But but they're good now honest! Most of the apologists here don't know and usually aren't interested in the history and just assume it's jealousy or just about IE being the default browser.

Apple aren't the only company who make Thunderbolt and it's a patented Intel technology anyway.

Speaking as a former COBOL programmer who did Y2K work you really don't know that you've got it good. Some of that code was a vile mess of hacks, commented code , blocks of code that couldn't be touched on case they broke so had to be coded around. Shit code can be written without frameworks and in my experience more often is, due to the wheel being reinvented repeatedly and badly. The good old days never existed and personally I'm far happier writing C# in Visual Studio for SMEs than I ever was trying to debug some horrendous code written by a moron 30 years ago that some bank utterly depends on and which is probably still in use now 10 years after I escaped.

Funny but my skills in C# are far more valuable than my COBOL skills thanks to all the mainframe COBOL work being outsourced to India because people like me were too expensive.

It's also pretty hard to fight back when the other side is so much better armed than you. A bunch of NRA members with assault rifles won't last long against tanks and fighter jets without outside support and the most powerful of the US' enemies are too far away to give any meaningful support and taking that support would immediately lose any popular support you might get.

"stan o'neil" site:bbc.co.uk returns the article. This is all hysterical bullshit.

Some of the most expensive IT failures in history have come from contracting it out to the amazingly efficient do no wrong private sector.

Damn those lefties and their workers' rights, rights for minorities and women, universal education and universal vaccination.

In which EU nations do you "just get handed citizenship"? I can't speak for other countries but here in the UK becoming a citizen is a long and quite expensive process.

That really does suck. I'm not best pleased about that since it's totally unnecessary. My misunderstanding of your point was that I installed an extension (I had no idea there was a difference between that an app which I guess is obvious now I think about it) which didn't require my password. As soon as I followed your link and tried to install it asked me for my login details. That's really shit. The developer check box doesn't make a difference either.

It's not really a monoculture when there are 4 separately developed rendering engines. IE isn't going away thanks to corporate users, Firefox is still going strong although nowhere near where it was, Apple have a strong market position that will not go anywhere in the near future and Google has forked Webkit to go their own way so I can't see any single browser dominance any time in the near future and I certainly haven't come across a single site that insists I use a particular browser like used to happen in the bad old days of IE5 and 6.

I'll have to investigate the apps issue further because I'm not happy with them saying where I can install apps from. They don't do it on Android so why should they do it on Chrome.

I'm not defending Google here by the way but people's fears of a return to the early 2000s IE only nightmare seem largely unfounded to me. Google have contributed a number of technologies to everyone - a long way from the One Microsoft Way of yesteryear.

Firefox uses Gecko, Opera and Chrome use Blink and Safari uses Webkit. That's 3 if you exclude IE.

How is it a monoculture? Can you give examples of sites that only work in Chrome or say "this site works best in Chrome" a la IE6? I think it's unlikely website owners would annoy all the iDevice users who don't have access to Chrome.

I didn't know you needed a Google account to install extensions so I just logged out and installed a random extension. It didn't ask me to log in again so I don't know if it was happy that I just exist in the Google world or whether they've taken that requirement out again in the latest version (35.0.1916.153 on Windows 8.1).

That was my first thought when I read the headline as well.

Meet the Australian Army.