I like the new Win 7 phones, especially the HTC and Samsung ones and Win Phone 7 looks fairly comfortable with nice big UI buttons. Will definitely be looking into one next year when my contract is up.

However, the ZunePass, currently, is probably not going to be much of a crowd pleaser. iTunes Music Store has the music market pretty much sown up at the moment. That might change however, because a lot of people like Steve Jobs even less than they do Ballmer, which takes some doing.

I also think Xbox live integration will be interesting for some but probably not be much of a deciding factor either. There aren't enough Xbox gamers who use Live to make a dent in the phone market.

Similarly, Windows Live is not Facebook or Twitter.

And finally the Office integration is a good deal for business people, but it won't make that much of a difference in the consumer market.

No, what will decide the market is apps and word of mouth popularity. Android got off to a slow start but has now overtaken the iPhone. WinPhone 7 can do this as well if the phones are good value for money and perform well without too many bugs. Consumers don't care who the phone comes from, but they do care if it's popullar with others and works well enough for them.

As the article states, these would be ideal for processors that operated on the surfaces of Mercury and Venus. While a probe on the surface of Mercury could probably get away with good (but very large and heavy) heat shielding, Venus especially has always been a problem for probes and the Soviet Venera probes that delivered images of Venus' surface lasted only somehwere around 57 minutes before failing. A probe based on this technology, i.e. a working high temperature design, could last much longer.

Living in Europe, I think most European Taxpayers would dearly love to know what the fuck the European Patent Office is doing making presentations at a computer conference on the other side of the world.

Walk up mountain, unfold backpack, run off mountain, fly using thermals, land a good distance away. You mean something like that?

You mean a jet, burning fuel that was transported over tens of thousands of kilometres, carrying fat americans is more efficient than a cyclist pedalling his way through the air?

The charges against him were suddenly withdrawn. It makes it highly obvious that someone paid someone else to smear him. I wonder if Assange will be bright enough to press charges against the women who pressed charges against him. Would be interesting to see what trial discovery unveiled.

PLEX was introduced by CCP to counter macro farmers funding large RMT organisations, the ones you can find by googling "eve isk". PLEX is legal within the game, whereas ISK bought from the many, many dubious webites that offer cheap ISK is not. However, the return on a PLEX is significantly lower than buying the ISK off the internet. For example, 2x 30 day PLEX costs you around $35. This will give you around 560 million in game ISK. Buying ISK online, however, will get you around 1 billion in game ISK for around $30 according to google. The larger RMT organisations are also pretty good about keeping the entire real transaction out of the game (no in game communication), and legal within the game - you "sell" them junk items for enormously inflated prices in game, which is next to impossible to tell apart from the regular, legal in game scamming that goes on all the time. They also apparently have numerous in game methods of laundering in game farmed ISK, so as to make it difficult to track back to the original RMT'er.

Of course, if you do get caught by CCP, they'll ban you from their game, but there's not much else they can do.

Additionally, Eve and CCP have the source of some pretty big scandals recently, with many of the older players quitting the game because CCP refuses to commit to fixing any of the large number of bugs and imbalances. The biggest bug is extreme lag in systems where many of the older players in big alliances play, and the player rage has made a large number of player feel that CCP is wasting their subscription money to develop new features (a la SWG:NGE) that the players do not want at the cost of ignoring more pressing problems.

I live in Switzerland (been here 20 years), speak English to a the English speaking people I know, German to my German co-workers, the Swiss-German dialect to my Swiss co-workers, French to 2 of my co-workers and Afrikaans to friends from South Africa, where I come from.

If you have to find fault with BP, find fault with things they really messed up, of which there are many, but not a photo retouched for aesthetic reasons.

I'm a Mac user and I have an older iPhone, and I have to say that the denial that Apple supporters have in suppressing any negative comments or reports on Apple is simply amazing. It seem to be almost pathological.

I don't give a flying fuck about Microsoft and most of their business failures over the past few years have been their own fault, but I do like the fact that they are also, under great pressure of becoming irrelevant, moving towards a standards compliant browser.

Back in 2003, the company I was working for bought 20 Dell Optiplexes. Of those 3 were DoA. It took Unisys, the company that Dell outsources support to here in Switzerland, 3 months to finally get the last one working. If Switzerland had laws like in the states where law suits can be the number 2 in 1)Buy Dell, 2)???, 3)Profit, we would have made a killing. The quality of the machines was truly terrible and even the German speaking support (Dell had/has a German speaking support center in Ireland) were just the usual read-the-support-script kind of people. Never again.

OMG Apple fanboi fire brigade to the rescue!!!!! Thank God you got here in time before people could realise that Apple is just as prone to making shoddy products and lying about it as anyone else.

Even if you could negate inertia, your aircraft carrier would still be attracted to the earth.

I would like to post my new app "Steve's Johnson" to the app store. Please tell me where I should put it.

Regards
Theolein