Same in my country (at least for copy machines, scanners, printers, writable cd's and dvd's I think) Just one question, since they collect "piracy tax" on storage media doesn't that mean that it's ok to pirate everything, since you've already been taxed in advance for exactly that?

When I (used to) recover from old floppies I would turn to an old Thinkpad 750p laptop. It's floppy drive recovered many more discs successfully than the 5$ flimsy drives that equipped the last desktops that had floppies.

I got married, I have a family and I still take care of archiving :) One doesn't replace the other - it just optimizes it. Instead of burning trough tens of cd's/dvd's for pictures, family movies and so on I jutst keep 2 backup copies of each on a closet server and external hdd. Normal movies are ripped and sit inside the 3Tb media center. If this one blows up I simply rip again / re download the movies. Yes family means less time for this things and so simple scripts keep my pc, my wife's laptop, the backup server and a remote rented linode nice in sync. I simply download my pictures or my home movies on my pc and the rest happens by itself.

25$ (78 lei if anybody cares) for 100 Mb fiber, tv, phone and a 7.2Mb mobile internet stick thrown in. I guess prices do drop some places.

The fact that we don't see many specialized multicores around still supports my opinion. In order to switch a core on/off you need something that accepts commands from software and that something should be running all the time - let's say that the base core takes care of that. You still have lot's of cores switching on and off, overlapping from time to time. Not to mention the base core that would be busy all the time - running basic functions and switching the others on and off. The bottom line: a basic core running consumes a lot more than an advanced core idling. I can't find a number but I bet that a smartphone cpu say the omap3 idles at pretty much nothing. Microchip PIC mcu's can idle drawing less power than the natural discharge rate of a battery - just to give you an idea. I think that we won't see many specialized cores soon inside smartphones outside the graphics and multimedia area.

Yes and no... You already have multiple cores if you want: besides the general purpose cpu you usually have a dsp core used for a/v decoding. It's usually best to have a core as fast as possible that will spend most of the time idling (race to idle) than to have many cores running all the time. Not to mention the expense of silicon surface. And in the end imagine the nightmare of programming for such a platform.

and make a nice table: computer1, computer2, .... all the machines you usually use with your removable media Write under each of them the file systems it knows how to read. You'll be happy to see that fat32 is the only option. No matter how much you discuss it, unless you want to take the road explained by someone before me and partition your drives in fat32/ext2 and use something like ext2ifs which is fine (i use it myself) excepting some (rare) bluescreens. Oh and to that commenter I would be very *happy* if everybody visiting me would install some crap so that he can use his usb drive :) Add to that that most stand-alone media players (car radios with usb, dvd players, etc) usually only know how to read from fat32 disks the decision will be simple. Need bigger files ? Split them !

Fast 100% Java - now that's the definition of oxymoron right there.

So Microsoft can leave a hole in my buget AND my netbook? Great.

'They don't have the right to read a book out loud,'

This is probably the most idiotic thing I have heard about copyright in a long time.
My sugestion is why let us read it in the first place ? We'll remember it and so an unauthorized copy will be placed in our head. Conclusion: anybody without an approved lobotomy shouldn't be allowed to read !

They have invented this technology long before, end even implemented it in some Intel Pentium processors :)

God forbid the day when my computer decides how accurate my calculations need to be !

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

that only means that you are watching the surface and miss the meaning