>>Amiga 500 > Insert Amiga Workbench floppy ... wait ... AW loads

Compare to:

ATARI ST > Switch on > under GEM within 3 seconds

In France, we actually have a dual system.
Public hospitals and private clinics.
Everyone is covered and can go to the hospital. 'The rich' as you qualify them, will go to the clinic and thus pay more, getting things such as a personal room instead of a shared one in the public hospital.
Doctors can get the money from working at the clinic because they also have to work part-time at the hospital.
No 'bribing' involved. Just some common sense and both parties are satisfied.

It has something to do with what all cartels do :
Jack-up the price of a product by artificially restricting its availability.

Examples that come to mind are the DeBoers cartel for diamonds, or the cartel of the music industry.

And btw, the US department of Justice does officially refer to the music industry as a cartel.

Though Ballmer could take a few pointers from Kempin about hunting :

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/07/04/ms_execs_hunting_trip_illegally/

IIRC (read long ago on gaming sites that are now long forgotten), Valve was created by ex-microsoft employees. Half-life's first incarnation was not as good as they hoped to be. Thanks to their wealth (from being rather early microsoft people), they were able to scrap the game as it was, keep the really good parts , and expand those, polishing the whole until they were fully satisfied with their work and finally released it to the world.
Their financial independence made possible the heavy reworking that lead to the genesis of half-life as we know it. A luxury most of the developping teams nowadays can not afford.(blizzard being the exception)

Just to say that the qualificative 'group of dedicated gamers' does not fully describe Valve, imo.
It rather makes me think of the players who wanted more out of the FPS experience and wrote counter-strike, the half-life mod.

You are forgetting that PC makers have to pay microsoft for windows whether their PC actually includes windows or NOT.

Those are the terms to be able to sell windows on PC, if you don't like them as a maker, you are free to get windows from another vendor. Oh, wait, there is no such entity ? tough luck ... guess you're stuck with what is called the microsoft tax.

Get on to coding ... the win32 API ? (urgh ...)
And witness the 99% of win apps that stutter or freeze on you whenever the messaging sytem in windows shows once again its retarded model ? ( sigh ..)

Microsoft is the reason we have to use shitty OS and software for decades. Didn't you notice ?

Better OS + better API documentation = better software, better productivity. More of the good software you like to use.
That's not hard to understand, is it ?

You are absolutely and totally wrong in both your examples.

Japan was lagging behind the US, France, germany and a lot of countries concerning internet access.
Then one particular member of their government (his name eludes me for now) declared that internet access should be a priority, and the big companies followed the impulse up to today's situation.

France has successfully reached a healthy competitive market for internet access, all thanks to proper regulation that FORCED the previously state-owned monopolistic operator, whose lines were paid by french citizen's taxes, to provide access to the last mile to competitors.
Said historical monopolistic operator, france telecom (now orange) had to be pulled into this screaming and kicking, and was using all its weight and dirty tricks to hinder and slow any other company.
If not for the ART (Telecoms Regulation Authority) kicking France Telecom's nuts so they would obey the LAW that opened the market and allowed competition, there would not be such an excellent internet access for citizens today.
Morevover, everyone is impatient to see the arrival of a new operator in the cell phone business. French government wants a 4th cell phone carrier to operate, as the current triopoly has been comdemned in justice already for their pricefixing (colluding to keep prices artificially high).

The US needs proper regulation. Not abscence of regulation nor bailout/incentive/whatever billions of $.

Does a pretty good job of allowing game to game communications.
Not only MMOs, but every kind of online game.

Regularly updated to keep functionning even after your beloved resource-hog/pain-in-the-ass/ supposedly cheat preventing/mandatory 3rd party program (Xtrap, GameTrap, whatever) prevents every other network or keyboard using program on your computer to work properly.

There was no internet when we were 10-12, so what I was looking for at that time was how to program in 6502 assembler on my ATARI 800 XL.

In every way ?

Seriously, name the features you think PSN has over Xbox live.
I haven't read anyone concurring with your point of view, please elaborate with constructive elements and examples.

Actually, Halo was bound for the Mac and not the PC, as Bungie was a Mac game maker.
(long time Bungie fans correct me if I'm wrong)

A new hope