Holding America back, the rest of the world doesn't allow this sort of shit to happen (we have our own pointless crap).

Probably Emma Peel, although John Steed runs a close second.

The change was made with Vista, 7 merely copied the installer. I liked that changing your location also updated your keyboard, time zone, currency etc. I've not seen another installer do that, but then I assume it will come at some point.

Faith in driving tests, we manage with them just fine here, sorry if you don't live in the civilised world.

Mostly systems fail at start because of manufacturing defects or after a few years due to mechanical failure. At least in one image I saw they were using water cooling on their boards, which should reduce the mechanical failure issue of fans, I would also assume they are using some fault tolerant storage which is the other major failure route. If you take a, possibly optimistic, failure rate of 1% that is about 1 machine failing a day over a 3 year life span. Being as I would make them as similar as possible to make the job of swapping out much easier I can't see it being that much of an issue.

From 10 years of data I can tell you what is definitely going to happen in 15 years, you're obviously not trying hard enough.

When I buy a used car I don't get the original owners warranty or any free stuff which may have come with the original purchase, free services, road tax, insurance offers etc. Not entirely sure why you think a secondhand purchase should be the same as buying new. Being as this is a relatively effective and less intrusive way of reducing piracy it's better this direction than others have taken.

If you can come up with a good solution to reducing piracy and rewarding genuine purchasers of software then you could make a lot of money.

Also when I buy a car I am generally required to give lots of personal information, are you suggesting that you should be able to just have software like a book. Well it comes with some services (online content, updates, support) and it is reasonable to request registration for such services.

You however seem to want the moon on a stick, which I am unable to assist you with.

It's his toy, if you want you can take the code and give it whatever version number you like there is nothing stopping you.

France produce almost 80% of their power from nuclear.

I thought they crashed into Mars.

I thought they were going for the Watt balance over the silicon as that will probably have the same mass loss issues as the kilo does at the moment.

I would have said that for most angular measurements you need a couple of pies.

And 60 is just a hold over from the Babylonians.

A pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter*

*Using standard Imperial measure.

Today it does, thought I'd get in early.

Can I get a +5 funny please.