The article says you have have Win 7 Pro with this one instead of Win 8.1 if you want.

The article does mention that a 91Wh alternative battery is available when you configure the device, which presumably makes battery life (somewhat) more competitive.

"if a parody super star did emerge, it would unleash an 'existential catastrophe' on humanity."

Well we did get the Alpocolypse last year...

Apart from the display, the specs seems bit weaker on the Dell - the Macbook Pro has more storage capacity, and a faster processor even in the base configuration.

Also the Macbook Pro 15" now has the ForceTouch track pad, which will be more useful over time (and Apple makes excellent trackpads anyway, Force Touch or not).

I have a Macbook Pro 15" Retina currently, that I use in non-scaled mode (so I get 1:1 use of the pixels). I'm not really sure how much better the higher resolution would look on that small a display.

Y can't be sued for anything if they do not know that it was originally confidential, but they *CAN* be sued for using said information after they have learned that it was misappropriated, which they could learn very shortly afterwards. Sort of like how you can't be prosecuted for buying stolen merchandise from someone else if you didn't realize that it was stolen, but you aren't allowed to keep what you bought once its origin has come to light. You are, however, allowed to sue the person you bought it from. In the case of a broken confidentiality agreement or NDA, it's my understanding that if the information has only been transferred to one party, then the court grants an injunction against the party from utilizing that information, and that party can claim legitimate damages from the party that they acquired it from. The situation you describe is only applicable in a circumstance where the confidential information was revealed to the general public, and the "genie is out of the bottle", as it were.

Of course, all of this is applicable to the story were are discussing only if the guy who sold the Rift to Facebook was not actually entitled to do so.

I think the challenge with the current system and shared Euro currency isn't that a nation loses control of its own policies on things like taxation and trade, its that whether those policies actually work is significantly influenced by the equivalent policies set by other nations that share the currency. As we've seen in recent years, if some nations screw up their own economies due to poor management, corruption, or for any other reason, it does have a serious knock-on effect across the whole currency group.

So, although a shared currency doesn't in itself imply shared tax and spending policies, I suspect that more centralised government (and therefore necessarily less autonomy and sovereignty for each member state) will follow in practice. To a degree, it already has, with the nations that struggled worst after the crash effectively being forced into unpopular austerity policies by foreign influences in return for bail-out money or even having their entire governments replaced by technocrats for a while.

The mostly-unspoken underlying question here is whether the people of Europe actually want to bound together in that way. Some people do see a United States of Europe in the future. Generally speaking, the people of the UK don't, or at least don't want to give up our own national identity to become part of such an umbrella organisation, any more than Canada wants to be the 51st state just because some Canadians speak the same language as most people in the US and they share a border and some broadly similar political views.

In principle, I agree with you.

However, "working it out" when you're starting with the level of disparity between countries like the UK and Germany on the one hand and the "new Europe" nations on the other is a generational problem that will take many years to solve. It's not something that can be finished in a matter of months with a quick treaty or two.

In the meantime, if you immediately establish tight integration as something like joining the EU does, you have artificially increased the pressure on both the weaker and the stronger nations. Consider that Greece -- which was already an EU member and part of the Eurozone -- is still in serious economic trouble today, coming up to seven years after the big crash. There are still serious political frictions there over dealings with Europe, and there are still serious political frictions in nations like Germany, where they have been picking up the tab for all that time.

One possible alternative is to provide humanitarian and economic aid to less fortunate nations without such close formal ties. For example, the UK has a government department responsible for international development. It has thousands of staff, and now sends over £10B per year in aid funding, mostly to nations across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. This makes the UK the #2 provider of official development aid (after the US) in absolute terms, and the #5 provider (after Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, and Denmark) relative to gross national income.

So again, if the UK were no longer part of the EU, this doesn't necessarily mean the UK would no longer support the economic development of the "new Europe" states. A cynic might also point out that unlike the EU, there are also actual accounts showing where the money for UK overseas aid is really going and robust mechanisms for reporting and shutting down fraudulent claimants.

For the near future, this kind of arrangement might be more beneficial to the nations receiving the aid and impose a lower risk on the nations giving it, without the mechanics of shared currencies and the like clouding the issue. So again, looking at the big picture, I don't see much of an argument for the UK becoming more tightly integrated with the EU and in particular joining the Eurozone given the current economic disparity among member states.

There were a few things (GDI handles and suchlike) that had very small limits. Once you exhausted them, the system was basically unusable. There was a little program you could run that would show the number allocated vs allowed. By the time you'd launched one program, they were normally 60-90% gone.

These two are related. OS/2 needed 16MB of RAM to be useable back when I had a 386 that couldn't take more than 5MB (1MB soldered onto the board, 4x1MB matched SIMMs). Windows NT had the same problem - NT4 needed 32MB as an absolute minimum when Windows 95 could happily run in 16 and unhappily run in 8 (and allegedly run in 4MB, but I tried that once and it really wasn't a good idea). The advantage that Windows NT had was that it used pretty much the same APIs as Windows 95 (except DirectX, until later), so the kinds of users who were willing to pay the extra costs could still run the same programs as the ones that weren't.

I never ran 3.0 on a 386 to try that. On Windows 3.1 it wouldn't work, because the OS required either (286) protected mode or (386) enhanced mode. Running 3.0 on a 386, the DOS prompt would use VM86 mode (yes, x86 has had virtualisation support for a long time, but only for 16-bit programs). Windows 3.0 could run in real mode, so would work inside VM86 mode. In real mode, it didn't have access to VM86 mode (no nested virtualisation), so probably couldn't start again.

I'm not sure if it ever became a real product, but the Novell guys did have Netware running as a paravirtualised Xen guest. Apparently it was quite an interesting challenge, as Netware was one of the few operating systems to use rings 1 and 2 on i386.

And Windows 3.1 lost real mode support. You could run Windows 3.0 on an 8086 with an EGA screen and 640KB of RAM (I did - the machine originally shipped with GEM). I think 3.1 still have 286 protected mode support, but didn't work very well unless you ran it in 386 enhanced mode. It was a bit sad that the version of Windows that required an MMU didn't use it to implement memory protection...

Precisely. And since, in terms of economic strength, everybody in the expanded EU most certainly isn't equal (please note that this is not intended as any sort of insult, merely a statement of fact) the free movement principle does not work well.

In particular, what has really happened in certain cases, for example with Poland and England, is that most of the movement has been one way. This puts strain on English services, but it's important to recognise that it also means many of the people who would be best placed to help Poland develop its own economy are among the most likely to find working in richer European countries more attractive and/or lucrative, creating a "brain drain" effect back home. In the long term, both nations could end up worse off because of the imbalance.

In principle, freedom of movement is a good idea, for both business and pleasure purposes. But on the business side, it does require reasonably balanced parties so the traffic at least roughly cancels out. This was the case in the early days when there were far fewer nations in the shared European machine, but with the expansion to nearly 30 actual or aspiring member states with much more diverse economic conditions, the same logic no longer holds.