...(1) the only contributors are employees with time on their hands, who tend to be the drones. Those employees who actually know someting useful to you are too busy to waste time with crap like this
(2) the only employees who will tell you anything at all are ones you have actually met face to face - otherwise you are not a real person, and they don't trust you, no matter what you say.

Been there, done this with a multinational corp.

"to safely store all of your photos in iCloud" Rated +5, Funny. I don't mean any specific criticism of iCloud, but ...for God's sake...the idea that anything at all is "safe" in the cloud...is hilariously wrong.

In UK. If you have your broadband from BT, you can use wifi from any router that is advertising FON service. You need to logon with your BT account credentials, but it's otherwise free to use. If you are out and about, and you need wifi, just drive into a residential area. There will one or more FON routers on almost any street.

"Karpichko Information Services are proud to announce that we have won a high-profile contract worth a six-figure sum from a US client. The client, a low-profile multinational data-gathering business, wishes to discredit certain information sources and shift the blame for their own loss of control of the situation. Our operative, ex-KGB Major Boris Karpichko, enjoys a well-earned international reputation in the disinformation field, and has recently graduated summa cum laude from the IBM Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt School."

...does City of London police have any jurisdiction outside City of London? Registrar should not have caved in.

I should like to point out that I, a registered voter and taxpayer, have never been asked whether I want my taxes spent on something so monumentally stupid as a Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit. And I suspect that its creation was an idea planted, bought, and paid for by You-Know-Who.

I've done work for a local charity to select, install and implement a local open-source solution. The problems came when the national HQ with a national IT department started arguing with our choice of an open-source solution, recommending a proprietary solution on the basis that "you'll be able to get support". It wasn't just that they wanted $1200 per year per seat (as opposed to nothing per year per seat), but also that they were based in Flagstaff, AZ and had no (zero) offices anywhere in my country or anywhere in Europe. Just how exactly were they going to supply this support? Meanwhile we had two local volunteers on board, both competent in the relevant language, both of whom would be available at an hour's notice at no charge. So whenever you find yourself facing a recommender who is pushing proprietary on the basis that "you'll get support", call him out on it, demand to talk to a previous customer to find out what support experience they have had, and challenge him to match local availability and fees for people with relevant skills.

but I don't want a separate device just to do Office...I want whatever device I use to be able to run "everything I use" so I can combine stuff, rework, sort, juggle, scrape and reformat all that stuff into one coherent work output. If, like the Surface, the other apps from other suppliers are either not present or unusable with a touch screen, it's dead in the water. And it's dead in the water if I have to buy again software I've already paid for on another platform. And don't say Cloud. Cloud is dead because using it makes me legally non-compliant.

EU law already makes it illegal to pass "personal data" to any location which lacks the protections available in Europe. The so-called Safe Harbor provisions apply for te US situation, but everyone who understands the EU law knows that the Safe Harbor arrangements are just smoke and mirrors - they afford precisely no protection at all - they exist to enable EU companies to export data to the US while claiming they have complied wth the law.

My Dad used to take me to play pitch-and-putt (nine short holes, played with a 9-iron and a putter). One day when I was 9, we were both having an awful round, and I said "Dad, this is a bloody frustrating game". He replied "Yup, that's why I gave it up in 1932". I got the point, and have never been back since.

The hate for Monsanto also comes from the irresponsibility. They planted Roundup-resistant plants all over while saying "the resistance will never spread to other plants" without actually bothering to check whether that was the case, as if they had never heard of plasmids. Roundup-resistant weeds with the Monsanto gene in them were found IN THE NEXT FIELD BELONGING TO A DIFFERENT LANDOWNER four months after the first crops were planted. Since then, Monsanto have lied repeatedly about the spread of resistance, and what the likely consequences might be - and denied having any responsibility for the consequences.

That is, which American organization paid off the legislators? NSA? CIA? Some large company that thinks they own Canada?

You've done something wrong. I started using Cinnamon without the nVidia driver, and it was OK, as good without a proper driver as XP was WITH a proper driver. Then I installed the nVidia driver, and it lit up and flew. I am getting through my work noticeably faster on exactly the same hardware. Of course this is the case for a person with an NVidia GPU. Everyone else's mileage will vary.

How many of those '1,332,784,839 lines of code' were written in Python on a Raspberry Pi? Both of which are things Microsoft would really rather not support (like the Baptists do not like to support having sex while standing up, because it might lead to dancing).

Looks like XP, mostly works like XP, closer to XP than Win 8, easier upgrade path than Win 8, lower rate of support calls from friends and family ...and in my experience, it's lighter and faster and more responsive than XP. So, no, I won't be laying out hundreds of pounds/dollars on a new machine or even more hundreds on replacing all the software that will not work on Win 8.

50 years, yeah, and the rest. Flywheels were widely used in the 1930s and 1940s to store energy and cut fuel consumption.. The first car I remember (a 1945 Rover 75) had one.