Elections are, for better or worse, largely about picking up the middle ground. You can mobilize your base and hope you win that way, but for the most part, mobilizing your base is seen as a threat by the other side which mobilizes them making that a pretty awful way of winning. Instead you go and try to convince the folks in the middle left or middle right to swing towards you. That's why political parties tend to move towards a center point, which frustrating though it is, is actually the way that democracy is supposed to work.
When you're trying to win the general election, the very last thing you actually want to do is come off as being substantially off that center point.
Now you can argue that the center point of American politics has shifted somewhat to the right, and you could possibly be correct, but it hasn't shifted as far as Paul Ryan, who aside from being generally a douche, is also the poster boy and flag carrier for the ideology of Ayn Rand, which is about as far from that center point as you can actually get.
Obama has been a useless sack(though most of the problems aren't actually his fault except in not actually doing anything about them). Health Care is about the only thing he's actually done right, and even that's not what it should have been.
Problem is, the Republicans don't actually want an election about the economy(mostly because their plan is going to do two tenths of fuck all to help anyone except the very rich and they don't need the help), instead they've made this election about a level of ideological war which hasn't been waged, since Jefferson put in the Alien and Sedition acts more than 200 years ago.
This election isn't about the economy, the economy is fucked, cutting taxes isn't going to change that and it's probably too late for any serious stimulus even if the economy was healthy enough in the first place to stimulate back to life.
Romney made this election about extreme right wing ideology in the primaries, and by choosing the poster boy of everything wrong with the Republican platform as his running mate he's made the general election about it. Now of course the ironic thing is that there is pretty much nothing he could have done to make it easier for Obama to win reelection than picking this knucklehead to run with, so who knows why he's done this. There's no President etch-a-sketch with Paul Ryan on the ticket.
Things have gotten a lot better lately, but local retailers restricted themselves to the first gen stock for more than a year after some of the better replacements started appearing. That first batch of Intel drives just never even made it here.
It's about the same everywhere, because of the nature of the business.
The military has really high security protocols, but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that a lot of them fall by the wayside when the bullets start flying. Metaphorically speaking a hospital in a hospital the bullets are always flying.
For the most part my comment was trying to say that in most instances the cost of the tradeoff between security and usability is time and in a hospital time can mean human life. Expecting a hospital to work like a bank is ridiculous, hospitals simply cannot afford the kinds of delays proper security requires.
That said of course, most medical records breaches the world over are from insurance companies and government agencies, and those idiots don't have any kind of excuse.
A lot of that depends on whether your doctors are staff or external consultants. A lot of hospitals actually essentially act as facilities providers with clients actually being doctors not patients. If you're lucky enough to work at one where they're employees the situation is a lot different.
Hospitals are complex places. Lots of staff, lots of data being transferred between systems some of which are insecure and there's nothing you can do about that, because they're required, and no competitors exist.
The main reason that the number of breaches in hospitals is as low as it is is because for the most part people don't target hospitals so relatively basic security functions. Now of course we have people doing it "for the lulz" or to prove some sort of point which makes health care even harder to do.
In a hospital environment you have to cater for doctors which no one other than the person running their accreditation even knows exist, nurses who view IT as a barrier between them and what they actually do, patients who want miracles, and health funds who seem to desire complexity for the sake of complexity. Connect all that up to IT products which haven't been updated since the mid 90's, never will be updated and can't be replaced because the group that would certify a competitor makes the product in question, add in vastly disparate WAN locations, a need for instant performance and 5 nines up time all on a shoestring budget and you'll start to get a picture of hospital IT.
In the end you really have to ask yourself, is it better or worse to risk having a portion of your medical record stolen, or to die because the doctors couldn't get the information they needed quick enough. Sadly that's about how the choices line up, hospitals aren't generally negligent, it's just the nature of the game.
Well yes, they do "just die" as do crappy hard disks.
If you happen to live in a secondary market(like Australia where I live) they die a lot because the vendors imported a bunch of crappy first gen stuff and refused to import any of the second gen stuff till they could stick enough idiots with their mistakes.
The point is that whatever problems you have with an SSD, reaching the write limit doesn't even make the list. Fried controllers, low quality materials, all the usual. Samsung make crappy drives in my experience and OCZ doesn't even seem to be able to make thumb drives that last. The Intel stuff though is pretty good.
I'm sick of this myth. The math I've done indicates that, presuming that the drive is doing a halfway decent job of spreading the writes around, most cheap SSDs are rated to allow you to write the entire volume of the drive every day for about 30 years. Now personally I don't even come close to doing that, and your average physical HDD is rated for about 5 years, with 10 being a seriously long life.
If you buy a reasonable quality SSD at present your drive will not last long enough to see a significant level of NAND failure and what will kill it will be one of the million things that kills HDDs on a regular basis.
The fact that Microsoft isn't putting windows phone 8 on the phone is public record, the fact that this means the phone is dead is evident to anyone who owns one.
It's had feature updates, it got wifi tethering, and multi image MMS. It needs a hell of a lot more than that. The phone has a lot of really neat things, but it's about comparable in a lot of ways to a first gen iPhone. Without the update to windows 8 phone, you're not going to see it get where it needs to go. Add into that new phone OS comes with a complete new API which won't be supported by the old devices, but will be supported on tablets, the new win phones, and the three desktops that update to Windows 8, won't be supported on the old phones at all and you're looking at an obsolete phone.
Microsoft can pretend it's not obsolete, but the market says differently. Development for the platform and sales of the devices have pretty much dropped to zero. Does anyone seriously believe that Microsoft is going to pump huge amounts of development time into the old models, particularly since sales weren't all that great(though that's not surprising since the time gap between finally getting some decent mango phones and the announcement that win phone 7 is dead was about 5 months). Win Phone 7 had a lot of promise, but it needed a lot of work, it won't get that work, therefor it's dead. I'm a big fan of what they've done with it, it's a really great vision of a product, but it's dead.
Microsoft also announced that WinPhone 7 was obsolete within 4 months of releasing the first decent phones for it, which is why when mine broke I bought an Android to replace it.
Lovely phone, but the fact that it's never going to get any updates to give it the features it's missing is kind of a death knell.
FFS I'm not implying that the Olympic founders were out there trying to wipe out undesirables or create concentration camps. I'm saying that their idea of Olympic this and Olympic that and how it would create almost a new nation of Olympians has roots in the ideas of Eugenics which were immensely popular amongst all kinds of people at the time.
The Olympics are about finding the very best physical specimens of humanity, at least partially in the hopes that these people would find some way to prevent war and misunderstanding. It was in many ways a noble goal, but they still wanted to accomplish it through super people, stop seeing the word "eugenics" and thinking creepy Nazi in a lab. Sure the idea of the encouragement of genetic superiority seems to inevitably lead to horrors unimaginable, but that doesn't mean that everyone who was touting those ideas was ill intentioned.
Except that women are built differently than men. You can pretend otherwise, but in many sports, the Olympic winner would always be a man, not because they put in more effort, not because they were even genetically superior, but simply because they have a different physical structure. Doesn't matter how much testosterone you pump into them, they're still different. The Olympics recognize that different is not inferior so they have separate competitions.
There's an awful lot of writing by the folks who founded them that's got a hell of a Eugenics slant.
Now there's a bit of a difficulty in that what the "super man" that the Olympic founders envisioned and the "super man" that actual wins modern Olympics are not the same beast(as a specific example, a lot of the people who win modern Olympics would have been considered as being sub human, not super human by the people who founded the thing, but there's definitely a lot of that same flavor going on, even if white accountants from Bristol might have been what they considered genetically superior.
The reason is that, at least in theory, the Olympic games are about the effort and discipline it takes to get to the elite level than about genetics. Throwing out the hard work of women because they are biologically different(most specifically this relates to the structure of their hips, though other factors certainly play a part) doesn't fit that spirit.
Now you can argue that the Olympics are won largely by genetic freaks, and there's no Olympics for the "normals", but that's really rather beside the point, because the genetics won't give you the whole puzzle. It's true that if you or I spent as many hours training as Bolt we likely still wouldn't even be able to qualify for the Olympics, but simultaneously if all Bolt did was sit on his couch and eat chips, he wouldn't either.
More importantly the original revival of the Olympics was just part of the whole Eugenics craze of that era in history and you can't really breed a super race without super women as well as super men. The fact that an entire army of genetically superior super people could probably be defeated by a cripple with a brain and a chemistry lab doesn't fit into the world view of the kind of people who started this crap.
I've had great success with shrewsoft Has worked for me with a few different VPN vendors and it's available in 32 and 64 bit for a bunch of platforms. Works better for me than the CISCO client.
What that means is that the vast majority of people who purport to use agile, both as developers and as clients don't understand what their responsibilities are, or what the technique is supposed to achieve. Lots of developers think that agile is about not planning and not having deadlines and clients think that agile is about being able to change their minds with no consequences. Neither of which is even remotely true.
The reason that waterfall fails is that people don't actually know what they want, not because it's a bad system, if you knew your requirements exactly up front as a client, and the developers understood what those requirements meant for them well enough to give decent estimates, waterfall would work perfectly. Unfortunately neither of those things are ever true. Agile when done well lets people plan on scales they can actually manage and allows change and unexpected issues to be caught as early as possible and priced in properly. You want your shiny new feature X and it's going to take 3 days to do, then you either have to extend your project out 3 days or you need cut three days worth of something else. You anticipated feature Y was going to take 3 days and it's now looking like 10, well you know that pretty quickly and the client can decide to go ahead or scrap feature Y.
In essence the fundamental idea of Agile is that when you hit your project deadline, you probably won't be finished anymore than you would have been in waterfall, but if everyone has done their job properly and the project deadline wasn't ridiculous to start with, you should have the most important features so that your client can walk away with something that meets their primary requirements.
It often fails because people don't do it well(clients don't prioritize well, developers don't stick to the priorities, or everyone's estimates and expectations are way out of whack), but in those circumstances your project will fail regardless of your methodology.
If you have a client who uses agile as a way to change requirements every sprint, then know your project is going to fail, if as a client your developers are using agile as an excuse to not stick to deadlines or plan anything then know your project is going to fail, if a consultant is promising that agile will fix all your problems, know they're a fraud.
The great big secret of Agile is the same as the great big secret of most of these methodologies, common sense. You run an agile project for someone else the way you'd run any project for yourself, you set priorities and stick to them, this gets better software out the door quicker the same way it does when you're working on something for yourself.
It's not as bad though. 7 was a jump, 8 was is a major jump, but once you're working with 8, you're past the "checking for browser not functionality" javascript headache and the upgrade path isn't too bad. 9 to 10 will be a bit of a headache as, however cool Windows 8 may turn out to be, it doesn't seem to be entirely ready for anything that doesn't have touch, and I don't really see an awful lot of enterprises upgrading to it period.
This is only true if you're compiler hasn't been compromised, or the that compiled it, or the one that compiled that one, and on and on.
The reality is that no matter how clever you are, how long you spend reading the source code for your favorite operating system, or how well you understand the results of that reading, you have to trust someone some time.
Even aside from that, the number of people who truly understand the source and design of any given OS completely could probably be counted without resorting to toes. A Debian maintainer neutered their SSL library for years getting rid of a compiler warning. The days of Mel's are long gone and when you get into the deep magic, most folks, myself included, are way out of our depth.
Open Source has a lot of advantages to it, but the idea that someone is going to stick something in a proprietary OS which is simple enough for even most programmers to actually catch without it getting detected is pretty close to nil. Many eyes only helps if the back door is simple enough for the many to recognize.
It isn't so much an issue of missing features as just sort of fitting together a bit better. It remembers the last few things you've played, allows you to go and get more music from an artist from the same place you're playing the music from, Allows you to select music by genres really well, and the Zune software is a little bit easier to use than iTunes. I also like that it displays album covers as I tend to listen to an entire album as opposed to a collection of tracks. It's not "throw out your iPod and buy one" better, but it's quite a nice little player. I haven't used the stand alone Zune of course, and while my wife has a latest gen iPod, neither of us have an iPhone so I can't compare it apples for apples, but it's decent. I like the phone as well, it's got some kinks in it, and Microsoft really didn't step up as far as they should have, but if you don't want the bigger screen size of an S3 and don't want to pay as much as an iPhone costs it's about the best on the market at the moment.
They didn't so much give up on the Zune, they just gave up on it as a standalone product. It's now a component of the Windows 7 phones, and is actually in a lot of ways superior to the equivalent iPod software. That said, from all accounts when it got released it was just horrible, which was more of the problem. You don't get a lot of second chances in this market. The XBox actually did fairly well, and the 360 essentially wins because it was more powerful than a Wii and cheaper than a PS3(Sony made something that was immensely awesome and powerful but which was just too expensive).
If the price point on these tablets is right, they might do quite well, whether Microsoft can find the sweet spot between the old gigantically expensive hovercraft they used to sell and the cheap(though still overpriced) crap that flooded the Android tablet market in recent years, is of course a question.
Windows RT seems quite reasonable and the HTML5ish front end they have will have a lot lower barrier to entry for programmers than XAML does(XAML is incredibly powerful, but it's not exactly something you pick up in an hour or so) allowing some better app UIs to be built. Who knows though.
That said I'm still yet to see any evidence that a market exists for these things when they're not made and marketed by Apple. Sure most of the Android ones were low priced crap and the few that weren't suffered from using Android when it still sucked, but they still didn't sell well whereas the iPad is a license to print money.
Movie theaters cannot remain as a commodity item. There's simply no market there, a reasonably priced home theater system can provide a better all around experience than a bog standard movie theater could possibly hope to achieve for substantially less overall cost(a rental will generally set you back less than a single movie ticket and home made popcorn and snacks are a lot cheaper, even if you're just doing movies for one).
This means that about the only way for movie theaters to remain competitive is to either drop prices to blow the cost of renting a movie(which isn't economically viable) or increase the quality of the experience they offer so they can charge a commensurate premium. Declining box office sales are a fact of life, only held in check by controlling the release of movies, something the MPAA is having an incredibly difficult time doing these days. Eventually the movie industry will be forced to release the home version of content almost immediately, leaving movie theaters pretty well screwed unless they can find a new market.
I'd predict that within the next 5(well given this is big content and they hate facing reality 10) years a movie ticket will probably cost 3 or 4 times what it does now, but offer an experience on par with going to a cheaper concert. It won't be something you necessarily do all the time the way people used to go to the movies, but it'll be worth the money. If they don't manage that theaters will be like the previous generations drive ins, a few around for nostalgia and that will be about it.
The answer to your question is entrenched in the most favorite quote of your ideology. Soap Box, Ballot Box, Ammo Box.
When you can't speak to convince the majority of your beliefs, and when you can't vote or your vote doesn't count, then maybe it's time to consider the violent solution.
Free speech has been somewhat curtailed in recent years(sometimes reasonably others not so reasonably), but it's far from gone. You are exercising your right to free speech right now, you're doing it on Slashdot where it doesn't matter instead of in the street where you might convince someone, but that's neither here nor there. You can still run for office(though until someone overturns Citizens United that might be difficult), local and state government positions are eminently achievable by third party candidates, and once you can get enough of those you've got a real shot at federal seats and then the presidency.
The ballot box again has its issues, redistricting is certainly problematic, but you still have the right to vote and while district lines may minimize it's overall value(there are some arguments for proportional voting for federal seats in various places so you don't get to vote for your local member but if 10% of the population voted for a third party, said party gets 10% of the representation regardless of where the votes came from).
There is nothing at the moment stopping you from using the political process to get your views across and make a difference. Barriers exist to make it difficult, but violence is only justifiable if those barriers make it impossible. We may be getting to that point, but we aren't there yet.
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Elections are, for better or worse, largely about picking up the middle ground. You can mobilize your base and hope you win that way, but for the most part, mobilizing your base is seen as a threat by the other side which mobilizes them making that a pretty awful way of winning. Instead you go and try to convince the folks in the middle left or middle right to swing towards you. That's why political parties tend to move towards a center point, which frustrating though it is, is actually the way that democracy is supposed to work.
When you're trying to win the general election, the very last thing you actually want to do is come off as being substantially off that center point.
Now you can argue that the center point of American politics has shifted somewhat to the right, and you could possibly be correct, but it hasn't shifted as far as Paul Ryan, who aside from being generally a douche, is also the poster boy and flag carrier for the ideology of Ayn Rand, which is about as far from that center point as you can actually get.
I apologize, right conflict wrong side.
Obama has been a useless sack(though most of the problems aren't actually his fault except in not actually doing anything about them). Health Care is about the only thing he's actually done right, and even that's not what it should have been.
Problem is, the Republicans don't actually want an election about the economy(mostly because their plan is going to do two tenths of fuck all to help anyone except the very rich and they don't need the help), instead they've made this election about a level of ideological war which hasn't been waged, since Jefferson put in the Alien and Sedition acts more than 200 years ago.
This election isn't about the economy, the economy is fucked, cutting taxes isn't going to change that and it's probably too late for any serious stimulus even if the economy was healthy enough in the first place to stimulate back to life.
Romney made this election about extreme right wing ideology in the primaries, and by choosing the poster boy of everything wrong with the Republican platform as his running mate he's made the general election about it. Now of course the ironic thing is that there is pretty much nothing he could have done to make it easier for Obama to win reelection than picking this knucklehead to run with, so who knows why he's done this. There's no President etch-a-sketch with Paul Ryan on the ticket.
Things have gotten a lot better lately, but local retailers restricted themselves to the first gen stock for more than a year after some of the better replacements started appearing. That first batch of Intel drives just never even made it here.
It's about the same everywhere, because of the nature of the business.
The military has really high security protocols, but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that a lot of them fall by the wayside when the bullets start flying. Metaphorically speaking a hospital in a hospital the bullets are always flying.
For the most part my comment was trying to say that in most instances the cost of the tradeoff between security and usability is time and in a hospital time can mean human life. Expecting a hospital to work like a bank is ridiculous, hospitals simply cannot afford the kinds of delays proper security requires.
That said of course, most medical records breaches the world over are from insurance companies and government agencies, and those idiots don't have any kind of excuse.
A lot of that depends on whether your doctors are staff or external consultants. A lot of hospitals actually essentially act as facilities providers with clients actually being doctors not patients. If you're lucky enough to work at one where they're employees the situation is a lot different.
Hospitals are complex places. Lots of staff, lots of data being transferred between systems some of which are insecure and there's nothing you can do about that, because they're required, and no competitors exist.
The main reason that the number of breaches in hospitals is as low as it is is because for the most part people don't target hospitals so relatively basic security functions. Now of course we have people doing it "for the lulz" or to prove some sort of point which makes health care even harder to do.
In a hospital environment you have to cater for doctors which no one other than the person running their accreditation even knows exist, nurses who view IT as a barrier between them and what they actually do, patients who want miracles, and health funds who seem to desire complexity for the sake of complexity. Connect all that up to IT products which haven't been updated since the mid 90's, never will be updated and can't be replaced because the group that would certify a competitor makes the product in question, add in vastly disparate WAN locations, a need for instant performance and 5 nines up time all on a shoestring budget and you'll start to get a picture of hospital IT.
In the end you really have to ask yourself, is it better or worse to risk having a portion of your medical record stolen, or to die because the doctors couldn't get the information they needed quick enough. Sadly that's about how the choices line up, hospitals aren't generally negligent, it's just the nature of the game.
Well yes, they do "just die" as do crappy hard disks.
If you happen to live in a secondary market(like Australia where I live) they die a lot because the vendors imported a bunch of crappy first gen stuff and refused to import any of the second gen stuff till they could stick enough idiots with their mistakes.
The point is that whatever problems you have with an SSD, reaching the write limit doesn't even make the list. Fried controllers, low quality materials, all the usual. Samsung make crappy drives in my experience and OCZ doesn't even seem to be able to make thumb drives that last. The Intel stuff though is pretty good.
I'm sick of this myth. The math I've done indicates that, presuming that the drive is doing a halfway decent job of spreading the writes around, most cheap SSDs are rated to allow you to write the entire volume of the drive every day for about 30 years. Now personally I don't even come close to doing that, and your average physical HDD is rated for about 5 years, with 10 being a seriously long life.
If you buy a reasonable quality SSD at present your drive will not last long enough to see a significant level of NAND failure and what will kill it will be one of the million things that kills HDDs on a regular basis.
The fact that Microsoft isn't putting windows phone 8 on the phone is public record, the fact that this means the phone is dead is evident to anyone who owns one.
It's had feature updates, it got wifi tethering, and multi image MMS. It needs a hell of a lot more than that. The phone has a lot of really neat things, but it's about comparable in a lot of ways to a first gen iPhone. Without the update to windows 8 phone, you're not going to see it get where it needs to go. Add into that new phone OS comes with a complete new API which won't be supported by the old devices, but will be supported on tablets, the new win phones, and the three desktops that update to Windows 8, won't be supported on the old phones at all and you're looking at an obsolete phone.
Microsoft can pretend it's not obsolete, but the market says differently. Development for the platform and sales of the devices have pretty much dropped to zero. Does anyone seriously believe that Microsoft is going to pump huge amounts of development time into the old models, particularly since sales weren't all that great(though that's not surprising since the time gap between finally getting some decent mango phones and the announcement that win phone 7 is dead was about 5 months). Win Phone 7 had a lot of promise, but it needed a lot of work, it won't get that work, therefor it's dead. I'm a big fan of what they've done with it, it's a really great vision of a product, but it's dead.
Microsoft also announced that WinPhone 7 was obsolete within 4 months of releasing the first decent phones for it, which is why when mine broke I bought an Android to replace it.
Lovely phone, but the fact that it's never going to get any updates to give it the features it's missing is kind of a death knell.
FFS I'm not implying that the Olympic founders were out there trying to wipe out undesirables or create concentration camps. I'm saying that their idea of Olympic this and Olympic that and how it would create almost a new nation of Olympians has roots in the ideas of Eugenics which were immensely popular amongst all kinds of people at the time.
The Olympics are about finding the very best physical specimens of humanity, at least partially in the hopes that these people would find some way to prevent war and misunderstanding. It was in many ways a noble goal, but they still wanted to accomplish it through super people, stop seeing the word "eugenics" and thinking creepy Nazi in a lab. Sure the idea of the encouragement of genetic superiority seems to inevitably lead to horrors unimaginable, but that doesn't mean that everyone who was touting those ideas was ill intentioned.
Except that women are built differently than men. You can pretend otherwise, but in many sports, the Olympic winner would always be a man, not because they put in more effort, not because they were even genetically superior, but simply because they have a different physical structure. Doesn't matter how much testosterone you pump into them, they're still different. The Olympics recognize that different is not inferior so they have separate competitions.
There's an awful lot of writing by the folks who founded them that's got a hell of a Eugenics slant.
Now there's a bit of a difficulty in that what the "super man" that the Olympic founders envisioned and the "super man" that actual wins modern Olympics are not the same beast(as a specific example, a lot of the people who win modern Olympics would have been considered as being sub human, not super human by the people who founded the thing, but there's definitely a lot of that same flavor going on, even if white accountants from Bristol might have been what they considered genetically superior.
The reason is that, at least in theory, the Olympic games are about the effort and discipline it takes to get to the elite level than about genetics. Throwing out the hard work of women because they are biologically different(most specifically this relates to the structure of their hips, though other factors certainly play a part) doesn't fit that spirit.
Now you can argue that the Olympics are won largely by genetic freaks, and there's no Olympics for the "normals", but that's really rather beside the point, because the genetics won't give you the whole puzzle. It's true that if you or I spent as many hours training as Bolt we likely still wouldn't even be able to qualify for the Olympics, but simultaneously if all Bolt did was sit on his couch and eat chips, he wouldn't either.
More importantly the original revival of the Olympics was just part of the whole Eugenics craze of that era in history and you can't really breed a super race without super women as well as super men. The fact that an entire army of genetically superior super people could probably be defeated by a cripple with a brain and a chemistry lab doesn't fit into the world view of the kind of people who started this crap.
I've had great success with shrewsoft Has worked for me with a few different VPN vendors and it's available in 32 and 64 bit for a bunch of platforms. Works better for me than the CISCO client.
What that means is that the vast majority of people who purport to use agile, both as developers and as clients don't understand what their responsibilities are, or what the technique is supposed to achieve. Lots of developers think that agile is about not planning and not having deadlines and clients think that agile is about being able to change their minds with no consequences. Neither of which is even remotely true.
The reason that waterfall fails is that people don't actually know what they want, not because it's a bad system, if you knew your requirements exactly up front as a client, and the developers understood what those requirements meant for them well enough to give decent estimates, waterfall would work perfectly. Unfortunately neither of those things are ever true. Agile when done well lets people plan on scales they can actually manage and allows change and unexpected issues to be caught as early as possible and priced in properly. You want your shiny new feature X and it's going to take 3 days to do, then you either have to extend your project out 3 days or you need cut three days worth of something else. You anticipated feature Y was going to take 3 days and it's now looking like 10, well you know that pretty quickly and the client can decide to go ahead or scrap feature Y.
In essence the fundamental idea of Agile is that when you hit your project deadline, you probably won't be finished anymore than you would have been in waterfall, but if everyone has done their job properly and the project deadline wasn't ridiculous to start with, you should have the most important features so that your client can walk away with something that meets their primary requirements.
It often fails because people don't do it well(clients don't prioritize well, developers don't stick to the priorities, or everyone's estimates and expectations are way out of whack), but in those circumstances your project will fail regardless of your methodology.
If you have a client who uses agile as a way to change requirements every sprint, then know your project is going to fail, if as a client your developers are using agile as an excuse to not stick to deadlines or plan anything then know your project is going to fail, if a consultant is promising that agile will fix all your problems, know they're a fraud.
The great big secret of Agile is the same as the great big secret of most of these methodologies, common sense. You run an agile project for someone else the way you'd run any project for yourself, you set priorities and stick to them, this gets better software out the door quicker the same way it does when you're working on something for yourself.
It's not as bad though. 7 was a jump, 8 was is a major jump, but once you're working with 8, you're past the "checking for browser not functionality" javascript headache and the upgrade path isn't too bad. 9 to 10 will be a bit of a headache as, however cool Windows 8 may turn out to be, it doesn't seem to be entirely ready for anything that doesn't have touch, and I don't really see an awful lot of enterprises upgrading to it period.
XP is also an outdated insecure pile, which needs to go as badly as IE 6.
This is only true if you're compiler hasn't been compromised, or the that compiled it, or the one that compiled that one, and on and on.
The reality is that no matter how clever you are, how long you spend reading the source code for your favorite operating system, or how well you understand the results of that reading, you have to trust someone some time.
Even aside from that, the number of people who truly understand the source and design of any given OS completely could probably be counted without resorting to toes. A Debian maintainer neutered their SSL library for years getting rid of a compiler warning. The days of Mel's are long gone and when you get into the deep magic, most folks, myself included, are way out of our depth.
Open Source has a lot of advantages to it, but the idea that someone is going to stick something in a proprietary OS which is simple enough for even most programmers to actually catch without it getting detected is pretty close to nil. Many eyes only helps if the back door is simple enough for the many to recognize.
It isn't so much an issue of missing features as just sort of fitting together a bit better. It remembers the last few things you've played, allows you to go and get more music from an artist from the same place you're playing the music from, Allows you to select music by genres really well, and the Zune software is a little bit easier to use than iTunes. I also like that it displays album covers as I tend to listen to an entire album as opposed to a collection of tracks. It's not "throw out your iPod and buy one" better, but it's quite a nice little player. I haven't used the stand alone Zune of course, and while my wife has a latest gen iPod, neither of us have an iPhone so I can't compare it apples for apples, but it's decent. I like the phone as well, it's got some kinks in it, and Microsoft really didn't step up as far as they should have, but if you don't want the bigger screen size of an S3 and don't want to pay as much as an iPhone costs it's about the best on the market at the moment.
They didn't so much give up on the Zune, they just gave up on it as a standalone product. It's now a component of the Windows 7 phones, and is actually in a lot of ways superior to the equivalent iPod software. That said, from all accounts when it got released it was just horrible, which was more of the problem. You don't get a lot of second chances in this market. The XBox actually did fairly well, and the 360 essentially wins because it was more powerful than a Wii and cheaper than a PS3(Sony made something that was immensely awesome and powerful but which was just too expensive).
If the price point on these tablets is right, they might do quite well, whether Microsoft can find the sweet spot between the old gigantically expensive hovercraft they used to sell and the cheap(though still overpriced) crap that flooded the Android tablet market in recent years, is of course a question.
Windows RT seems quite reasonable and the HTML5ish front end they have will have a lot lower barrier to entry for programmers than XAML does(XAML is incredibly powerful, but it's not exactly something you pick up in an hour or so) allowing some better app UIs to be built. Who knows though.
That said I'm still yet to see any evidence that a market exists for these things when they're not made and marketed by Apple. Sure most of the Android ones were low priced crap and the few that weren't suffered from using Android when it still sucked, but they still didn't sell well whereas the iPad is a license to print money.
It's a bit more complicated than that.
Movie theaters cannot remain as a commodity item. There's simply no market there, a reasonably priced home theater system can provide a better all around experience than a bog standard movie theater could possibly hope to achieve for substantially less overall cost(a rental will generally set you back less than a single movie ticket and home made popcorn and snacks are a lot cheaper, even if you're just doing movies for one).
This means that about the only way for movie theaters to remain competitive is to either drop prices to blow the cost of renting a movie(which isn't economically viable) or increase the quality of the experience they offer so they can charge a commensurate premium. Declining box office sales are a fact of life, only held in check by controlling the release of movies, something the MPAA is having an incredibly difficult time doing these days. Eventually the movie industry will be forced to release the home version of content almost immediately, leaving movie theaters pretty well screwed unless they can find a new market.
I'd predict that within the next 5(well given this is big content and they hate facing reality 10) years a movie ticket will probably cost 3 or 4 times what it does now, but offer an experience on par with going to a cheaper concert. It won't be something you necessarily do all the time the way people used to go to the movies, but it'll be worth the money. If they don't manage that theaters will be like the previous generations drive ins, a few around for nostalgia and that will be about it.
The answer to your question is entrenched in the most favorite quote of your ideology. Soap Box, Ballot Box, Ammo Box.
When you can't speak to convince the majority of your beliefs, and when you can't vote or your vote doesn't count, then maybe it's time to consider the violent solution.
Free speech has been somewhat curtailed in recent years(sometimes reasonably others not so reasonably), but it's far from gone. You are exercising your right to free speech right now, you're doing it on Slashdot where it doesn't matter instead of in the street where you might convince someone, but that's neither here nor there. You can still run for office(though until someone overturns Citizens United that might be difficult), local and state government positions are eminently achievable by third party candidates, and once you can get enough of those you've got a real shot at federal seats and then the presidency.
The ballot box again has its issues, redistricting is certainly problematic, but you still have the right to vote and while district lines may minimize it's overall value(there are some arguments for proportional voting for federal seats in various places so you don't get to vote for your local member but if 10% of the population voted for a third party, said party gets 10% of the representation regardless of where the votes came from).
There is nothing at the moment stopping you from using the political process to get your views across and make a difference. Barriers exist to make it difficult, but violence is only justifiable if those barriers make it impossible. We may be getting to that point, but we aren't there yet.