Quite simply getting access to some of the finest German shizer films on the web!

What? you'd claiming that the internet is used for more than just fulfilling the fetish desires of lonely men in their basement?! heresy! heresy I say!

Mate, there is a reason why the tranmission towers are turned off when being serviced; I don't know what shit box operation you're running in the US but in most other countries they don't subject employee's to radio waves that can kill birds.

Lets remember that as part of becoming integrated into the economy - Vietnam will be told taht they have to crack down on piracy.

Do they crack down on piracy and push up the cost of doing business in Vietnam by having all departments use Windows + Office, and thus all those who interact with the government having to have said software - or is it smarted to start off using opensource software now given that they are pretty much starting from a clean slate? They've made a good move - and I'll put money on it people will be looking in and asking their own government why Microsoft is given multi-billion dollar contracts when Vietnam's public service is just as productive (if not more) using Linux/OpenOffice.org as they would using Windows.

Believe it mate. New Zealand is in the current sorry state thanks to the two major parties doing very little to improve on the status quo.

yeap, we're the great fudgers - we avoid confrontation, heck, recent study showed that if New Zealand was offered a benevolent dictator and ran things better than now - most would ok it.

Sure, there will be a few loud people who will kick up a stink, but the rest of NZ will comtinue moving. The anti-smacking bill isn't going to get removed, nor any of the other reforms introduced by Labour. Both parties talk about change but the reality is that they keep the status quo once they get it - then add more of their own laws to the sporgusboard.

Its unfortunate that the green's are the only part who have their IT sorted out - and yet their economic and social policy royally sucks. How come there are so many idiots on the right - specifically, complete ludites when it comes to IT?

How about a much simpler reason - it plain well sucks giant donkey balls.

We're talking about a device which only works with Windows, only available in a small mumber of countries (I don't give a shit about the music service - you can put music on it without a fucking music service so the need to 'roll out the service' is a bullshit excuse) and the software sucks balls.

Its a top to bottom epic failure - and its in the mold of Microsoft NEVER to learn from these failures or more correctly, learn from its rivals who are making gains. Then again, Microsoft is kinda like a mini-America, the world uses metric, the US uses imperial. The world uses 240V, and the uses 110V etc. etc.