...unless they skip "11"....

I think "galactically stupid politicians" is my new favorite term.

Back in the seventies, working for a military contractor, we built microwave communications and countermeasures equipment using GaAs devices. Later, working for the cell phone industry in the early nineties, I seem to remember that at least some manufacturers were switching to GaAs-based radios in cell phones. It's my impression that even today they're used often for high frequency devices. Seems like the only news here is the improved method of manufacture, as the technology has been around for decades.

I thought I read the other day that this was one of the issues M$ backtracked on. I believe you can now choose not to have updates installed automatically.

This was a show stopped for me also (a single bad update could take out a large section of the computing public? Who thought this was a good idea?) but was not the only reason for not adopting. The main reason is that I'm tired of my machine, the one I use to perform work for which I get paid, being a test bed for whatever Microsoft thinks is this year's good idea. So no. I may look at 10 in a year or so, after the inevitable early thrashing has died down.

...but no thanks. 7 works fine. I'll let others be QA for Microsoft.

Oh goodie, another standard keyboard layout. Because getting rid of the "esc" key and putting an additional key in the bottom row worked so well for DEC.

But getting used to yet another keyboard layout... I'll leave that to the keyboard experimenters. I have actual work to do.

Great. Now put Latitude back in Maps where it belongs!

What I want is all video, sound, script playing in all tabs to be always suspended, except when I explicitly permit them to operate. Just confining them to a tab is not sufficient, because you can be watching a video in a tab and have the sound cluttered up by one to three commercials auto-running on the same page. (And I'm not talking about pr0n sites -- certain news sites have been especially annoying lately.)

People still browse the internet with the sound on? That's so... nineties.

He could also tax them to the point where they all leave. Problem solved.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the mayor who has an industrial air conditioner blowing into his limo so it's nice and chilly when he gets in?

Wait... isn't contacting the cops what they're *supposed* to do?

The machines that receive pop cans and bottles and (if you're *very* lucky) print a receipt that you can use to claim the deposit, found extensively at supermarkets in Oregon, *still* boot up with a Windows 98 (not SE) splash screen. They're so unreliable that people consider the deposit as an additional tax and just throw the cans away instead of trying to get their deposit back.

...and many companies, usually in the billing department. There's a couple reasons for this: (a) the code may have been written as long ago as the 1960's, and there may not be anyone *alive* who still knows how it works. (b) A certain three letter acronym famous for having what is probably the most aggressive customer retention teams in the business world.

I'd rather just not bring the phone in the first place.

Back when I did this sort of thing, cell phones were only owned by doctors and hedge fund managers.