I was at a meeting at Microsoft recently. A program manager on Visual Studio said that in their metrics, only 10% of the people ever open the Options dialog in a program, much less change anything. For that reason, the default configurations have to be right, and it takes a very strong argument to add the feature to make changing the default configurations even possible.

A friend of mine used to take Thunderbird, put it in expensive wine bottles, and serve it at parties. It was always a hit.

No, IE became popular because. for a period of time, its only serious competition was Netscape version 4. IE was gold compared to that bug laden, mish-mashed piece of software. I'd take IE version 4 over Netscape version 4 any time.

If Microsoft hadn't written this crappy code, and they'd used Linux instead, this wouldn't have happened.

So create an app so that it collects real-time data gathering information via GPS, Wi-Fi hub, and cell tower triangulation and uploading it to a central server (similar to Google Latitude). You could even use the accelerometer in the iPhone to detect when trains started moving, since I'm sure that it would be a different profile than walking. After a month or so, you'd have a real database of when the trains run rather than what appears on the schedule, which is more valuable information anyway. They couldn't touch that info, since they don't own it. If I lived Down Under, I'd write it just to tell them where they can stuff their copyright.

Bottom line: "one person, one vote" must mean exactly that; otherwise, elections can't be trusted.

That's not the way that the U.S. electoral process works. People from Wyoming get more of a vote than anyone else, since the state has more electoral votes per population than anywhere else. Now ultimately it is one person, one vote, but only when we are talking about the electors from each state that vote on December 15th.