Windows 8 has already made itself incompatible with most non-x64 processors anyway. It requires SSE2, PAE, and NX bit, which are features that CPUs, say a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.46GHz or a Pentium 4 HT 571 3.8GHz, do not offer. Doesn't matter that you have 8GB of RAM and an SSD in them. Believe me, these CPUs are fine for just about any office task.

Windows 8 runs on crap tablet hardware but won't run on CPUs that can run MFLOPS around them due to a few CPU features.

Copyright, as in "intellectual property", is a notion that exploded from The Shining City on the Hill, namely Jesus's country, America. We've rammed each and every treaty down the world's throat for almost thirty years. Now that it's established, of course European copyright lords are helping seal us in with our cask of Amontlliado. But it is American in origin.

Well done, madam or sir. Exactly so.

They don't want to eliminate the internet. They want to turn it into a paid cable TV service with data for a fat extra charge. They want to own the internet, turn it into another corporate-owned asset. And they have won.

This is ME saying this, but in Betamax decision, the SCOTUS said that *even though* VCR sometimes infringed on copyrights, that the non-infringing uses outweighed the "bad" use. Yes, that makes little sense, but blame copyright laws for that. Change the laws, change the decisions.

"Is it one of those things, like sex and human organs, that you can give away for free but you can't charge money for it?"

You can't charge, either. You must remain a virgin until they license you to have sex, er, watch TV.

Um, Scalia tried that with Bush V. Gore. "Only applies to this one election." Bull.
No, it doesn't work like that, unless someone is crookedly applying law. Law is law, and they don't get to choose what the consequences of their STUPID decision is.

"Fair Use"? HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA! That was FUNNY! "Fair Use"!! Why, grampa here just peed in his Depends when he heard you mention that dead fish. Fair Use indeed. Whoo. Whee.

Those consequences were quite intended by the broadcast industry which sued Aereo. Only Scalia, amazingly, got it right when he warned they were after this endgame. Blind adherence to the tiny details of the law give us this stinking pile to live with, just as when they ruled that eternal copyright was fine as long as there was *some* time limit mentioned, even if it was a century, even if the limit would be eternally extended, as it just obviously had been.

The US writes all the treaties. Amazing how that works.

"How can the government of country A fine a company from country B any money when that company's dealing has NOTHING to do with country A in the first place ???"

Empire. Rules of an empire. We've thousands of nukes, hundreds of military bases in a hundred+ counties, and we create every single "treaty" that governs our actions. You are either a vassal, or a cooperating and subordinate power.

Americans are fine with this idea. They never leave home much, and even if they did, they would not mind the hate. We are the fhining City on the Hill, the Nation Favoured by Providence, the people chosen by God Almighty to lead the world to a perfect age, so that Jesuf can come back, deftroy the world, hurl the unbelieverf and the wicked into the Pit of Fire for ever and ever and build a new Fhining City of Gold for uf, the chofen, to live with Jefus forever, along with perhaps a few foreigners who listened to the Holy Word of America.

If you don't understand the news coming from America, the above is THE explanation. You need no others; it is not hyperbole. And it will get so much worse.

Indeed.

Print encyclopedias had to be picky about editing, because even edited down they were still 100lbs and took up feet of shelf space.

A digital encyclopedia has no such constraints. It can be a repository for everything, at no cost.

The "not notable" constraint is totally artificial and serves only as an outlet for the petty-minded to exert some small degree of power.

DG

Says the "Anonymous Coward".

Oh, the irony.

DG

Where Wikipedia fails HARD though is the article deletion process.

There are people out there who get a weird thrill from deleting articles.

An article that has been in place for *10 years* can be snuffed out just because a motivated moderator decides it isn't "notable" and sets up a "speedy delete".

Notice 6 months after the fact, try and put it back, and the whole friggin' WORLD descends on you.

Wikipedia is ruled by a group of petty, self-nominated bureaucrats. And the system - as horribly broken as it is - cannot be reformed, because there are too many vested interests who want to see it STAY broken.