Care to elaborate on that? I'd be thrilled if MS offered ISO downloads. Requiring a subscription like Technet doesn't count. I shouldn't have to pay money to download software that I already have a license for. Doubly so when the system came with software but no recovery disks.

The problem is made worse when said systems are completely unusable without a wipe and reinstall with your imaginary media in order to eliminate all the crapware.

If MS has any faith in their 'activation' systems they should make ISOs available. If they don't trust their copy protection methods enough to do so, they shouldn't have bothered...

Wow this turned into a rant, but I legitimately had to wonder if you knew something I didn't - in terms of obtaining ISOs.

If General Motors and Ford participated in the same fashion as the schmuck lawyers they would have sold the person the car with a tougher bumper after he explained his intent to run me down.

Nothing irks me more than technology being crippled for no good reason. Yay for lawyers and IP nonsense!

Yes, I rather enjoy Apple's Bluetooth peripherals, when paired with their computers. Sleek glossy white plastic and aluminum look funny next to a boring, matte and clunky looking HP ProBook (assuming it even had Bluetooth, mine doesn't). :)

My point is, I'd like to see Bluetooth (or a successor) more widely utilized for wireless peripherals outside of Apple's realm. If such an inexpensive add-on wasn't constantly treated as an unnecessary option we'd be a step closer.

Chicken and egg, no BT peripherals without widespread BT support. Why bother bundling BT in your system when they are so few peripherals?

It actually drives me crazy that PCs tend to not include Bluetooth. This means Bluetooth isn't ubiquitous, which in turn means almost nobody makes Bluetooth peripherals.

Thanks to that stupidity the market is flooded with lame keyboard/mouse devices that require needlessly wasting a USB port for a proprietary receiver. More often that not these receivers are intolerant to WiFi interference. Bluetooth and WiFi are designed to co-exist without stomping over each other RF wise.

In contrast, I'll never understand why Windows users insist on covering their entire screen with one single window. What a waste of real estate!

Hunting through my maze of open non-fullscreen windows is made easy via expose, without it I'd almost understand where you're coming from.

Flame war? Flame wars are built around personal preferences. You're stating facts. :D

The ability to print to any Mac via AirPrint was supposed to show up in 10.6.5 but for unknown reasons this feature was pulled. Though there are 3rd party apps like Printopia and Fingerprint that will enable add the missing functionality. You can also download the missing files from earlier 10.6.5 seeds to re-enable AirPrinting.

Google Voice sounds really cool... Sure wish they'd bring it to Canada... In time I guess...

If the cracking of DRM tech continues at this pace, we'll soon find ourselves living in a strange world where consumers are granted the privilege of PLAYING the content they PAID hard earned cash for! Ridiculous! This must stop while there's still a shred of decency and fairness left in the world! How will the copyright infringing pirates differentiate their loot if the legit stuff become as flexible, reliable and convenient?! What a mess!

I don't foresee ISPs trying to pull off such stupidity in this day and age. Maybe I underestimate their incompetence. It'd be pretty difficult to market such an inferior service policy when home users have become accustomed to having multiple computers, their PS3's, HTPCs, smart phones, etc, etc, etc all sharing their Internet connection over the last decade or so.

I'd switch ISPs instantly if it meant the difference of having a single IPv6 address or a proper /64 prefix for my home LAN. If they all collude and run their network like a bunch of brain damaged idiots, well hey, I can NAT the single IPv6 address and things are no worse than they are now. Though they would have killed the most significant advantage of the new protocol.

Taking the only approach that makes sense (assigning each customer their own global prefix) would give them some advantages in tech support they don't currently have. The ISP I work for often has to suspend accounts with one or more compromised computers that end up as SPAM bots. Currently, in the IPv4 world of NAT, we can't tell them any specifics - only that one or all of their computers have been compromised. With every address globally routable, at least your ISP could shove you in the right direction and say something along the lines of '2610:78:ad:1::3' is infected.

I don't think my default-deny rule was necessarily off-topic. It is there to support my point, that is: if you aren't granted access to my computers, why the hell should I care if you can confirm their existence? In my opinion, hiding my topology isn't worth dealing with the kludge that is NAT. Many protocols embed IP addresses within the protocol and break when they pass through NAT. These tend to have workarounds, but who wants to bother with that?

All that being said if, in your opinion, hiding your topology is worth the drawbacks of NAT all the power to you. There is nothing preventing the use of a similar technique in IPv6. I will choose against NAT, others may strongly disagree with me.

The thing is, in IPv4 I have no choice but to hide everything behind NAT. IPv4 addresses aren't plentiful enough to have a block routed to everyone who wants one. In IPv6, addresses are plentiful and you're free to use whatever strategy you want. This is a good thing!

What merit does topology hiding have in your opinion? Does the default deny rule in the firewall vanish once I know how many hosts you have? The whole topology argument smells like 'security through obscurity.'

NAT breaks end-to-end connectivity. Its main purpose in IPv4 is to deal with the limited address space. In the massive address space of IPv6, NAT is no longer necessary.

You can still NAT everything behind non-routable ULA addresses if you wish, but I see no reason to do so. If one takes this approach and later decides they need a specific port opened to more than one machine, ie) port 80 for a couple new web servers, they won't be able to do this without re-numbering or setting up a a couple new static NAT rules. Note: I specifically say a couple (or more than one) as this is specifically where dynamic NAT based port forwarding breaks down.

A much better approach is to keep everything on globally routable IPs and adding a quick (hopefully default) firewall rule to deny all incoming traffic. This way you still protect your network from undesired incoming connections but still have an easy option later to open ports as needed without any of the limitations. This is exactly how I would set my IPv4 networks up today, if real IPs were actually available.

There MAY be niche scenarios where non-routable IPs are desirable in the IPv6 world, I honestly can't think of any. Can you?