I had Verizon FiOS TV for 2 years and I have to say the picture quality, number of HD channels, and UI was FAR better than anything I had seen from Time Warner, Comcast, or Cox.

When was the last time you used a new version of Opera?

Treestyle tab: I don't think it will show a tree, but you can put your tabs on the left or right side
Small menu: My Opera UI has a Menu button at the top left and tabs to the right of it. There is no Windows title bar (ie it looks like Chrome)
Stop/Reload button: It is a single button

There are a lot of things you can do in Opera if you take a few minutes to look at the options but it seems a lot of people just see the default layout and run away. For the longest time I couldn't stand having my tabs at the top of the screen because I had been using Opera for so long with them at the bottom. I couldn't get Firefox or IE to replicate Opera's tab handling but I could customize it quite a bit in Opera.

Here's a screenshot of the top left corner of Opera on my system: http://i47.tinypic.com/x5tw77.png

$40 for that really isn't that bad. Anyone who knows how to do would never pay for someone else but for the average consumer who just knows how to open IE and go to www.google.com it's worth it. How long would it take you to do that on a system that has been running for months without updating or cleaning? Of course they probably won't babysit the PC during the updates but it would be on the bench for a while. Of course paying the Geek Squad to do anything is stupid but the price for that service seems fine if it's done properly.

Think about the preventative maintenance you pay to have done on your car (assuming you don't know how to do it yourself.) Are those mechanics conniving as well? Services cost money and you have to decide if it's worth your time to do it yourself or pay a fee to have someone take care of it for you.

I strongly disagree with your statement about dual core Atoms. I wouldn't even want to use one with dual 5890s. While GPUs take up a lot of the responsibility in gaming the CPU is still very important. In one test I see on a hardware review site a 1.8GHz quad core Phenom barely reached 60FPS...at 1280x800 with medium settings in Far Cry 2.

While a lot of Americans are limited to less than 4Mbps upload there are plenty of people in other countries (and even a lot in the US) who have faster connections. I personally have a 100Mbps (up and down) connection in Japan. I have seen above 90Mbps both ways in real world tests to an FTP server...in the US. A lot of European countries have higher speeds and anyone on FiOS would have decent speeds at least. I'm sure they're also including bandwidth from servers which are infected and have access to high bandwidth connections. I wouldn't doubt that number but I'd like to see how they came up with it.

The tab bar can be placed on the top, bottom, left, and right. This has been available for many versions. When I started using Opera it defaulted to the bottom so when they changed it in 6 or 7 I just put the tab bar back at the bottom. I'm not sure why but it bugs me to have the tab bar at the top in Opera but I deal with it in Chrome.

Have you ever flown a plane or even seen what the cockpits look like on military aircraft? When you're flying a plane you generally have PLENTY of time to look around outside or inside. Sure, a fighter pilot wouldn't be looking down at his screens while dogfighting or refueling but there's plenty of time to do so. Here's an example of a cockpit: F-22 Cockpit If they weren't supposed to look down why would they give them all those lovely displays? The HUDs on newer aircraft can show quite a bit but they won't show you everything.

I was sticking to my personal boycott of the game which was hard because I knew it was a great console game (PC and XBox 360 gamer here). My brother bought the 360 version for me as a birthday present so of course I have to play online with him now. On PC I'll just stick with CoD4.

I'm sorry but having local access to Wikipedia with no outside connection is the biggest feature of this device. That is not a weird definition or exclusion to define competitors.

I wouldn't say that. Does it really have any competitors? I don't consider anything that requires a data connection a competitor. I just hope this causes others to say "we can do better than that!" so we have better options.

A few minutes to destroy 100 hard drives? I didn't see much for details about the construction of the destroyer but it looks like a simple hydraulic automotive jack. If you've ever used one you'd know it's not a simple pull of a lever and you have a destroyed drive. It will take lots of pumping. I'm fortunate enough to have a very nice degauser at work which can do drive after drive and I believe it takes less than 30 seconds per drive (could be up to a minute...it's been a while since I've used it.) We have gone through hundreds of drives at once before and it took longer to fill out the destruction forms than to degauss the drive. The only reason to use something like this "deformer" is cost.

I think you missed the part about "whichever is greater."

You're missing the point. Forget that he said AT&T or T-Mobile. Get rid of exclusive deals for phones and the carriers have to compete directly for your business.

The tabs at the top is one of the things I just couldn't get used to in Firefox. There were some other issues with tab behaviour but I can't remember what it was now.

Opera has only been ad free since 2005. Back when it had ads it was definately worth the $30 or whatever for the full version. Just look at the competition (or lack thereof) it had during those years. I started using it back in the v5 days and refuse to give it up.

There is one thing that bugs me about this article though. They say Firefox is more customizable. The main reason I couldn't get used to Firefox (this was back in v1&2, dunno about 3) was because I couldn't customize the UI to look like what I was accustomed to without using poor quality addons. As far as I can tell Opera has always been more customizable "out of the box" than Firefox.