Yeah... I'd be surprised if his sister even knew what a right-click-drag was. You're really, really, really reaching.

Reaching for what, exactly ?

I made mention precisely because I've been very surprised at people who do use it (ie: secretaries, CEOs, etc).

That's funny, because in a recent Slashdot discussion about laptops the exact opposite was recommended - business grade laptops are typically priced higher for essentially the same hardware you get in the "consumer" grade.

It's not the hardware specs you're paying for, it's the better warranty and support and _vastly_ better case construction.

For at least three years the trackpads have been multi-touch; so, at least within bootcamp, the right click etc is emulated by having two fingers on the trackpad while clicking...

I no longer have Windows installed on my MBP to check, but it certainly used to be that the two-finger-right-mouse-button-emulation didn't work when trying to do a right-click-drag, which a surprising number of people use quite a lot.

Great. Now let's go antiq--BOOM!

Sounds like a job for the ACCC to me, they have the independence and the teeth to tackle something like this, as you say the opposition are not going to want to help the government look useful.

After ten years of Liberals in Government, the ACCC is but a shadow of its former self.

5 subsequent years of "New Labor" has (unsurprisingly) done little to remedy the situation.

Allow free importation of goods from the US and other markets and watch the vendor premiums for your mysterious island continent collapse. If Australians could simply buy from Adobe US, It'd be pretty difficult for Adobe to maintain a price premium...

There are few import restrictions to Australia in general and even fewer from the US thanks to the "Free" Trade Agreement.

There is nothing "easy" about Windows, or any other OS.

Give Windows to a person that has never used it, see what happens.

Same with Linux and Mac OSX.

I have used Linux and Windows for 15 years now, but I am completely lost if you put me in front of a Mac

In other words, all OSs are equally 'hard' (or 'easy').

Full agreement. Let me add that this is the same problem that Google has: trying to copy Microsoft of all people, by Bing-ifying the search experience. I'm pointing my finger at you, Google image search. Remember when it just gave you... images? Now it's all AJAXy, and if you are using IE, forget about viewing more than 2 pages of image search results on older hardware. We used to have the simple, straightforward "click to see more" links, now we have this stupid dynamic crap, and the worst part is that it captures the pointer if you hover over it. The only way to get the page you want is to minimize the search results, and THEN you have to click again to get the page instead of the page with a stupid AJAXy image layered on top of it.

In other words, Google made themselves less Googly because they feared MS, just as MS is making itself less Wintelly because it fears Apple. Sheesh! Just be yourselves! But in a world full of boardrooms where CEOs lie about things like... having CS degrees... what should we expect?

Even people who are glued to devices still pick up dead tree editions of our local free papers. You can find out things there that you wouldn't otherwise know--like the fact that the local bowling alley is going to be replaced with a condo.

They're online too, and they're advertiser supported in both cases. What does Buffet think is unsustainable about this? Advertiser supported media isn't going anywhere. Local advertiser supported media with "stringer" reporters are alive and well. I don't look at it much, but there's been a lot of buzz about Patch.com lately. Even if that particular site doesn't survive, I don't see free advertiser supported, or even volunteer (community supported via donations) news going away.

That's right Mr. Buffet, people can just volunteer to throw up a server. Retirees, students, anybody with time on their hands. You know, like college radio or PBS?

Maybe what he means is that you aren't going to make big money with free news. Yeah, that might not be sustainable; but local free news ain't going away, and when you aggregate it from Indonesia to Iowa, you've got world news for next to nothing, with more reporters than the old model could ever dream of hiring, and probably with better objectivity.

Companies are run by people. People are NOT rational. Alan Greenspan cited this as a problem, although IMHO Greenspan's bigger problem was to accept that corporations are people and then to assume that they were rational.

Rational actors maximizing profit is theory. Reality is insane people "managing" things into oblivion. If the HDD manufacturers try to squeeze the market to the point where solid state displaces HDD everywhere, and they fail to extract maximum profit because they are greedy, that will not surprise me one bit.