There are many organisations far more worthy of the money, I can understand giving family members the finger. But why not do so in a constructive manner, their are good charities and causes out their, no need to flush it down the shitter by giving it to church. Hell I would understand leaving it to a pet dog or cat better than the church,.

It is when you replace them with an even more greedy bloodsucking group of people (i.e. a church).

Additional: I do agree though that removing media center was a dick move. One that seems idiotic given the small devices and the increasingly common appearance of computers in the living room.

yep, better rip that t shirt off and replace it with your tin foil hat. If they wanted to remotely monitor you they have had the ability to do that for the last 2 decades, nothing really new here except a usable interface for users. The forced updates is only for home edition, which in my opinion is a long overdue addition, anyone serious about their IT setup is either not using windows or at least not using home edition.

you can drive the distance in half a day from Germany to Italy, why would somewhere that you can easily hop in your car in the morning and be there in the afternoon be a dream destination, especially for a so called world traveller

So first you whine that the government isn't doing anything, now you whine because it is pointed out they are doing something and doing it in probably the most tax efficient manner.

The government DOES provide it. They do so through legislation that requires hire car businesses to have a certain percentage of vehicles on the roads at all times that are accessible, the cost is then passed on through higher average fees across all vehicles. In essence this is one of the taxi industries complaints (and a justified one at that), Uber by ignoring the regulations avoids costs that legitimate businesses pay and hence can undercut the market.

I regularly work with large corp's and governments building large HPC, mainframe replacements, large clusters and you appear to be falling into the same trap a lot of them do. As others have said, it isn't the hardware, anyone that tells you what is best based on your summary doesn't have a clue as it is all about the SOFTWARE. I recently watched an organisation spend the best part of a million dollars on high core count machines only to then find the app doesn't perform well in parallel and in fact scales much better on high clocked low core count machines that would have cost them less than a quarter of the price. Memory, Core count, machine architecture, core clock speed are all essential items that can only truly be determined by good application profiling, absent that you are just pissing money in the wind. PS: Don't build these sort of machines yourselves, the amount of integration testing and trouble you can run up against with these type of configs costs you more than you can save by not going with a recognised vendor.

actually your definition of kill date is different to mine. A Kill date is a date at which time if you are running upto date browsers and software it will stop working by default. It doesn't mean you can't turn it back on for yourself (albeit unsupported) or that you can't use legacy versions. It simply means only those that absolutely need it enabled for legacy reasons will have it. by being off by default instead of a slow tail off of use over many MANY years it will be a steep drop.

That is a pretty sad indictment on the state of vsphere.

Flash is a diseased animal in pain, it needs to be put out of its misery. It is going to die on its own, Adobe may as well save a little face and do Flash and the world a kindness by euthanizing it.

Activation isn't important at this stage. The RTM version will be out long before the Activation protection kicks in.

because the audience that buys Linux machines is very VERY different to the ones that buy a commodity windows laptop. The crapware vendors rely on making their money back from users too technically lacking to have the skills or knowledge to nuke the installed image from space. While under windows that audience is a large percentage, under Linux it is a fraction of a percent of a much smaller target audience, i.e. it aint worth their time and money.

Microsoft wants to see BSD succeed, that is hardly a hidden agenda. They have leveraged BSD assets greatly over the years (as well as contributed back to them).

no, generally the crapware they ship with it pays for it, actually it usually more than pays for it to the point where coming without windows actually is more expensive for most PC Makers.