So what you're saying is people aren't eager to 'pay good money' for a PC. And Apple is making 50% of the profits. Hmmm. I see a salesman in an Apple store with a sad face on....

Most people don't end up with a rubbish PC. And if they do, it was so cheap ($199 for the cheapest 17" laptops at WalMart last time I looked, doesn't a mouse or a few cables from Apple cost nearly half that??) that it's easily replaced.

With Seamonkey you can still rightclick an image and select 'Block images from url.com' and bip! Sorry, web 'designer', you failed to impress. Firefox has gone over to the darkside and doesn't have this feature. It's nice to have the images from adservers blocked so the aren't even loaded.

They just have to stop storing personal content 'on the cloud'. Don't buy into the idea of no local storage. Say NO to devices that don't have an SD slot ( sorry, Apple and Google...)

32g sd cards are really cheap now.

I don't use skype for a 'chat box.' Really, I hardly 'chat' at all anymore. Did enough of that in the late 80's to early 90's. I use skype as my long distance phone carrier. As long as I'm at home or have a wifi connection, I can call any phone in the continental US at no extra cost. This costs me about $4 a month. It's a nomadic sort of thing, I used to do it with an iPod touch, but now use an unsubscribed Android phone (the iPod touch 'for the rest of us', which even has an SD slot!). When home I make long distance calls on my desktop. We have DSL and a local landline, no long distance carrier.

So this would never replace skype for me.

So when you say 'by teaming up with the major credit card companies' do you mean through an exclusive monopolistic agreement with them? I don't see the credit card companies making that sort of deal, and if they did, we've got a precedent with Apple and the eBook industry, and people are gonna be right on it.

I have an SE/30 with NetBSD on it.

The users are winning, because they're not being roped into a monoculture.

It's much the same as the prosperous early years of the PC clones. It didn't matter what brand PC you used, in fact if your computer had a national brand name on the case it simply meant you had paid too much for it. In that era the best deal in PCs was a shop somewhere in your city putting together clones with parts from many vendors.

We should try to reintroduce the giant sloths, which were driven to extinction by the earlier human settlers to North America.

More like New Yorkers will be thrilled when there's no lettuce or carrots because of what the pigeons did to the farmers' fields.

Some bird manure is a good thing. It's very easy for there to be too much of a good thing. Like, say, the big manure lagoons around a large-scale hog farm. I doubt if an inch thick layer of bird manure is good for a field.

So we finally restore the American Chestnut. Then passenger pigeons descend on the trees like locusts and decimate them.

The passenger pigeons WERE locust-like in the era before their extinction. It was a real problem for people wanting to farm.

There are Republicans under you bed when you sleep at night.

The orthodox jews in the US are not in charge of the government. They don't force their views on the whole population.

Quit being ridiculous.

So you embrace a 'one true scotsman' view of communism?

What's your preferred flavor, then? Trotskyism? Or are you a Spartacist? Or just a dabbler in Fabianism?

Perhaps an 'intellectual marxist' or some other flavor of oxymoron? Check out Henry George. There are countless musty old disciplines of political economy to dabble in. It can make Civil War reenactment look like a tiny hobby by comparison.

Human literacy, and the written word to record knowledge, existed for eons before movable type and printing existed. Gutenberg was just a bandwidth increase.