At first I thought it said "all 114,000" Ipad owners. Because I don't see them around and there's no way they sold as many as they said they did.

Part of the problem is that the production company ripped off the film's backers to the tune of $75 million.

Viewing the film (torture) will reveal numerous places where horrid shortcuts were taken with sets, special effects, unknown bad actors, etc.

The rest of the problem is that the movie covers the worse half of the book. The second half would have actually made a good space shoot em up, the first half is nothing but cave man wandering about. There is no noticeable Scientology proselyzation in either the book or the movie.

Do not forget Mars, which is at opposition right now (up all night, closest to Earth). The 4" should show the ice cap.

So I was doing an install of ATT DSL a few months ago. You don't just plug it in, you have to authenticate.

Only IE works with their server, and the install disc includes IE6 in case you don't have it.

Firestone still took the contract, they weren't going to turn down a sale of millions of tires.. They knew what Ford was putting them on.

The US did the same thing through its industrial phase. There are still disasters like the Love Canal all over the country scheduled for Superfund cleanup. Take a look at the map for one near you.

I was a part of that problem, with $6 per hour billing finally gone we would just leave the connection on. But that locked up all their modems and so they would "goodbye" you after 15 minutes of inactivity. So then we would install programs to keep alive the connection and so on and so forth.

Bandwidth wasn't necessarily being consumed, the issue was modem unavailability, especially at 7pm when everyone got home to check their spam. One modem, one user.

The issue today is different, a small subset of iphone users are hogging all the bandwidth and I can't even make a goddamn phone call sometimes. I don't see a problem with a normal cap of say 4-5 gigs a month, which is "practically" unlimited. If you need more porn than that you have other issues. If you don't think porn is the issue check out all the sites offering iphone compatible video.

Additional reasons are they're closed, and are malware vectors that need to be constantly updated. As if that wasn't enough reason not to use them, there are even phishing scams to update your flash or pdf installs... with the scammers horrible malware.

Unless you play Flash games or view Youtube all day there is no need to run Flash, all it does is deliver ugly ads or someone's horribly botched schoolboy attempt at an edgy webpage. Flash, far from enabling web usage is often used to RESTRICT usage, go to Webshots for an example of that.

Dividends, which is what you are talking about, have not been paid in years. All a stock is today is a percentage of the company, for instance if there are 500m shares of Microsoft and you own a share, you own 1/500,000,000 of Microsoft.

Don't get me wrong, it would be better if it were the way you describe it, the way it was. The dissociation of dividends from share value is in my opinion everything that is wrong with the markets today. It used to be that steady, reliable profits, year after year, providing dividends to the shareholders was enough.

Without dividends, all that is of interest to investors is the stock price increasing, and for that to happen, the company must report increases and logarithmic growth year after year, which is unsustainable in the long or even medium term. These days, half of the stock profits taken by investors of a company's entire lifespan, if any, are received in the IPO stage, at the very beginning. Stock trading is gambling, nothing more.

What are these signs of age? I seriously doubt the code is degenerating. More like being forced out along a mandatory upgrade path, because apps made with .net will only work on newer oses.

Some of these app "upgrades" are completely insane. Let me give you a great example. The popular ZoneAlarm firewall tried to force an upgrade via an expired root certificate last month. Any install prior to v.7 will not start if the system clock is set to after July 15, 2009. They overplayed their hand however because you can't uninstall it either. or upgrade. And versions 8.0 and above work only with oses XPSP2 and newer. The best part is that the download is an installer, so you need to be connected naked to the internet while the setup downloads, along with trojans, worms, etc.

This is not the result of an "aging" os. it is the result of the desire for a continuous income stream from the installed base, by forcing product with dubious improvements. I've pretty much opted out, in the above example there are many software firewalls to choose from that run on Win2K. we use too many apps 12-15 years old that won't even run in XP, and if the day came we had to buy/build new apps it will be on a non-MS os.

Every gmail account I've opened has been flooded with spam. One I never sent a single message from.

XP is slower, uses more system resources, does stupid things with directories (for instance, if any media is present, switches to a media view), autoplays everything, and requires Activation.

I really wish MS would live and let live and stop trying to wean users off 2K by doing things like making .net 2.0 XP compatible only.

Microsoft is the 800# gorilla in the room because it doesn't break backward compatibility.

This is not precisely accurate, at least in my case. I have a lot of 16 bit programs that date back 10 years or more, and with every MS OS "upgrade" fewer and fewer of them work.

Also, a lot of new stuff is written in .NET 2.0 which only installs on XPSP1 and newer. There is no reason for MS to make it not work with for instane 2000, except to force OS upgrades.

It is why I will not proceed past XP. If I have to buy/write new programs, I might as well go with another platform that doesn't force "upgrades" for the sake of revenue.