I have friends who now communicate through Facebook and Twitter in preference to email and IM. If Wave had supported Farmville it could have been huge.

Why not ban hard drives too? And since many people fill their hard drives with copyright infringing material downloaded using Bittorrent we'd best ban that. Bittorrent depends on the Internet. The Internet has does serve some legitimate purpose but this hardly mitigates the fact that it is enables piracy. Ban that too. I have a TV capture card in my PC. Piracy!!! Of course TV capture would be nothing without TV broadcast, a piracy enabling technology if ever I saw one. VCR. Blank cassette tapes. Pen and paper. The spoken word.

...and they all moved away from me on the bench.

By contrast, my wife had a problem with her Dell Studio 15. I spoke to an Indian guy who organized for an Indian guy to come to my house the following day. He arrived on time, diagnosed and fixed the problem very quickly and handed be an invoice describing the repairs undertaken and indicating no charge as the fault was covered by the warranty.

... or you could invest in buses, trains, bikes, etc. like the original poster suggests.

My route to work is horrible too. Traffic congestion so bad I could get to work faster on foot, public transport so crowded I can only get on if somebody else gets off at my stop. So I ride a bike. The exercise has improved my health and fitness such that I've probably added a few years to my life too.

It's not for everybody - I live too far from work, in the mountains, and it snows, even in summer, and there are wild animals and cannibals and I'd look gay in bike shorts and ... Harden the fuck up.

Apple's just proving the point that consumers don't care how "fast" a chip is if the experience is that the device has an Apple Logo.

XP and OSX were both released in 2001.

All XP updates since have been free (as in beer). While retail copies of XP are no longer available the operating system is still supported and security patches and the like are still regularly released.

New versions of OSX have been released at approx. 18 month intervals since the initial release, they have all cost money and as far as I can tell software updates are only made available for the current version and the previous version. Security fixes for vulnerabilities in anything pre 10.5 will never be released so if you run OSX it's a good idea to pony up for the new version periodically. And, of course, the change in CPU architecture means most of the old versions won't run on the latest hardware anyway.

Windows Path : whatever I paid for the XP Home OEM that continues to run well on my old 1.6 GHz P4 as it has done for years + $0.

OSX Path : buy a Mac to check out this new OSX operating system all the kids are talking about + rip off + rip off + rip off + buy a new Mac because the new version won't work on this old PPC piece of crap + rip off + rip off

Linux Path: Free biatches.

BSD: is dead.

So how do you know what aliens look like anyway?

I was hanging out at Steve's place the other day, he used to jokingly call it his iPad but after the announcement of the new tablet he got a letter from Apple's legal team, now he calls it the iHouse. I told him that was pretty lame but he says what the hell would I know anyway.

We had a few beers, ordered pizza, watched some sport on TV, we we're going to play some games but his XBox 360 is in for repair and there aren't any games for the Mac so instead we got to talking about the new tablet. He says, you gonna buy one? And I'm like can I tether it to my iPhone? And he's like hell no. So I punched him in the face as hard as I could and went home to play some serious PC games and shit.

If you fork a open source software project available under a liberal license is it a "rip off"? For example, are the Unix underpinnings of Apple's OSX, derived as they are from FreeBSD and NetBSD, a "rip off"?

Notions of copyright and intellectual property are probably quite different under North Korean law too.

There is no excuse for a wealthy, modern, industrialized nation not to offer a public health system.

Shut up, it would be awesome to be a bird.

If you can find the time to troll on Slashdot you can find the time to supervise your children.

Australia is an entire continent, about the same size as your 'lower 48', but it has a smaller population than California. 21 million vs. 36.5 million. We're spread out all over the shop, comically low population density, although there are a couple of quite big cities on the east coast. Just shy of 20% of the country is desert. The Western Desert is bigger than California. Not much work gets done there. Not much work gets done anywhere really. Could be a cultural thing, maybe it's the weather. Don't know and I don't much care.

It's interesting that Californian's have, as you say, some of the highest taxes in the nation. In Australia we have a single federal taxation system which covers income tax and consumption - the Goods and Services Tax (GST) which replaced the old sales tax about ten years ago.

States have a limited power to impose duties such as the stamp duty imposed on the purchaser in the sale of cars, houses, alcohol and tobacco but remain largely dependant on the federal government for funding. Of course each state has its own education system, police and fire departments, etc. More or less everything is duplicated. But the taxes are federal.

Probably of greater interest to the average punter on Slashdot - it's the height of summer here and topless sunbathing is gaining popularity on St Kilda beach. Hot European backpackers are leading the charge. Thank you Europe.

Smarter than a dead lizard. Can't play minesweeper on a lizard. Lizards don't even have batteries.