That was an outlawing, this article is discussing an excessive consumption tax. If this argument/approach works for food/cigarettes then it will also work for alcohol. ( Alcohol has more societal cost than obesity. )

I'm English, we have a ( far from perfect ) National Health System ( NHS ). To me it seems barbaric that a citizen of a society would be seriously ill/die because they don't have money to access available treatments.

Next up after obese would be alcohol drinkers. Personally I'd rather give up drinking alcohol than smoking.

And is therefore the highest of the arts.

Dropbox takes a hash of the file that you're uploading/storing and if they find they have it already they don't do the transfer over the Internet, they just copy their local file to your account. Machines on local networks sync via LAN not Internet.

For Amazon mp3 purchases from them they copy the file to your account also, just one download for your local copy.
For mp3's ripped and/or bought elsewhere they will probably already have a matching copy, so no transfer will take place.

Certainly the more popular songs I store in my dropbox a/c don't upload. Same for movies.

Also. Please look up 'html line break's, they work in /. posts and would have made yours much more easily readable.

You're forgetting that we'd then have the option of an American free Internet *

* The sound a car alarm blaring outside your bedroom window at 4am makes when it finally stops.

I was educated in the Christian myth as a child, it distinctly states in the bible ( Genesis 1, unsurprisingly ) that God created everything, including specifics on light, earth, animals and the stars.

If we ignore traditional definitions of God then I feel we're in the position of inventing new Gods, or of amending the supposedly inviolate idea of God to fit our current beliefs and knowledge, which to me would be evidence that God is a social phenomenon rather than an entity.

Never again.

War isn't a flashy news item with patriotic missiles gleaming off into the sunset, it's friends and relatives dying horrible, horrible deaths.

To create everything from scratch God would have to at least understand *everything* and so has to be more complex than everything else. Just the knowledge of how to create a universe adds more complexity than a universe which has occurred.

You now have the same problem but one stage worse than the one you started with. 'Where did life/the universe/everything come from vs. where did life/universe/everything/God come from.

Occam's razor for me says if you leave the God part out you're closer to a solution, we have a large & growing set of information for this.

Faith is one word for it. If you'd been randomly allocated birth on a different part of the planet your idea of God would be quite different. If you'd not been taught it at an impressionable age you probably wouldn't have developed the idea yourself, because there is zero evidence.

You seem to have accidentally posted generic flamebait rather than citations ?

Cool. Thanks, seems it might have been the second generation iMac, about 2003 ?

So far your input to this topic has been:

- Mac's aren't exploited because they don't have case fans.
- Windows is exploited because windows is cool.
- Linux & Windows machines are made of 'more awesome' components.

I'm more a believer that the tiny spinning noise coming from over there is a fan in a mac, Windows has never been cool, and most desktops are made of very similar components.

Citations please, mr troll.

Afaik the only mac without a fan was the cube, in 2001. Your troll is ten years out of date.

I think Google's OS plans are to replace the need for Windows on a lot of devices and for a lot of people completely.

A perfectly working Wine extends the life of Windows by (not) emulating it, and Microsofts biggest customers are still likely to buy the 'official' version, especially when the FUD starts ?

I'd rather spend my millions working towards my customers using my product than an approximation of a rivals.

Lack of mouseover/out is a touchscreen thing. You touched it, you clicked.

Or, the only things which run well on small underpowered devices are things written natively for them. html/js has awful performance across mobile devices if you're doing anything more than laying out a simple page, and maxing the tiny processor drains the battery quickly whatever.

Flash is write once - deploy nearly anywhere, it doesn't match the speed or economy of a native app. html/js is not really production ready unless you can exclude anything but the latest browsers from requirements ( hard as some of them are still unreleased ). If you want multimedia deployable across mobile/internet/ie
html = 1 x development costs. Flash = 1x dev costs. iOS app = 1 x dev costs. Android app = at least 3 x dev costs ( major platforms ).

Flash developers are upset about Mr Jobs' statement as it confuses their clients and badly affects their businesses. iOS is minority platform that now drastically limits the approaches available for building websites. I don't enjoy telling my clients that they can have the shiny they now expect, or they can have it working on their iPad. The only option for 1xdev cost is html/js. The only reason for this is iOS.

Between this and WebM/h264 it's a very badly managed transition stage for web based development, most of the technology being used is unfinished, against an unratified standard, with all kinds of parties attempting to 'own' parts of it. I understand and agree with the need for standardisation, but currently html/js + WebM is a large step back ( about five years ) in tecniques I can use, and quality of product I can produce.

Thanks for the thought and understanding you've obviously put into this. I'll drop Flash happily as soon as there's a suitable replacement technology.