I don't know if things are better in the UK, but here in the US the bottleneck for fiber-to-end-user is rarely the link from CO to end-user.

Currently, for most places in the UK, the bottleneck for fibre-to-end-user is the copper cable between the end-user's house and the cabinet down the street where the fibre terminates.

It's been a while, but wasn't VIA responsible for the really screwy AMD chipsets that used to make people curse under their breathe?

Yup. I had one where only one of the 3 memory slots ran at advertised speed and the onboard audio somehow conflicted with the AGP port, which caused the system to crash whenever I tried to do anything 3D.

And they're still responsible for the audio on some of the cheaper motherboards. It's the worst audio chip I've ever heard, the mic input didn't work properly and the driver was terrible and unstable.

All in all, it seems VIA seem to be incapable of writing stable/working drivers or firmware and the hardware's pretty shoddy too.

That may be the case in the US, however TFA's figures are worldwide. About 95% of the population is in the (oft-forgotten by Americans) rest of the world, where Apple is generally less popular.

From the release notes:

As part of an ongoing effort to implement process checkpointing/restart, Linux adds in this release support for stopping a TCP connection and restart it in another host. Container virtualization implementations will use this feature to relocate a entire network connection from one host to another transparently for the remote end. This is achieved putting the socket in a "repair" mode that allows to gather the necessary information or restore previous state into a new socket.

Also, some other potential uses: http://criu.org/Usage_scenarios

It appears, as far as I can tell from the low resolution image, that the round thing (along with the port/dock looking thing and the screen edge) are made up of broken lines and therefore aren't part of the patent itself.

That just leaves the rounded corners and possibly a ridge around the front edge. Oddly enough, that sounds remarkably like a very basic description of my Nokia mobile that was released 1 year before the first iPad, albeit having a different aspect ratio - but then, so does the Samsung.

Most policies in the UK that cover you to drive "any vehicle" also require that vehicle to already be included on *someone's* insurance, just not necessarily yours.
Typically, it's only some commercial insurance where that's not the case afaik.

I'd check your small print if I were you - it's quite common for people to get caught out by this.