Do you really want a blu-ray player, AND an HTPC, AND an Xbox 360, etc. cluttering up your living room

Yes, I do. Why? Because electronics are made cheaply and I like the idea that if one thing dies everything else still works.

Windows NT version numbers have gone 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4.0, 5.0 (2000), 5.1 (XP), 5.2 (Server 2003, XP 64-bit, XP x64, Home Server), 6.0 (Vista, Server 2008), 6.1 (7, Server 2008 R2). If you ignore the marketing names the version numbering is actually pretty reasonable.

It depends. This new interpreter may be better in some specific circumstances but worse in others, making it unsuitable for most people and highly useful for others. That's the sort of situation where you want to keep both the old and the new and everyone's happy.

I don't know what planet you're from, but this seems to me a fairly unremarkable canvassing of opinions on the topic without editorial comment. The format of the article goes:

Introduction
Police opinion
Westfield uses some words and says nothing
Australian Privacy Foundation opinion
Contextualisation
Professor Maciej Henneberg's opinion

Just because you don't agree with the opinions doesn't make the article biased, it makes those people wrong in your view (and in mine). But you can't deny that their opinions are relevant to the issue - the police, a privacy advocate group and an academic. The only failure on the part of the journalist is the selection of the academic they spoke to, who according to a quick search is in the field of biological anthropology and anatomy.

When an Xbox 360 console is banned, there are offline features that are disabled too - the most significant are playing games from the hard disk, and using the console as a Windows Media Center Extender. Once banned, the console will corrupt the saves on memory cards and hard disks that it comes into contact with so that they can't be used on a non-banned console without re-downloading them from Live.

My heart goes out to Nintendo in these difficult times of record profits.

The truth? Probably not many. Text to speech technology still has quite a way to go before it sounds human enough to not be jarring.

As for books, I'm not sure TTS will be able to express the emotion of a good book in my lifetime. If audiobooks were just about reading the text aloud then nobody except the blind would bother - and the preponderance audiobooks in real bookstores and even on torrent sites suggests to me that far more people than the blind are listening to books.

You mean the way it dumps the key amongst other junk in the output file one in every 256 times it's run with debugging off?

When was the last time you checked the output of an encryption program to make sure it was truly random? What about your boss? The CEO's secretary? The accountant? Someone in a government office dealing with your personal information?