Couldn't they at least have come up with a decent car metaphor, if they're going to mistake the map for the terrain anyway?

My business is just me (technically) plus a few contractors. At what point are we and our interests no longer individuals?

You could be on your own, and you and your business would already be separate. The business is a separate legal entity, a "legal person" if you will. You are an agent of the business. If you don't understand that dichotomy, then you are doomed to be frustrated and/or bewildered rather often in the course of your work. Either that or you're a sociopath who actually enjoys telling people what to do :)

Does it not make a difference that in low-level, prophylactic use, the bacteria cultures are not killed outright, whereas in regular use, bacteria cultures are eradicated? So even if more antibiotics are used today in the EU, they actually kill the given strain, rather inadvertently strengthen it?

... they won't only have to continue to teach users what the "any key" is, now they can teach generations of users how to put batteries in, all over again.

Remember, kids: it *always* a good thing if there's more than one way to do something; indeed, the more ways there is to do something, the better (*).

I always appreciate devices that treat me like an idiot, and attempt to do my thinking for me. I'm looking forward to my first device that is missing the [+] and [-] signs in the battery bay, because hey, it says there right on the box that I threw away half a year ago that the batteries can go in any which way. Duh.

(*) alert: sarcasm

Okay, this is probably going to come across a a little weird. I contend that the main thing that MS got wrong with the Kin is the name. You cannot call a device "Kin" without some kind of blowback. "Kin" is a basic anglo-saxon word that essentially has no etymology - it just is. The dreaded four-letter words fall into this category, as do many other very basic words such as water, earth, grass, fire, and so on. Except that "kin" does, as MS correctly identified, have a social connotation. "Kin" is people you're related to by blood or common interest - and by "common interest" I mean savages fighting for the same cause, and not people who like the same kind of literature as you do.

Now - call a device "Kin", and you are basically claiming the you can use it to identify who in "kin" to you. And that is plain too powerful. When I first came across this device the main part of my reaction was to be slightly upset at MS' attempt to co-opt this rather neat word. And that's why I say weird above: basically I'm saying they evoked a concept too powerful for this or any gadget.

So: They should have called it the "Microsoft Social Management Device" or something similarly inane. Then it would have been accepted more as "good first fling, looking forward where they're going to take this", rather than "this is what they want to sell us as the epitome of social interaction? You have *got* to be kidding me". Unfinished devices are fine; the first iPhone didn't have copy-paste, and that was OK.

Finally: I would have liked to like the device. A Blackberry keyboard on a social device? Cool. Perfect present for your 11-year-old niece. Welcome to the social; finally. Backed by a company that will maintain it for years to co... oop, where'd it go?

I think a -1 (fail) would be better than just a plain -1 (wrong). It's like, I dunno, claiming Poland has no coast or something similarly insane. But thank you for the heads-up.

Ouch. I need to lay off ... something, and improve my reading skills. Ta for the heads-up.

And by "we" you mean "us who don't mind being off by a factor of 100 or so"?

There are two points I take exception to:
(1) The title of this post, which should read "I Took a Big Vendor To Small Claims and Won". The product isn't named. The OS isn't named. The instructions from tech support aren't given. All it really says is "Oh yay it isn't easy and you have to be precise." You have to bring ample evidence to court and make yourself aware of how it will be interpreted? Oh my.
(2) The penultimate sentence: "Needless to say, I have not bought any other Adobe products. Even opening a PDF makes me nervous!" Now I'm not exactly the grand proselytizer of Adobe products - but I am aware that a large number of people are using their products professionally day in day out. This blanket statement implying that "Adobe == shit" just casts, to me, a rather dark shadow on the not-being-a-lame-brain bit further up.

Not going into all the rest, but IBM's "foray"? Just off the top of my head, IBM more or less invented the "Personal Computer" as such, as the smaller version of mainframes and minicomputers (hence the term "microcomputer". Note: Altair, Apple IIe, etc. were "hobbyist/home computers" in their day). Microsoft originally supplied exclusively to IBM, and Intel was a spin-off, too. And this is consistent with IBM's strategy throughout the last decades: as soon as something looks as if it's heading in the direction of becoming a commodity, they drop it. Hard disks, for example. And they always do it early. IBM drops PCs - enter Dell; IBM drops hard disks - enter SSDs; always quite a few years down the line. IBM appears not the be interested in playing the margin game with n different competitors.
OK, now back to the rest: bullshit. Disregarding core competencies is a necessary part of progress. The Newton was closer to Apple's core competence that the iPod, when they came out, and we know which failed and which succeeded. Or the iPhone - damn, was that a saturated market when they started out, never having built a phone before.

Bailout priorities ?!

The bailout priorities aren't going to change very much at all. This is a thing where it's not the president figuring things out, but a bunch of backroom eggheads. The only thing that's going to change about the bailout priorities in respect to the president is the degree to which the incumbent has the ability to follow WFT is going on ( ... maybe. But what do I know?). This isn't going to be apparent at all.

Nah, Military strategy is where it's at, of the poll selections.

And outlandar perception of the US as a whole (you know - "good" - "bad" - pick one) is where it's at outside the poll selection. /whatever //first time in a long time I looked at the /. poll results and figured "... nah."

... now we'll have robots lording over us from random vertical surfaces?
I, for one, am not sure I welcome the idea.