labs. Why can't regulatory agencies like the EPA and its European Union equivalent do the same thing?
There's actually no scientific reason to believe that so-called "truth serum" makes someone tell the truth. As suggested in the original article, what these drugs really do is lower inhibitions, which may, in some cases, cause a suspect to drop their guard and say things they otherwise wouldn't. Of course, you could just get them drunk and the results would be about the same, since alcohol also lowers inhibitions. As the ancients said – in vino, veritas.
It does seem strange that of all the anti-competitive things that Microsoft did, bundling the browser turned out to be the sticking point. Everyone else does that, and Apple's current practice (no even allowing competing browser engines at all on iOS) seems considerably worse. Microsoft really did commit a great deal of anti-competitive behavior, mostly in the 1995-2005 period, though some of it continues today – but most of this had little to do with IE. To the extent it did, it was only possible because of their desktop OS and office suite monopolies. I think we would have been better served if Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's original remedy had been carried out and Microsoft had been split into two parts, an OS division and an apps division. If that had been done, we'd almost certainly already have Office on iOS and Android. An even better solution, suggested by some commenters at the time, would have been to split Microsoft into several "Baby Bills", independent companies which would each have full rights to the existing MS copyrights and source code. Who knows, if that had been done, one of them might have even attempted to go open source at some point to gain more market share, or been bought out by Google...
One of the most annoying things about the MS API documentation is all the unexplained dependencies. You see a function call that takes 2 structure pointers as parameters and returns another structure... now you've got to open 3 additional documentation pages to read what those structs mean. And they might contain other structures of their own, so soon you can be up to half a dozen or more tabs, all for one API call you want to perform.
Ok, I am sick of this. Java is a fine language and platform and it doesn't deserve all the bad press it got lately just because it is poorly managed at the moment in one specific area: browser plugins. Banks and other corporate customers that feed Oracle couldn't care less about the flaws because they use Java server-side.
The problem is that, until very recently, the Java installer went out of its way to shove the browser plugin down your throat. Even if you removed it manually, it would come back the next time Java was updated. They changed it recently so you can disable the plugin in the control panel, but that's not really good enough – it ought to be turned off by default. In fact, it should probably be a separate download, with a warning that it's for legacy support only. Also, they really need to stop using the update process as an opportunity to try to make an extra buck with Ask Toolbar.
On its face, the proposal to share student data with private companies seems to clearly violate FERPA, the federal law covering privacy of educational data. According to the article linked, the schools are claiming that it's OK, because when FERPA says it's OK for student data to be accessed by "School officials with legitimate educational interest", that really also means third-party contractors working for the schools. Apparently, the Department of Education has signed off on this. WTF? How can this possibly fit the legislative intent? It says "school officials", not "school vendors" or "school contractors". And there's a reason for that: actual school officials are subject to some level of public control and accountability, while private contractors are not.
This plan should be challenged in court as a violation of federal law.
The reason why this adapter exists is because Lightning is simply not capable of streaming a "raw" HDMI signal across the cable. Lightning is a serial bus. There is no clever wire multiplexing involved.
The HD-SDI standard can transmit a full, uncompressed HD signal over a serial connection. Why wasn't that used?
Certain people are aware that the quality could be better and others are working on it. For the time being, the quality was deemed to be suitably acceptable.
Any level of compression artifacts introduced at this level is unacceptable. We understand that HD video has to be compressed to fit into a sane amount of space, but up until now all cable formats have been lossless – this is a regression.
And why does your marketing literature say 1080p output when that is clearly not true?
Even the "server" version of the Mac Mini does not support ECC RAM. Many other important server-grade features, such as IPMI, are also missing. Why would anyone choose this over cheaper, more robust commodity PC server hardware? You can't even plead cosmetics, because it's a freaking server; it goes in a rack somewhere and only a handful of IT staff ever need to see it. The only possible reason I can think of why someone would want to run an OSX server is if they were going to be remote-accessing it to run Xcode for iOS development. What else can you do on OSX that you can't do on Windows or Linux?
Yeah, because what we really need in IT are more compliance checklists and more lawyers and more absolute rules that never get revisited or updated.
Under what circumstances do you believe it is appropriate, or would be appropriate at any time in the future, for a website to store passwords in clear-text?
The only thing that can hope to topple MS Office is an open document format. Microsoft has a format in ISO but it's not quite accurate enough to do an independant implementation and has many vague descriiptions of behaviors and/or descriptions of behaviors that references things not part of the office suite. (I'm sure most of us followed the whole ISO certification thing... they "fast tracked" a standard which wasn't complete or accurate and has yet to be fully implemented.)
So OOXML is still quite proprietary and no one can faithfully implement it based on the ISO speciification alone.
They did eventually describe the stranger parts of the specification (e.g. 'autoSpaceLikeWord95'). The problem is that OOXML is basically an XML-serialized dump of MS Office guts; it wasn't designed from the ground up with interoperability in mind like ODF was, so interoperability is very hard. The spec runs to literally thousands of pages.
The new version of Office is supposed to include the option to save as "OOXML Strict", which should cut back on some of the deprecated junk (such as VML) in the OOXML spec. But I don't think this will be enabled by default, and even if it was, the old documents will continue to be around for years to come and will still have to be dealt with.
Google is one of the few organizations on the planet (other than Microsoft) with the resources to produce a good OOXML document reader/writer, so it's a shame that their efforts here have been so lackluster.
There's also quite often a need to exchange documents with opposing counsel, for, e.g., joint stipulations. Finally, I need to be able to submit documents to the judge's chambers in Microsoft Word (or WordPerfect.WPD) format, and they have to look right when the judge opens them. The judiciary isn't going to go with OOo anytime soon (they're still slavishly tied to WordPerfect!)...
Most business use Office only because they don't know any better.
Most businesses use MS Office because:
It's what all of their staff is already trained on.
They need to be able to reliably and accurately interchange documents with other people and organizations who use MS Office. Close isn't good enough.
In many cases, they have business logic coded into some arcane VBA applet. The only competitor I know of that has even started to do anything with VBA is Open/LibreOffice, and even then it is very sketchy and far from enterprise-ready.
MS Office is easy to push out and manage through Group Policy. This is the same reason why IE still rules in the enterprise, even when the IE6 dependencies have finally been gotten rid of.
Most of what I've seen Excel get used for in an office setting would be better served by a database....
That's true. But the average user isn't technically savvy enough to configure a database (and even if they could, IT policy might prohibit it), while that same user can come up with something quick-and-dirty in Excel. The ease of use makes up for the limited feature set and sub-par performance.
In theory, these Excel "apps" should be replaced with real databases by IT once they become an important part of business logic, but in practice, that seldom happens, and the original hacked-together solution continues to be used for many years.
Ok you guys dislike Windows 8, we know. You guys hated Windows 3.1, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7 when it came out too.
Actually, Windows 7 was fairly well-liked when it came out. As for XP, the reason it was disliked at first is because it wasn't really fully mature when released, and its hardware requirements seemed too high – remember, this was 2001. However, the first two Service Packs fixed most of the bugs and glitches and made XP a bit more secure by default, and Moore's Law meant that the specs that seemed outrageous in 2001 were nothing by the middle of the decade. So it wasn't that the original impressions of XP were wrong, it's that maintenance and better hardware made XP actually a better product as time went by.
Worst case scenario: Skynet goes operational without all the nuclear post-apocalyptic drama.
Even if the drones did go berserk, wouldn't they all eventually run out of fuel and crash? Sure, it could cause a ton of damage, but there would be limits to how much.
So if Iran was found to have conducted something similar but less drastic than 9/11 against the US
If we consider a nation hostile and are concerned about them launching a 9/11-style attack, the obvious solution is not to let their citizens come into our country. If they don't come here, they can't commit those kind of terrorist acts.
or North Korea blows up a twenty or thirty airliners, the only possible US response is then nuclear annihilation of Iran or North Korea?
What would we do if North Korea did that now? Remember, they not only have a couple of their own nuclear weapons, but also massive artillery batteries aimed at the largest South Korean population centers, which gives them the ability of mutually assured destruction. Which means that our practical options are no different than if we only had nukes: we can go all-out (a war which we'd win, but at the cost of millions of lives and many billions of dollars of damage to the world economy), we can do nothing, or we can do non-military stuff like pushing for China to cut them off. Our existing conventional military forces really don't add any extra options to this situation as far as I can see.
As to why fighters are up there in the first place? To stop the other guys bombing you, and to protect your bombers and other assets, typically.
But in that case, couldn't drones overwhelm the enemy by sheer force of numbers, even if each individual drone was inferior to a manned fighter jet? After all, the whole point of drones is that our soldiers don't die when they get shot down.
I seem to recall reading in a history of WWII that the U.S. tanks were inferior to German tanks, but we produced so many more of them (for our own troops and the other Allies) that the Nazis just couldn't keep up. Any idea if that was correct? If so, it seems the same principle might apply here.
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It demonstrates that car industry has failed. We should be designing systems that don't need seatbelts and don't care if user decides to slam into a tree at 100km/h.
This analogy is flawed because car safety mechanisms are constrained by the hard limits of physics. If someone slams a car into a tree at 100km/h, that kinetic energy has to go somewhere; car manufacturers already try to ensure that as much as possible is absorbed by the crumple zones, and protect the passenger compartment with airbags, but there's only so much they can do in the face of this kind of catastrophic failure.
On the other hand, the fact that malware is so rampant in the IT world has nothing to do with the laws of physics; it's due to poor legacy design decisions and bad coding. We could design a system that is secure by default, but for the most part we don't.
The breakdown of votes is very different to what I'm used to seeing on Supreme Court cases – you've got Breyer, Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Sotomayor, and Kagan in the majority, and Scalia, Kennedy, and Ginsburg in dissent. That's really weird; usually you've got Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts on the conservative wing voting together, with Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor as the liberal bloc. Kennedy is a bit of a swing vote, though he's gone more with the conservatives recently, and Scalia used to occasionally vote with the liberals on civil liberties cases, but he doesn't any more and is now pretty much an elderly partisan crank. Roberts occasionally crosses the line (as with the decision upholding PPACA) but it's rather unusual to see so much intermixing between the liberal and conservative blocs.
Just goes to show that copyright as a political issue doesn't neatly break down along existing partisan lines.
Yes. Windows 8 is a Windows Vista. Like Windows 7, Windows 8's successor will just be a tweaked version of its predecessor, but sheeple will insist that the predecessor was worst evar and the successor is a ginormous improvement.
The primary reason why people dislike Windows 8 is the forced exposure to Metro and the loss of the Start button. Unless Microsoft gives an option to get around this, Windows 9 will be just as disliked as Windows 8. Power users and business users aren't suddenly going to decide that a tablet interface on the desktop is a good idea.
Windows could have been sandboxed too making it impossible to edit system files, access files outside the installation directory too. Also autobooting at start should be something only the user can choose and can't be automatically checked. This would have rendered most viruses useless. This should have been done circa 1995-98 when the Internet was just going mainstream.
The problem is that circa 1995-98, the average home PC simply wasn't powerful enough to handle this kind of sandboxing while maintaining acceptable performance. Windows 9x basically ran on bare metal (one bad app could easily bring the whole system down) and there was no such thing as security. It was crude, but it was the best you could do on a Pentium 100 with 8 megs of RAM (16 if you were lucky). A modern smartphone leaves these old systems in the dust. The Windows NT series has a Unix-style security model, though it was undermined by the need for backwards compatibility forcing regular users to run as administrator (UAC was a belated attempt to fix this). But this also means that NT needs a faster processor and a lot more RAM than 9x. The first home version of Windows based on the NT kernel was XP, and people were all up in arms about its "outrageous" system requirements back in 2001.
Nowadays, you can usually get away with running as a limited user and escalating only when installing or updating a program from a trusted source. I agree that sandboxing could be more sophisticated than it is on Windows, but this isn't a unique flaw; in fact, it's a result of copying the outdated Unix security model, which assumes that the program is the user and would do roughly what the user wanted (maybe true in the 1970s on shared university systems, but obvious nonsense now).
Samsung's smartphone hardware is superior to Apple, and their own user experience is pretty good. But one of the big advantages of the iPhone, which Samsung hasn't been able to match yet, is the fact that the iPhone comes clean: no crapware installed by default, even if you buy it through a carrier (which almost everyone in the US does). Samsung lets the carriers jam their phones full of crap, some of which runs in the background, and it seriously degrades the experience and wastes your limited storage space. It's even worse than an OEM PC, because you can't remove it without rooting. Samsung may not have the heft to force all of their phones to come crap-free, but they should at least be able to enforce that on their premium lines like the Galaxy S and Note series.
Full HD screen, a 1.9GHz processor, and a 13 Megapixel camera. What exactly more did you expect from this phone?
A hardware keyboard?
That display is awesome, AMOLEDs are getting better and we're finally beyond retina density for AMOLED displays (the S3 had a pentile display which lowers the effective dpi a bit)
The S4 also has Pentile, though at 1080p on a 5" screen the effective DPI is still very good.
The EPA tests aren't exactly a paragon of realism, either. There is at least as much fudging there. And to complicate things, the MPG figure you see on the window sticker is not the same figure used to calculate aggregate fuel efficiency for CAFE requirements.
Incidentally, one US-specific cause of MPG shortfalls is the use of ethanol. The cars are tested with pure gas, but regulations require a certain amount of ethanol to be blended into the real-world gasoline supply (up to 10% and the lobby wants to raise it higher), and this drastically hurts efficiency.
When Consumer Reports wants to test a product (including cars), they don't go to the manufacturer, much less let the manufacturer run the testing process! They buy the product anonymously at normal retail, and then test it in their own labs. Why can't regulatory agencies like the EPA and its European Union equivalent do the same thing?
There's actually no scientific reason to believe that so-called "truth serum" makes someone tell the truth. As suggested in the original article, what these drugs really do is lower inhibitions, which may, in some cases, cause a suspect to drop their guard and say things they otherwise wouldn't. Of course, you could just get them drunk and the results would be about the same, since alcohol also lowers inhibitions. As the ancients said – in vino, veritas.
It does seem strange that of all the anti-competitive things that Microsoft did, bundling the browser turned out to be the sticking point. Everyone else does that, and Apple's current practice (no even allowing competing browser engines at all on iOS) seems considerably worse. Microsoft really did commit a great deal of anti-competitive behavior, mostly in the 1995-2005 period, though some of it continues today – but most of this had little to do with IE. To the extent it did, it was only possible because of their desktop OS and office suite monopolies. I think we would have been better served if Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's original remedy had been carried out and Microsoft had been split into two parts, an OS division and an apps division. If that had been done, we'd almost certainly already have Office on iOS and Android. An even better solution, suggested by some commenters at the time, would have been to split Microsoft into several "Baby Bills", independent companies which would each have full rights to the existing MS copyrights and source code. Who knows, if that had been done, one of them might have even attempted to go open source at some point to gain more market share, or been bought out by Google...
One of the most annoying things about the MS API documentation is all the unexplained dependencies. You see a function call that takes 2 structure pointers as parameters and returns another structure... now you've got to open 3 additional documentation pages to read what those structs mean. And they might contain other structures of their own, so soon you can be up to half a dozen or more tabs, all for one API call you want to perform.
Ok, I am sick of this. Java is a fine language and platform and it doesn't deserve all the bad press it got lately just because it is poorly managed at the moment in one specific area: browser plugins. Banks and other corporate customers that feed Oracle couldn't care less about the flaws because they use Java server-side.
The problem is that, until very recently, the Java installer went out of its way to shove the browser plugin down your throat. Even if you removed it manually, it would come back the next time Java was updated. They changed it recently so you can disable the plugin in the control panel, but that's not really good enough – it ought to be turned off by default. In fact, it should probably be a separate download, with a warning that it's for legacy support only. Also, they really need to stop using the update process as an opportunity to try to make an extra buck with Ask Toolbar.
On its face, the proposal to share student data with private companies seems to clearly violate FERPA, the federal law covering privacy of educational data. According to the article linked, the schools are claiming that it's OK, because when FERPA says it's OK for student data to be accessed by "School officials with legitimate educational interest", that really also means third-party contractors working for the schools. Apparently, the Department of Education has signed off on this. WTF? How can this possibly fit the legislative intent? It says "school officials", not "school vendors" or "school contractors". And there's a reason for that: actual school officials are subject to some level of public control and accountability, while private contractors are not.
This plan should be challenged in court as a violation of federal law.
The reason why this adapter exists is because Lightning is simply not capable of streaming a "raw" HDMI signal across the cable. Lightning is a serial bus. There is no clever wire multiplexing involved.
The HD-SDI standard can transmit a full, uncompressed HD signal over a serial connection. Why wasn't that used?
Certain people are aware that the quality could be better and others are working on it. For the time being, the quality was deemed to be suitably acceptable.
Any level of compression artifacts introduced at this level is unacceptable. We understand that HD video has to be compressed to fit into a sane amount of space, but up until now all cable formats have been lossless – this is a regression.
And why does your marketing literature say 1080p output when that is clearly not true?
Even the "server" version of the Mac Mini does not support ECC RAM. Many other important server-grade features, such as IPMI, are also missing. Why would anyone choose this over cheaper, more robust commodity PC server hardware? You can't even plead cosmetics, because it's a freaking server; it goes in a rack somewhere and only a handful of IT staff ever need to see it. The only possible reason I can think of why someone would want to run an OSX server is if they were going to be remote-accessing it to run Xcode for iOS development. What else can you do on OSX that you can't do on Windows or Linux?
Yeah, because what we really need in IT are more compliance checklists and more lawyers and more absolute rules that never get revisited or updated.
Under what circumstances do you believe it is appropriate, or would be appropriate at any time in the future, for a website to store passwords in clear-text?
The only thing that can hope to topple MS Office is an open document format. Microsoft has a format in ISO but it's not quite accurate enough to do an independant implementation and has many vague descriiptions of behaviors and/or descriptions of behaviors that references things not part of the office suite. (I'm sure most of us followed the whole ISO certification thing... they "fast tracked" a standard which wasn't complete or accurate and has yet to be fully implemented.) So OOXML is still quite proprietary and no one can faithfully implement it based on the ISO speciification alone.
They did eventually describe the stranger parts of the specification (e.g. 'autoSpaceLikeWord95'). The problem is that OOXML is basically an XML-serialized dump of MS Office guts; it wasn't designed from the ground up with interoperability in mind like ODF was, so interoperability is very hard. The spec runs to literally thousands of pages.
The new version of Office is supposed to include the option to save as "OOXML Strict", which should cut back on some of the deprecated junk (such as VML) in the OOXML spec. But I don't think this will be enabled by default, and even if it was, the old documents will continue to be around for years to come and will still have to be dealt with.
Google is one of the few organizations on the planet (other than Microsoft) with the resources to produce a good OOXML document reader/writer, so it's a shame that their efforts here have been so lackluster.
There's also quite often a need to exchange documents with opposing counsel, for, e.g., joint stipulations. Finally, I need to be able to submit documents to the judge's chambers in Microsoft Word (or WordPerfect .WPD) format, and they have to look right when the judge opens them. The judiciary isn't going to go with OOo anytime soon (they're still slavishly tied to WordPerfect!)...
They won't take PDFs?
Most business use Office only because they don't know any better.
Most businesses use MS Office because:
Most of what I've seen Excel get used for in an office setting would be better served by a database....
That's true. But the average user isn't technically savvy enough to configure a database (and even if they could, IT policy might prohibit it), while that same user can come up with something quick-and-dirty in Excel. The ease of use makes up for the limited feature set and sub-par performance.
In theory, these Excel "apps" should be replaced with real databases by IT once they become an important part of business logic, but in practice, that seldom happens, and the original hacked-together solution continues to be used for many years.
Ok you guys dislike Windows 8, we know. You guys hated Windows 3.1, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7 when it came out too.
Actually, Windows 7 was fairly well-liked when it came out. As for XP, the reason it was disliked at first is because it wasn't really fully mature when released, and its hardware requirements seemed too high – remember, this was 2001. However, the first two Service Packs fixed most of the bugs and glitches and made XP a bit more secure by default, and Moore's Law meant that the specs that seemed outrageous in 2001 were nothing by the middle of the decade. So it wasn't that the original impressions of XP were wrong, it's that maintenance and better hardware made XP actually a better product as time went by.
Worst case scenario: Skynet goes operational without all the nuclear post-apocalyptic drama.
Even if the drones did go berserk, wouldn't they all eventually run out of fuel and crash? Sure, it could cause a ton of damage, but there would be limits to how much.
So if Iran was found to have conducted something similar but less drastic than 9/11 against the US
If we consider a nation hostile and are concerned about them launching a 9/11-style attack, the obvious solution is not to let their citizens come into our country. If they don't come here, they can't commit those kind of terrorist acts.
or North Korea blows up a twenty or thirty airliners, the only possible US response is then nuclear annihilation of Iran or North Korea?
What would we do if North Korea did that now? Remember, they not only have a couple of their own nuclear weapons, but also massive artillery batteries aimed at the largest South Korean population centers, which gives them the ability of mutually assured destruction. Which means that our practical options are no different than if we only had nukes: we can go all-out (a war which we'd win, but at the cost of millions of lives and many billions of dollars of damage to the world economy), we can do nothing, or we can do non-military stuff like pushing for China to cut them off. Our existing conventional military forces really don't add any extra options to this situation as far as I can see.
As to why fighters are up there in the first place? To stop the other guys bombing you, and to protect your bombers and other assets, typically.
But in that case, couldn't drones overwhelm the enemy by sheer force of numbers, even if each individual drone was inferior to a manned fighter jet? After all, the whole point of drones is that our soldiers don't die when they get shot down.
I seem to recall reading in a history of WWII that the U.S. tanks were inferior to German tanks, but we produced so many more of them (for our own troops and the other Allies) that the Nazis just couldn't keep up. Any idea if that was correct? If so, it seems the same principle might apply here.