Now browser market share in Europe will be determined by what kickbacks and/or threats the computer makers receive from the companies behind the major browsers.

Is that what you meant by non-biased?

Apple can't block it on the current version of itunes, but they could change the handshaking/syncing code in every upgrade to itunes. And boy does that app get frequent updates!
If necessary they could even force firmware updates onto ipods if people wish to sync with the latest version of itunes.

In fact apple could even break the palm integration unintentionally.

I'm not sure you understand how things work over here in the UK.

If people start using TrueCrypt volumes they'll change the law to assume everyone has a Truecrypt volume and if you can't give them access to it they'll throw you in prison to join the murderers, paedophiles and the people who forgot their winzip decryption password.

If it's similar to other cases I've read about I believe Sweden can ignore the ruling almost indefinitely, they are a sovereign country and their supreme court has ultimate jurisdiction and decisions can not be overruled by an EU court.

If the court rules against Sweden it will probably fine them. If they still don't comply with the ruling they will probably continue to fine them until they come into line with their obligations. I don't know how large the fines can get, but I think it's normal for the offending country to change their law to bring it in line with their EU obligations fairly quickly after they lose the EU case. It's worth noting however that it's rare for changes in a legal system to be enacted retrospectively in a member state even if it was shown that they were in breach of their EU obligations.

If you know exactly what test case is being optimized for including the chipset etc, and you can feed profiling data to a static compiler for the test case then you probably will be able to beat any other high level language.

But what if the task is to write the fastest implementation for any system where the test cases for the code, the CPU model and the system spec is not known beforehand. This is a more realistic test for a lot of software and it can be hard to beat a decent JIT compiler when you know so little about typical usage and the typical runtime environment.

Best bet for TW would be to throttle the bandwidth after X GB transferred in a month (to still allow email checking etc,). Allow the user to top up or upgrade a tier fairly easily and drop the user an email to let them know as they get close to the throttling cap and when they hit it.

Next to no support requirements, fairer distribution of available bandwidth, no cut offs and it might throttles worms and bot nets a bit. They could make the cap high and still sell it as unlimited just claim it's automated enforcement of the "fair useage" policy.

If you believe there was really 59,192,963 views of those videos then I'm afraid you are the sucker.

That's only worth it if people pick water slide parks based on how busy they are. If they mainly just select based on price and the 'Unlimited' feature then there isn't any point in building new slides.

Hell, if the people are mainly just interested in a cheap price and hearing the term 'Unlimited' maybe it's a better business strategy to spend the extra money on advertising your already overcrowded water slides!

You've now made a lot of money with little investment. What if someone else starts building an alternative water slide park?

Well you could then add some extra slides to your park and use your stockpile of cash to give away unlimited slides for free, announcing this on the same day as the other water park opens. You then run your water slide park at a loss for a few months until the competitor goes bankrupt at which point you may choose to pick up that second water park at a big discount. You can then put prices back up to $40 a day to compensate for the free days you had to give out before.

Eventually you run all the water parks in the world, you charge whatever you want, move your headquarters to a tax haven and use the money you've saved to offer large contributions to political parties in return for dropping any lawsuits against you.

It's the American Dream.

It's a bit like a water-slide park, where they originally charge kids $20 for 10 slides that have to be used the same day. Then they switch to a new pricing scheme where kids can have an unlimited number of slides on that day for $20.

The scheme is so popular at drawing people in, none of the kids can get more than 5 slides in because the queues are so long.

Sometimes people running a club do the same thing over here, you pay one fixed price to get in and you get unlimited drinks! Only catch is that the club is always packed and they only have 1 slow barman serving. It's also a very unpleasant experience at the bar!

Also even if it does get translated correctly no one will want to work on it because it will still look like COBOL code just written with the syntax of another language.

So what you are saying is that IBM might use this opportunity to make two really major improvements to Linux. Oh how horrible of them.

They tried Vista but they got pissed off with the alerts.

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It's not a good long term solution to this general problem, due to the fact that other software could have dependencies on the 'deprecated' official distro version of firefox.

I'm not saying that anything does actually have dependencies on the official distro version of firefox or that they would rely on the anti-phishing feature but if this was an official package it could happen at some point. Therefore breaking a feature of a distro packaged piece of software and not offering an official distro upgrade RPM could be quite problematic. Maybe the distro should strip the anti-phishing feature if they rely on a 3rd party who might cut it off?

A piece of data addressable by a unique key. not unlike a file.