I believe that this needs to be supported by the people in general, rather than Snowden single-handedly having to provide that incentive. I think Snowden needs to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize or something similar.

exactly. Another reasons is because parents and teachers have made twitter and facebook too mainstream for teenage taste.

Apart from the exit strategy lottery thing, there is the issue of ongoing costs.
Since the app is free, the users don't pay per use or as subscription and there's no sponsor... who's paying for Snapchat to exist? At some point the investors will want their money back. As it is today, I don't even see how they cover running costs.

I agree, at least in part. I don't know about Vista being generally unstable, but I remember it felt slow. I remember that when XP was released, it was common for PCs to have 256MB or less of RAM. When people stopped moaning about how bloated XP was, it was because they already had replaced their PCs of 2000/01 with something that had 1 or 2GB or RAM, as well as CPUs and graphics cards that were much better. SATA interfaces for their HDD also pushed the performance up considerably. With XP "surviving" 1 or 2 hardware upgrades, it's only natural that it felt super-fast.
With whatever optimisation and bug fixing they did at MS, W7 was indeed faster than Vista. However, the perceived performance gains were certainly affected by having more RAM, which had become significantly cheaper. I'd be surprised to hear about people buying computers in 2009 that had W7 running on 1GB (or less).

Aero was eye candy and a very much needed update at a time when Windows UI was looking tremendously dated compared to OS X and a variety of Linux distros. If they had not made Aero, they would have had to make something else to replace the UI of the 90's.

This is such bullshit! In the alternative universe where Windows 7 was ready on the day Vista came out, software drivers for W7 would have been as unavailable as they were for Vista. All sorts of software that required users to have full admin permissions would have been broken by W7 UAC as it was by Vista's UAC. All PCs sold with 512MB or 1GB RAM would have still be slow compared to XP.

Only 1 or 2 years down the line when OEMs had caught up and released proper drivers, when PCs were being sold with 2GB+ RAM and when people learned to separate normal from admin users did Windows Vista/7/8 become less of a nuisance. It had very little to do with Windows 7 being so awesome.

OK, so I could buy a Roku device and hope that the functionality they added remains active;
or I can buy an Android-based media box and just get media apps from the different TV channels/netflix/whatever.

I still may get shafted but the general rule is that if it runs on Android, it should run on my box, right? For everything else on the LAN, XBMC runs on Android.

Other than avoiding dodgy power supplies from nameless manufacturers, I don't see why I should get a Roku instead of a nameless Android media box.

My mouses (sic) tend to last a couple of years. Main reasons are that I buy them on the cheap rather than the proper choice of Logitech/MS product. I'd go for more expensive stuff but then I see the wife clicking with increasing violence and with her indicator finger reaching considerable height before slamming on the buttons when things don't quite work as she expects. Can't wait to get a laptop with a touchscreen to see her punch that Start screen.

My first mouse cost me EUR35, had a huge rubber ball and worked better to move the cursor to the right and down than in other directions.

I had a A4Tech mouse that was wireless but had a very weak sensor at the end of a long USB cable. That setup was clunky as hell under the desk. It worked fine with line of sight, not so great otherwise.

I once had a mouse branded Trust which outlasted the keyboard that was part of the set. I bought another set hoping I could mix and match. mix and fail was more like it.

I used a Microsoft optical mouse with a Mac and I think this was the one that lasted the longer, despite being used by everyone back at home, including 4 year old kids.

I currently have a Logitech mouse and keyboard combo and the mouse scroll wheel is becoming too old to register middle-clicks.

With my work laptop (HP Elitebook) I sometimes use a HP bluetooth mouse which loses signal every now and then. The same mouse worked fine with a Dell laptop but seems to dislike being paired with a HP machine.

I see them on sale in the UK and they are sold as smartphones in general, rather than cheap but respectable. I think sometimes people don't notice that this is a market that is growing a lot, has a lot of potential for more people to buy devices and apps and the market can still change radically from one year to the next.
Just because Nokia and Microsoft were late to launch something that compares well to iPhones does not mean that as of 2013 it's all hopeless for them. There's plenty of people in the whole world who are in the market their 1st or 2nd smartphone and/or are not deeply committed to iOS or Android.

Now if Apple decided to go loco and sell a truly low end device, similar to what they did with the 5c but for £200 unlocked, then it would turn the market upside down... again.

On the upside they will all become really good at playing tennis!

If your angle is that of the guy in China who produces these things, you should be OK. The drones will not be serviceable at a reasonable cost by anyone in developed countries. The drones will be replaced rather than repaired, just like what happens with so many other gadgets.
The drivers' jobs will be lost all over the world and the manufacturing jobs will be created in China. If we can all live comfortably without having to have jobs, it's all fine.

I am Tiger Woods.

auto-felch? hmmm, this thread is getting very technical. I'll check in the dictionary what felching means.

erm... OK... no chance I'll be buying this car!

yes, but do they run linux?

I'd go for a mix of 2, 3 and fear of being hit in the head with bombs.