This tallies perfectly with my experience. Only as this is the UK and we don't have UPS stores to take stuff to, UPS came and collected the Xbox (for free). We got the box shipped back a few days later working good as new.

I really can't fault Microsoft's after sales care on that front. It was far less of a hassle than I'd have thought.

They had to make that conversion gel somehow.

Thanks for first proving my original point, and secondly for reminding me that that place does sell some bizarre shit :P Next time I need a sugar fix and I'm near there...

Does that actually exist?! "Geranium and cherry cupcake" is precisely the sort of thing one would say Waitrose sell if you wanted to take the piss out of them...

If it does, well, that does sound fairly nice...

Or you can go somewhere like Waitrose and get better quality for not that much more money. Certainly not £3 a cupcake - I know Waitrose have a reputation but it's not that expensive.

Even if it isn't the sole factor, it does seem to be something that winds a certain section of the Republican base up even more.

And really, let's face it, do you think the "birther" loons would have got anywhere near the traction they did if Obama was white?

I think you misunderstand. The GP doesn't care about that. The GP wants to get high.

It is technological improvements mostly. Computerised switching means there is little to no human involvement in the average telephone call, which brings the cost right down. Calls are so cheap for BT and their ilk that It would be cheaper to run the entire network unmetered than it is to itemise, send out and collect payment for telephone bills.

Line rental prices are the level they are because they are the price BT levies, and unless you've got your own LLU facilities in the exchange you have to rent subscriber lines from BT. Even if you are LLU, the last mile is still going to be BT-owned anyway. There's no escaping them.

What should have happened with BT's privatisation is infrastructure (as currently vested in Openreach) being owned by and rented from the government at cost price, with telcos providing services over those lines. What happened is both infrastructure and telco services were privatised into one BT behemoth, with the infrastructure then later hastily sorta-kinda split off into Openreach. Who are owned by BT, and who own the entire telephone network - essentially being a private monopoly. We have all the problems of a monopoly with none of the benefits.

Trust the Tories to have dreamed up such a stupid scheme though. A lot of people got very rich from our core telecoms network being sold off at a pisscheap price, and everyone else is still paying the price more than 20 years on.

Both wrong, sadly - BT floated BT Cellnet as mmO2 (t/as O2) back in 2002 or so, making them totally independent - then they were bought by Telefonica.

The present day O2 has nothing to do with BT, other than using their physical infrastructure for "last mile" connectivity.

I actually just read the Minetest developer's note to "Minecraft fanatics". He actually has the balls to say:

I know a lot of people here are thinking that I am cloning a game, meanly and effortlessly copying what others have done, possibly making some fancy cheap technical improvements or something. [...] You could say all the first person shooters today are clones of Quake. They all look the same and mostly you can do the same things in them. Still everybody thinks they are different games and not clones. Why is it so?

Well the difference is that while Half-Life 2 didn't take Quake's gameplay, plot and look and feel wholesale (while of course sharing similarities in gameplay, what with them both being FPSes), Minetest is a clone of Minecraft, built with the sole aim and intention of being like Minecraft. That's a pretty big difference. There's a marked gap between building on what your predecessors did before and adding stuff, and just taking an existing game and trying to make that.

Hell, even the HUD on the screenshot is identical...

It's faintly amusing to me that despite the supposed innovation and originality benefits of F/OSS, all it ever seems to be able to turn out in the game world is different versions of existing, proprietary games - only this time free of charge. Civilization became FreeCiv, Lemmings became Pingus and now Minecraft becomes Minetest. Hell, even most F/OSS desktop applications and environments are heavily derivative clones of existing ones.

I'm not asking this in a trolling way - where exactly is the innovation here? Are there any F/OSS games (bar Tux Racer...) that aren't merely copies of some proprietary equivalent?

I can't see myself switching from Win7 for at least another few years. My OEM copy of it cost me £80, so basically I'm paying, what, £20 a year for it? And frankly, given how well it works, I feel it's worth it.

I tried running Linux (Debian to be precise - Ubuntu, oddly enough, wouldn't work) on the same hardware and gave up. Windows Media Center alone is worth the price of admission, and before anyone says, MythTV is in no way, shape or form a good alternative - I know, I tried. The configuration headaches alone ruined that, and something like MythBuntu made no sense as this is a general purpose gaming/browsing/office work/whatever box which happens to sometimes moonlight as a media centre.

Meanwhile, my laptop had an interesting bug where whenever it went to sleep it would be 50/50 as to whether it would wake up again, and if it did the clock would suddenly be three days in the future. No such bug on Windows, on Linux it was crippling, as things would suddenly refuse to work, I'd look up at the clock and swear under my breath.

£20 a year for not having to deal with that crap strikes me as a good deal.

It was bollocks then and it's bollocks now. There was no DRM in the network stack. That doesn't even make logical sense - there's nothing to be gained for anyone (not Microsoft, not the *IAAs, not anyone) in putting DRM in the network stack.

A point for having the courage to not hide your knuckle-dragging, racist idiocy behind an Anonymous Coward tag. That does take balls; so many people are unwilling to do so.

Minus a million points for the nonsense you're saying though. In total you're still a point above most of the derp I see, though.

Keeps all the retards off the rest of the Internet