And the second biggest is that everyone knows Microsoft makes it.

People want phones that are chic. Microsoft are about as chic as homophobia. Looks, both of the phone and of the UI, are even more important.

Apparent price/performance is another factor. Probably the main reason Android is doing so well is because those phones look good value in comparison to Apple (not hard with their 200% markup). The fact that interpreted Android apps make those quad cores as slow as dual cores doesn't come into the equation.

Lastly, some people really believe they need 100,000 apps.

... since ~2009. The community, who seem to be in love with Qt, have ported Qt5: http://talk.maemo.org/showthre...

You have nothing to lose by keeping Classic Slashdot as an option. Nothing apart from pride that is.

Is there a single comment even complementary to Beta rated above 3? Even if there was 30%, Dice should scrap beta.

But there are none. Never have I seen anything like it. I've seen a few obvious disasters that a company were set on driving headlong into.

But I've never seen mass, universal condemnation for a change. Not even in politics.

Whilst the Tories are 6 points behind in the polls, what it really means is that they're 12 points behind in terms of seats.

We saw a 7.1 point lead by the Tories turn into an ungovernable minority. In 2005, Labour's 2.8% lead gave them an almost unaccountable majority. There's both an electoral system bias against the Tories and a pool of potential Labour voters who don't usually bother voting. I'd estimate the actual bias to be 3-4%, but in polling terms it's about 6% ie, if the Tories win by 6, they'll scrape an even smaller win than in 2010. They'd need a 9 point win to get a majority.

For what it's worth, I got £250 back on a £100 bet for the Tories to win in 2010.

Firstly, Cameron didn't say it was necessary. He merely used that example to illustrate what he was saying.

Cameron's first act as PM was to repeal Labour's ID Cards Act (which was compulsory fingerprinting, numbering and recording on a national database to hook up all govt databases) and destroy the hard disks Guardian-style. Maybe this is where he got the idea.

He also attended the inception meeting of NO2ID, the immensely successful campaign that Labour's Home Minister Secretary at the time, David Blunkett, acknowledged in his final speech.

The Tory Snooper's Charter was a mess. Expert after expert (including industry data-rape experts from Google et al) slagged it off in official proceedings and even an open letter. We're kinda used to Govts being clueless about IT but what was properly disturbing was how the Home Office ignored all this clear and helpful feedback. So certainly, Theresa May should be sacked.

I'm not sure Cameron ever stepped in until now. Under pressure from his party, Clegg eventually said he wasn't going to support any such Bill and so that killed it for this Parliament.

We badly need an Act clawing back some of the surveillance powers of the state. They can do already do any surveillance at the ISP level they want as well as lock up people for not disclosing their public keys. There are no checks on that power whatsover in this country bar possibly The Guardian.

So that's a summary of where we are. The debate I wanted to highlight is how do we assess Cameron's views on this:

Few people know this but Cameron used to write a column for the left-wing Guardian. And he was far more liberal a couple of years before he got into power.

Has he gone from liberal to totalitarian in 3-6 years? If so, why? Is it merely scary-sounding intelligence reports or is it possible that our secret services are blackmailing him?

Or is he merely trying to shift the cost burden of surveillance from the state to the ISP/customer? And if so, why is he talking about a dead Bill which he has almost no chance of reintroducing (since he'll almost certainly be kicked out in 2015)?

They're working on a new mega-component as I understand it. Something like a cross between sidebar and the tab cycler popup.

The only feature I doubt I'll ever get it putting the address bar et al at the bottom of the window.

Opera have always been highly credible to me. I've used Opera since 3.64 and have liaised with a couple of the programmers.

Being Norwegian, they're part of a socialist paradise and largely immune to US strong-arming.

Also, they've only got a handful of programmers working on it. I doubt they've had time to put a backdoor et al in.

Firstly, I don't trust Google. Chrome probably sends Google/NSA your surfing history, passwords, everything.

Chromium is a pain in the arse to install.

I couldn't tell you what it does that Opera doesn't or vice versa.
The reason I'm not too interested in the above though is inertia. Since nobody is claiming Chromium is better, it's just easier and more comfortable for me to continue with Opera.

As an Opera fan, I uninstalled 12.14 (actually the latest Presto is 12.16) and am using Opera 19 beta exclusively. I still use Presto on my smartphone.

Presto is easily the best rendering engine out there which was sadly ignored by the rest of the internet except for possibly Marlin its intended successor. As such, Opera Software spent half their time trying to get it to work with badly-coded websites and proprietary code used in eg Facebook and Google sites.

I agree with Opera Software's difficult decision to abandon it and jump on Google's bandwagon. Using their own rendering engine was a strategy that had failed for 10 years. Their handling of the transition though has been a sad joke.

Compared to what I liked Presto for, Opera Blink has weak tab management. Everything else is either provided or covered by extensions.
What I gained: access to thousands of Chrome extensions, massively reduced startup time and memory requirements, perfect compatibility with websites and superfast Facebook.

Presto was so sophisticated and configurable that everyone used it differently. Opera Software has placed a low priority on pleasing them all.

Bookmarks are coming but development is progressing at a snail's pace. I guess I'd expect them around April.

In a prelude to the more recent gross attacks on democracy, the US and UK have both been consistently shitting on whistleblowers for many decades.

Snowden's method will probably only work if your leak will make you famous. For everyone else, anonymity would be advised.

The author of Spyblog has been documenting the progress of the UK's seemingly-inexorable descent into a Stasi police state for about 10 years.

In 2006, he started posting tips on whistleblowing. This has since evolved into a more comprehensive website.

http://ht4w.co.uk/

Windows RT implies it runs Windows which is a clear feature. The fact it doesn't wouldn't have lost them sales.

What killed both the Surface and Surface Pro were the prices. With Microsoft's $60bn cash reserves, it should have been selling the Surface at a loss and the Surface Pro at cost. It was happy to do this with Windows Phone.

Microsoft's backwards step with Windows 8 obviously didn't help either.

LOL. I didn't even mention Obama and I suspect a far higher proportion of US citizens are openly bigoted. Heck, many leading GOP members are openly homophobic.

Try again.

That voice you hear... isn't me. You might want to get that checked out.

So what are you doing here?

I am British and thus have no US party bias, which is more than I can say for you. Also, I am left of Obama, like nearly all Brits -- so you couldn't be further off the mark.

And this is why Schneier undid 10 years NSA work on subverting encryption algorithms. Terrorists are a miniscule threat compared to our Governments and Secret Services

The US no longer has a legitimate "government (..) for the people." The UK never did, except occasionally by chance.

We know that power like this is abused and attracts those who will abuse it. We must consider whether we want our children to live in a free country.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

We need to support projects like MailPile and BitMessage. Maybe some of you know of or are working on other projects you'd care to mention.