Basically they say that they provide more "quality control" than OSM, and that people should check their electronic map, this is not false...

The arguments are very similar to the ones the various encyclopedias offered (and still offer if they haven't disapeared yet) against wikipedia.

But they do recognize value in OSM, so I guess they are more into thinking how in the future leverage OSM, after all the real competition to tomtom is not OSM but google map or bing map on the mobile phones....

They should focus on lowering the price of their hardware, who will pay at least 150€ for a satnav, when they can have something similar for 19€ on an android phone.
(since they need the phone subscription anyway, and yes the tomtom is probably "better", but 130€ buys quite a lot of gasoline, even at current prices).

Maybe they'll bring out a 50€ android + osm based navigator, and offer some fun "add ons"

It did cost approximatelly 1 to 3 Billion us$ to sink less than 150 boats or about 10 Million us$ per boat....
well somebody must have made it real good there...

Warning it's based on avaiability in the french market, but since this is quite similar today it should still be helpful.
The site is called www.rue-montgallet.com after the name of a popular street with lots of geek friendly shops.

You try http://www.rue-montgallet.com/prix/comparer,portables,700,1,1,1,782=lt1.5,802=10173,1501=23351,min=700,max=1400
I preselected : less than 1.5kg (trust me your sister will be happier with something not too heavy), 1366x768 as requested (i would personally choose a screen size and then try to maximise the definition, I personally have this resolution on my laptop and wish it would be somewhat "taller", i also selected SSD and put the price in the range 700 to 1400€ so that is 1000 to 2000$ (since it includes IVA (sales tax) your price will probably be cheaper so you can splurge on options).

It yields 8 machines 4 Asus 2 HP and 2 Toshiba, I own a Toshiba and am reasonably happy with it, but I would probably choose the Asus which is quite cool looking and since Asus is really it's own ODM it can afford to provide more feature for the price.
I would avoid the i7 unless she really needs it (but then she would probably also need a faster GPU) since it really sucks the battery dry in no time
nb: If you would put in a slighty higher resolution it would have yielded the Asus zenbook UX31 series, which really looks cool
http://usa.asus.com/Notebooks/Superior_Mobility/ASUS_ZENBOOK_UX31E/#specifications
And still fairly cheap. see http://ixsoft.de/cgi-bin/web_store.cgi?ref=Products/de/ASRY009VHW.html (for pre installed Linux version, but in German, so just teasing :-))

Good luck

Microsoft offers a business model that is familiar and non threatening, sure it does not work that well, but then the general feeling is that IT is complicated anyway, and "everybody is doing it".
For most business persons, using Microsoft is the sure way of not thinking about IT, using anything else and particularly using an Open Source solution means thinking and making a decision about something they do not want to look at.
The alternative would be to delegate to the IT team, but that would be worse, you know "thouse people are weird..."...

And using a disruptive business models sheds a light on one owns business, can my "law business" fore example be handled the same way ?
could there be some "open source collaborative platform" giving an useful answer in 95% of the cases ? and putting me out of work ? (well actually asking me to start to really work...)....
Better not rock the boat...

Do not worry, destroying competition will fix this for you, they'll retain customers by removing competition, it's more fun to bribe^H^H^H^H^Hinform politicians than to have to interact with pesky tech people and try to understand why giving them money might make you a better provider than the competition...
Easier to legislate competition out of the picture.

The Mozilla people make exactly the same error as Netscape did, probably hired the same kind of marketoid loosers to run it as Netscape.

Linux users where the "secure core constituency" for FF, stopping to support them, even by arging "hey you can fix it", means that the platform becomes irrelevant for them, I hesitated to jump over to chromium because I felt that FF needed some support, and I'm not trusting Google that much either, although supporting FF means also accepting the Google cash.... so not that much difference anyway.

Windows and MacOS Users are FF users only because at some point a Linux Hacker told one of them "stop wasting your time, and more importantly my time (well some of us are trying to be diplomatic, so the second part might have been omitted), use a real browser and not a virus magnet, and don't support something that makes your shackle even stronger, switch to FF...

Now the same people who helped promote FF will just say/think, "get lost, where were you in the past 10 years, did you still not get it ? well too bad, go on forking cash over to moloch and please suffer for your foolishness"...

  So it's dead... Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Thanks for the info :-), It's hilarious, well I guess IGT is in an ideal situation to understand casino economy and it makes perfect sense to invite them to join the directorship of yahoo :-)
Will they replace her with somebody from bally ?

the result might well have been that they would still have hired the guy, but would have avoided to publish an incorrect CV and then the "scandal" would not have been:
"thomson lied to get hired by Yahoo", but
"thomson's cv x years ago was not fully correct", but since he did a job that we think is "good enough at the previous position" we still want him...

So Patti Hart is not fired over "getting the wrong guy in" but over "not doing her homework to make sure that the guy they choose would fit in and be able to do his work without generating a scandal just at the begining..."

so it make some kind of sense actually...

Yes Microsoft, Apple, and Google are behaving in unethical manner,
stop whining, vote with your wallet, boycot the jerks..

And yes it's kind of hard to do with google since it has something like "all the share", and if you want a smartphone, you are kind of stuck, (I mean BB come on...)

But not using microsoft and apple is really trivial, there is no real valid excuse, you might find it slightly more comfortable because you're used to...
But if you cannot change an habit because you are too lazy to learn something new, then do not expect law maker to stop helping these same companies to steal your money in exchange for some small "gifts". (and I do not even suggest that you lobby your employer to get rid of microsoft, just you on your personal machine),

If you are really shocked, write a letter today telling them: "I exchanged my i for an alternative vendor, and scratched the OS on my PC to install (your choice of Linux/BSD/haiku/...) and I will not come back until your tax returns show that you pay fair taxes in all the countries where you operate.

(of course I do expect you to do exactly nothing...)

And you would be completely wrong, B&M is just a way to outsource some marketing from Microsoft to a tax exemption device, and do some arm twisting exchanging some bribes for friendly IP policies in developing countries.
Moreover the cooperation of the foundation with monsanto will probably kill more farmer than any vacine could ever save.

Government are far from efficient, but at least they do somehow stem from they will of the people, and if you have not been able to elect non jerks in the past 200 years is not an excuse for "delegating" the use of collective money to a con person like mr Gate.

Moreoever although MS pays very little tax, and therefore it has very little opportunity to do any good, the level of cash siphoned by a small group of ethically challenged thieves does not bode well for your evil vs good calculation.