Parent is a test of the humor AI in Windows 9.

Right. Just the other day the Motley Fool published effective tax rates. That takes into account not just federal taxes but aveerage state/provincial tales and other tax-related burdens that actually get paid in real life by actual companies doing actual business in all the countries they list. The effective rate for businesses in the US is 40%. The second highest, behind only the UAE.

Captain cloud services is now CEO of MS and they were already headed down the wrong path. So get ready for a cell phone and Xbox-live level of ongoing nickel and diming. Buy it and forget it? HELL NO! That died with Windows 7. And then 6 months later, Linux will explode and MS will make half the stuff they tried to charge for free (see Windows 8.1 patch, lol).

No it was Apple, but Adobe is probably even worse.

I hadn't heard about the CoD incident, but ... [goes off, looks it up] holy shit, that's douchery of a high order. Tho I'm not sure the cops had much less douchery... I mean, 60 officers, WTF? I guess he can count himself fortunate they didn't overhear game gunfire and react by opening fire themselves.

If I had to wipe and reinstall Windows with any regularity, yeah, I'd be looking for a different OS. I don't spend all that time and effort getting it all just how I want it, only to have to replace it and start over. Reinstalling is against my religion. I use the damn machine, I don't just play with it. My OS setup is not disposable.

WinME was actually very good about drivers -- the install routine was smart enough to look for one that works even if it wasn't a WinME driver. I'd not seen that before and was suitably impressed. And while WinME sucked donkey balls out of the box, it could be made 100% stable -- turn off System Restore, apply 98Lite in default mode, and it goes from unable to even crash properly, to never crashes again. (Didn't help the sucky resource management, tho.)

But when we stoop to comparing FOSS to WinME... yeah, that shows just how ...unrealistic... their expectations and performance really are. The driver structure is insane. You do NOT build ephemeral software (ie. liable to be updated, possibly often) into the kernel, and not expect to have the whole house of cards fall down too often for comfort.

Holy crap. First I've heard of Cortana. Googled it.. Is that for real??? It looks like Seven of Nine got fucked by Bob and this is the offspring. I can already see the protests from middle America. "Electronic boobies from Satan are sending us to Hell". How could anybody think that's a good idea?

Not a bad government - they did exactly what they were paid to do :(
One guess who owns AU foxtel, US fox news and is a big political donor.

Aside from price, which makes accepting multiple monitors rather compelling(you can get physically big ones for relatively small amounts of money, because of TVs; but if you want resolution the cost goes up fast and things really start to misbehave if you go high enough that DP MST or the like is required to drive the thing), it mostly comes down to how good your windowing system is at tiling and how well applications that expect 'full screen' can handle playing with others.

A good window manager makes carving up a single large monitor into chunks suitably sized for your various programs easy and painless. If you are enduring a less obliging one, it can be a fairly ugly business, actually less pleasant than getting some help from multiple physical displays, which are more widely respected even by poorly behaved programs.

That said, the 'two side by side, giant bezel in the middle' configuration is not my favorite. A larger primary screen, with ancillary screens on one or both sides gives you plenty of room for assorted lesser windows; but also avoids annoying bezels in the center of your field of view.

It's not like that at all, we have very lax media controls.
I know you gun nuts think it's gone all Thunderdome over here since we restricted automatic weapons, but could you please refrain from making up utter bullshit about us on every fucking topic under the sun?

OK then - greed combined with political and market power. It's about protecting the profits of Rupert Murdoch's Foxtel which is the only game in town - everything else is being kept out.

It would provide unwanted competition to Rupert Murdoch.
Your second point is not correct or relevant since people are already using Netflix in Australia despite deliberate steps being made to stop them.

Travel+Holiday expenses+mac at US price (LessThan) same mac at AU price

That part seems logical. But I am amazed that "licensing and distribution" would be so expensive

It isn't, but that's the excuse. A few years back it was shown in a Mac laptop review that it would be cheaper to fly from Sydney to Hawaii for a five day holiday and buy the laptop over there than to buy it in Sydney. That's an extreme, but there are many items sold at inflated prices with flimsy excuses, especially when you still have to pay a markup for a download edition of some software just because of the region you are in.

With few suppliers the price goes up. You can see that with a lot of things in Australia, paticularly software with Microsoft, Apple, Adobe etc charging a lot extra because they can.

They don't appear to be a telco but they do seem likely to be in bed with them.

There's some Murdoch ownership there, via Sky, owned mainly by Mordoch like Foxtel is. Whether the link is enough to set policy is a bit of a guess but Rupert has a habit of taking a very active interest in anything he owns a part of and tends to have influence far beyond his level of ownership in some things.