I also apologise. My intention was not to cause offence but instead understand better.

I also do not believe a free market exists, but as an ideal I prefer a free market to a regulated market.

As for a monopoly, I am not sure we do not have them even in markets that the governments highly regulate, such as the water industries in the UK where I live where we pretend we have a market yet only have a single regulated supplier for the utility, and in other industries like gas we pretend there is competition yet that is just for billing as the gas is still provided by a single supplier, ran through pipes where we license the use, etc.

Would I prefer you take $25 for $100 worth of value? Sure... But someone else needs to fund that $75 shortfall and the worst case scenario is that everyone needs the $100 but only $25 was collected. In some cases where it is obvious that the person cannot pay and has no ability to pay would I turn them away for example because they are incapable mentally or physically? I hope not. Though I would prefer the option of doing so rather than being forced to under duress.

I am not sure what your basis for judging brightness is, nor do I accept that I am ignorant as I would say I have thought through the implications of book.

I would be interested to hear what your thoughts are though since they are obviously different to mine.

Rather than being a fairy tale, it is more of a book that attempts to explain what could happen if we continue to attempt to redistribute wealth.

One basic principle of the book is that if you keep taking from those that produce wealth they choose to give up creating the wealth and then there is nobody to take the wealth from and bad things happen since the whole monetary system collapses.

You can read part of it here: http://www.working-minds.com/galtmini.htm

They do not control over 90% of the wealth. They earn over 90% of the wealth. If you do not like it, go earn some wealth.

I would also suggest you read Atlas Shrugged...

My xbox 360 has a 250GB external USB drive attached to it that is used to store copies of home movies.

Although the article isn't as clear as it could be, this is really about adding support for Xbox downloadable content to use USB storage.

Oh, and for a laugh - currently the Xbox can't read NTFS format drives. FAT isn't suitable. So... use a mac, format as HFS+, and the xbox will happily use them.

> "There is nothing we can't do with our fibre optic cable network,

Apart from get it anywhere near approximately 50% of the population, and that is mostly in the very dense urban areas. Sure, wonderful if you live in an area that NTL cabled back in the 90s.

> It is a less powerful machine that requires a dock for a keyboard, which isn't very portable.

Except it doesn't require the dock. I'll be using my bluetooth keyboard with it, if, for some reason, the on screen keyboard doesn't cut it. Some of us cope just fine with the iphones keyboard.

As for portability - I've lugged a 17" laptop with desktop CPU and GPU (6kg) around... and I believe this device will be a little more portable... but that's maybe just me.

To power. I've used plenty of low power Linux style machines. My home NAS / media server is an eeepc 701 using luks encrypted external drives. It's also painfully slow to do any "hands-on" work. I've also got an iphone. I larger, faster iphone minus the calling and plus applications written for that form factor, is exactly what I want.

> Android... which IMO is better than the iPhone OS.

I've not looked aggressively at Android but I believe that platform suffers from the same problems that (the now expired) windows mobile suffers from. So many random form factors, hardware capabilities, and skinned interfaces.

> iPad isn't even going to be released for another month at least, and given the way new device releases go you probably won't get your hands on one for another two or three months after that, minimum.

I'm special. Seriously though I'm not sure where you get your time frames from... the only way any company gets money is to deliver products when they're wanted...

> The resistive touch screen is pressure sensitive.

and

> Does the Touch Book support multitouch?
> No. And we don't think that it's an issue. Multitouch is interesting when you want to zoom in / zoom out. At 1024×600, the Touch Book screen is big enough so that you don't need to zoom all the time as you have to do it on the iPhone.

Except when you want to play games that need multitouch, or use an onscreen keyboard with more than one finger (shift key...)

and

> OpenOffice will be available in a coming release

OpenOffice on a machine with a slow CPU and a tiny amount of memory.

This is the killer though:

  > expect your order to be shipped within two months.

In two months we'll be using something else...

> These days "Much darker than its predecessor" has become Hollywood doublespeak. It means nothing.

Maybe they're much darker because they're 3d?

> Fighting in that game was more stressful in the way your body isn't catered to dealing with: Prolonged periods of suspense and fear, with no way to vent it.

You must have been playing a different game to me. (2004-2009)

Prolonged periods of gate hugging, station camping, watching a bunch of dreads reinforce a POS while waiting 20-30 minutes for the FC to decide that it's ok to have them jump in.
Sure, we had fun. We also had suspense, especially when your cloak fails to activate at a gate for some unknown reason and you still manage to escape, or when you decide to try to solo in a low sec system, but as soon as you moved away from carebearing into "serious" 0.0 warfare it became a "we all warp in and watch the repeated warp in, snap back, warp in effect while shields fall and nobody else is on grid... oh look... I'm in a station... didn't even see anyone".

And no, you can't have my stuff.

Unfortunately the mp4 playback on the XBOX doesn't have 5.1 stereo. If you want 5.1 then you have to use AVI.

http://support.xbox.com/support/en/us/xbox360/gamesandmedia/movies/videofaq/viewvideoplaybackfaq.aspx

It's hard to pirate an MMO since you're paying for access to the server and the server is under their control...

Were you saying that having to right click is difficult, or that any interface that relies on right clicking to bring up a different interface is less than ideal?

I'd agree with the second but have no trouble right clicking with my trackpad/magic mouse.

Just cut and paste text from articles into your private correspondence. That way you haven't typed it on your keyboard.

WoRKEs GREAt wHeN you ARe wriTING randS0M NOtES toO.