Even though the software upgrade is free, it requires time from support personel and some loss of productivity to upgrade. In this economy, money for anything that is not essential is tight.

If it becomes difficult for you and your coworkers to do your job with IE6, then you have a good argument that might bear some weight. If there isn't a compelling business reason, they are likely to continue to put it off until cash flow improves.

Logic breeds skepticism of those that fail to make use of it.

Logic allows you to differentiate fact from conjecture and falshood.

Skepticism of what is logical however just allows people to be easily swayed by conspiracy theories and the like because without logic all you can really manage is either paranoia, or hope you luckily manage to be skeptical of the right things and trust in the right people.

Logic gives you the tools to make sound choices.

Skepticism by itself gives you nothing but doubt and indecision.

You're assuming that Windows gets such information from the BIOS. How does Windows even know what the original capacity is? It appears the BIOS is indicating that the battery is no longer working within specifications. Windows doesn't even know what those specifications are unless that's something it can read from the hardware.

It's nothing new. Windows has long gotten the blame for the consequences of buggy software and device drivers developed by others. They have come a long way toward reducing what mistakes made by others can crash the OS, but any kernel mode device driver can crash Windows, or any other operating system for that matter.

I've unfortunately released some drivers with bugs myself that I've had to fix at the insistance of justifiably irate customers.

What's different about this is they are getting blameed for messages they are passing on that come from the hardware.

Say the carrier provides 95% coverage. Getting that last 5% is prohibitively expensive, and only a small portion of possible customers will benefit. It just doesn't make sense carrier to saturate every place with cell towers to the point where they have 100% coverage.

If you are a consumer living in a dead spot, you can rant and rave, but if the amount they can earn from you and others that want coverage there you doesn't cover the cost of an additional tower, it makes little sense for them to build one.

So if you live in a dead spot you can ask yourself if whatever additional amount the femtocell costs you is worth it to you. If it is, pay for it, if not then I guess you can continue to complain.

Femtocells provide some people an option they wouldn't otherwise have. They can decide if the cost is worth it to them.

Wether you are 5 or 25 sharing things that are yours is nice, sharing things that belong to others is not.

If another kid lets you play with his toy in kindergarden you don't give that toy to a third kid and say they can do whatever they want with it.

When you "buy" music you are buying a license to use that music in a limited fashion. The person who owns the rights to the music is the real owner, you more or less have it on loan under specific circumstances.

That's the nature of copyright.

5 years? Many technologies take longer than 5 years to bring to market. Why invest millions in research to develop new technologies when you can just take what other people have developed once it starts to mature?

Your idea won't cause a growth of technology, it will absolutely destroy the profitibility of doing real research into new technologies.

I agree that there sure seems to be a lot of obvious patents that have been granted, though most are far more narrowly defined than you would think from just reading an abstract, or even worse the title of an article.

Patent reform is a good idea. Gutting the patent system is an absolutely horrible idea that would have far worse results than the mess we have now.

The existence of his allergies or lack thereof is irrelevant. The case should be dismissed because it is not his neighbor's resonsibility to go beyond FCC regulations in limiting radio emissions from his property. Turning off his cell phone will also do nothing about the cell towers in the area.

The guy with the allergies can take steps to block or at least seriously attenuate signals comming into his house. It may not be cheap, but since when is dealing with medical problems cheap.

He can also move to a rural area where such emissions are less in order to avoid them.

In today's job market where employers often get hundreds of resumes for a single position, the hard part is getting someone to care enough to bother contacting you at all.

It is remotely possible that an AOL email address might even benefit you it it looks out of place and brings attention to an otherwise great resume. However, more likely an overworked manager that is sick of looking at resumes is going to use it as a reason to toss your resume in the "NO" pile.

Should an AOL email address matter? No. Does it? Possibly. AOL has a stigma.

An Engineer says it doesn't matter. Someone from Marketing will says it does.

Your resume sells you, and the simple fact is a mediocre product that is well marketed usually sells better than a superior product that is marketed poorly.

The e-readers seem to do a good job at displaying text with low eye strain. However it comes at a heafty price tag for a single function device. It's like asking why people needed smart phones when two way pagers, PDAs, and simple cell phones already existed.

I don't see how such a vague reference even if it was intentional could harm the estate. It's not like there is a marketing advantage that Google would be getting from a vague reference based on a 30 year old movie based on a 40 year old novel. Even among customers that have seen Blade Runner, not many are going to remember the title of the novel it was based upon, and even fewer will remember that the android model was Nexus-6.

I can however, see the advantage of the estate trying to leverage the popularity of Google's new phone to get the name of the movie and the novel back in the media after all these years.

It's sad, but such threats of lawsuits appears to be a successful marketing ploy regardless of merit.

I guess government control is no more or less evil than any other control...

I'd would say there are some things the government does well, but having worked with and for the government most of my adult life I really can't think of any. There are however some public resources, such as the radio spectrum that need to be protected and administered in the public interest, and government is the best of the choices we have of who to to do that. So the government needs to be in charge of it. It needs to regulate it. That however doesn't mean having the government hire civil servants and beaurocrats to develop and maintain thins like a whitespace database.

Our government does employ a lot of extremely bright and talented people. However, they spend most of their time dealing with beaucracy and overseeing things from a high level. It is far more practical to have those bright people specify what is needed, and then let companies like Google come up with proposals on detailed implementations and then provide the expertise to implement them.

Let the government do what needs to be done by the government, but let privite industry provide the innovative implementations within the guidelines provided to them.

As for infrastructure... If it can be provided by private industry under what governmental regulation that is really necessary only, then let private industry build and maintain it. Let them take the risk and allow them reasonable rewards if they are successful. As foolish as corporations often are they manage to screw up far less than the government and provide a better value to customers than the government does.

The government is rarely a good solution to any problem. However, they are sometimes the only practical solution.

The Database and its administration will be paid for either directly through some form of fees or indirectly through taxes. In neither case is it free, its just a matter of who gets the bill.

It is highly unlikely the FCC is going to hire civil servants to develop and maintain such a database in any case. If they do it will take longer, cost more, and have more problems. Why? Because the government is the only entity with even more beaucracy and inefficiency than large corporations, and less direct incentive to do the job well. It is more cost effective and more sensible to contract out the work to a company that already has the technology and the people with the expertise required.

Since Google has the capabilities and the expertise they should be able to do this reasonably well. However, even if another company gets the bid, Google's proposal will at least mention issues that the government might otherwise miss. The government can only specify what they want as well as they understand the issues, and a lot of times things go badly simply because the governemtn doesn't know what they want at the begining and the requirements evolve over time.

I think is a bad idea for any OS company to rely on a third party app to properly display help files.

Removing artificial barriers to reasonable competition is one thing. Forcing bad design decisions is another.

Microsoft should not be prevented from providing a complete set of software that meets what are basically essential customer needs.

A decade ago it was much more reasonable for the court to say that browsers were not an essential part of the OS, and the fact that it took hours to download a competing browser over the internet did create a barrier to competition.

Now it is hard to say that a browser is not something people expect to come with their system to provide basic services they expect form it, and it is no longer difficult for consumers to access competing browsers that may add value for consumers.