I never said it was free, but we all pay taxes while only some of us don't have to fork out ridiculous additional sums for medical cover.

For example, I will never be hit with a bill for medical treatments my insurance won't cover. There isn't a moment I have to worry about getting charged for my stay in hospital. I don't have to worry about whether my insurance will cover the drugs my doctor has prescribed me, the most I will pay is £8.05, even if the drug costs £10,000 a course.

What unemployment thing? We are a few tenths of a percentage point behind the US on unemployment, nothing major.

Moving to the UK's system means no insurance company, and your employer et al do not have access to your medical records. In-fact, most doctors do not have access to your medical records - they are only now bringing in a system where your medical records are shared on an on-demand basis with other hospitals and surgeries. Walk into an A&E department and they won't have your medical records.

I am so glad I live in a country where the most I will ever pay for non-elective medical care is the price of the prescription (currently £8.05). Heart attack with a week in intensive care? Won't cost me a penny. Broken my leg, need a cast and physiotherapy? Won't cost me a penny.

Something that has to be interacted with, through a view controlled by Javascript will not be trivial for a bot to solve. I know the typical response to this is "well I don't enable Javascript!!!" but these voices are now a tiny minority of users, who doubtless have all sorts of problems using the web now. Disabling JS in a browser is like disabling Excel's ability to automatically perform calculations on cells.

For deaf users, the choice could be from a number of sounds - maybe with filters added to prevent them being piped through an audio search engine.

I think this idea will make it harder and less profitable to run spam bots, which is always a good thing.

The same can essentially be said for cat shit coffee...

...so who is going to pay for this extra feature vs. what we've got today? Are people even going to care if they hear in three dimensions versus on a single plane? Most people aren't because most people don't care about surround sound in the home, and most people can't tell the difference between even 5.1 and 7.1.

Again, you highlight the key argument here: how is the incremental cost justifying the incremental benefit? 3D did the same thing and I doubt the theater owners ever recovered their investment.

P.S. Thanks for your comments. They're very enlightening.

...and if Aureal had this 15 years ago, where's the money and why bother? Or is it like 3D that keeps coming back every few years as a fad only to go away again?

You're 100% right - all this has happened before, and all this will happen again.

You work for Dolby and want an Atmos mix of Dark Side of the Moon originally produced and mixed in an inherently planar format? What is there to actually gain? If it's just to take the original stems and mix them, the sound mixer is going to do that anyway before it's released. In fact, for most people, they will never use this feature and it will be a waste of bandwidth at a time when streaming media is quickly becoming a margin business and the vast majority of media is consumed in really poor environments with really poor reproduction equipment. As a mezzanine or mastering format, sure. For publishing? Not so much.

The ".1" is supposed to be the low frequency effects channel. Are you saying that a bandwidth-limited LFE has any other position in the EIA/CEA-861 speaker configurations? Do you even know WHY it is called a ".1"? (Hint: the channel is LPF'd)

More importantly, who cares when you need extra hardware? Most people don't buy A/V receivers and extra speakers, and what few are out there are improperly configured just as the article says. I can't see how one issue should be conflated with the other.

Finally: I've heard Atmos in the theaters. Unless the content is specifically produced to take advantage of height speakers, I stop caring about it very quickly since my other senses are also being inundated. This means most of the movie. Who knows how much money a theater operator has to spend to put this stuff in and if they'll get a single dollar more for it from the audience. Same thing happened with 3D and boy did these guys take a bath.

That isn't cinema Atmos, but consumer Atmos. There's a difference, especially in the way it's carried. If you doubt me, analyze the HDMI connection to the A/V receiver versus what is in a DCI-compliant box. Basically, there's a 5.1 or 7.1 channel bed and extra objects for the effects in 3D, but far fewer objects and the channelized mix is all you get. In a true object-based reproduction environment, the objects are all that should be used and that's not what's there.

Windows 7 was better received by the market because it was BETTER than Vista. Windows 8 was crap and got he reception it deserved. Merely releasing 9 without removing the crapstatic TIFKAM interface will result in poor reputation.

The reasons Internet Explorer got a bad reputation:

1. It was tied to the operating system, unnecessarily. The browser has exactly zilch to do with the operating system. ActiveX controls, tying versions of the browser with versions of the OS, varying behaviour of same browser version on different OS versions etc. If IE is renamed, it should be delinked from the OS like other browsers.

2. Intentional non-compatibility with standards, because of the arrogant assumption that with marketshare they can bully the World.

3. No sandboxing, no protection from ads, popups, malware downloads, sucking upto to the MAFIAA in proprietary standards and DRM.

Fix these issues in the browser FIRST, then call it Internet Shit-hole, but people will still buy it.

When you are in another country, you abide by that countries rules. When you play in a football league, you abide by that leagues rules. Suarez abided by neither, and thus deserved his punishment.

And again I suggest you actually investigate what he said, because "negrito" is far from the sole term he used, and it most certainly was not used in the same manner as his grandmother apparently uses it.

It might not even apply in the US - "fair use" is a defence, not an exception, and showing only the goals or other significant action in a football match could violate the "substantial" clause depending on how well the arguments are made to the judge.

A violation of clause 4 is also a potential due to the resale value of goal footage for round up sports programs etc.

You still aren't allowed to distribute a derivative work without the original copyright owners permission outside of fair use or expiration of copyright.

Also note my other posts on performance rights in the UK.