I love pfSense, it is superb, but that hardware is very overpriced. I guess it includes a support contract, but still, you could build out one of those appliances for less than half the cost.

I've used Rackspace email for about 10 years, since before it was even Rackspace email, and found it to be consistently great. What's the problem? I also used their manager servers some years ago and also found those very, very good. The company has grown a lot since then so I wouldn't be surprised if the quality of their service and support has reduced somewhat, although their prices hadn't last time I had a quote from them.

Expand please.

Not strictly true, this only happens if a) you sign in to icloud through system preferences or during the mac setup assistant and b) use iPhoto (and possibly iTunes) for your photo management. Apple haven't quite, yet, made it compulsory to use all their crapware if you want to use a mac.

I embraced it ages ago, for technical reasons. I can't even begin to predict how many thousands of hours we've saved as a result.

Yeah plugging it in at night and unplugging it in the morning is a real pain huh? It doesn't last as long as an old Nokia because it consumes more power and battery capacity is restrained by physical density, size, and cost. C'mon, charging your phone once per day is hardly a pain and for the vast majority is a completely insignificant cost compared to the benefit of the increased functionality that a power hungry smartphone has over an old Nokia dumb phone. If you'd rather trade off all those features for only having to plug it in once a week then crack on and buy a dumb phone.

It is mostly AOSP with major changes to the settings, themes, some tweaks to stock apps and a lot under-the-hood goodness and performance enhancements, but as far as actual apps that are bundled: Apollo - a quite decent music player DSP Manager - an audio equalizer thing File Manager - a fairly limited file manager However this is quite irrelevant because all the tools/apps you need can be downloaded from google play quite easily. And why bloat a rom with apps?

Yep Kindle Fire, or my choice the Nook HD which has HDTV HDMI output (via special connector). The Nook is on fire sale at the moment so worth consideration.

you may not like them but they have many benefits. we moved from imap/client setup to gmail for 60+ staff and saw our email support overheads tumble massively. configuring email clients and storing users email locally has many downsides in enterprise.

One word: imapsync

You're talking (typing) out of your hoop. The UK tax rates on "human activity" are not obscenely high. In fact we have some of the lowest personal and corporate tax rates in the whole of Europe (List of countries by tax rates). There are many reasons why this scheme could/would fail but tax rates are not one of them, unless you consider any form of taxation a problem.

Ignoring your poor grasp of physics, are you for real thinking 54.5MPG is hard to get? Or are you just totally locked inside your American gas easting bubble? Cars in Europe at least have been capable of 60+ MPG at 80MPH (real world figures) for at least a decade if not longer. Just because you choose to drive stupid gas guzzling monster trucks doesn't mean that more economical alternatives don't exist.

Mac Pro != Macbook

I've no idea how it works but I'd imagine that upon installation it can install a service or daemon that runs as root and handles the updates without requiring further passwords?