I'm in Australia and my average is 237ms, and they say that we don't need the NBN

The NBN will reduce the time between you and your ISP, so at most will shave 20ms off your latency - provided they don't screw it up and increase the latency with the equipment.

Here's a full tracert from a 19Mbit link on Internode:

C:\Users\John>tracert slashdot.org

Tracing route to slashdot.org [216.34.181.45]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 192.168.1.254
2 29 ms 29 ms 29 ms lns20.adl6.on.ii.net [203.16.215.174]
3 29 ms 29 ms 30 ms te3-3.cor1.adl6.on.ii.net [150.101.134.209]
4 29 ms 29 ms 29 ms xe-11-0-0.cr1.adl6.on.ii.net [150.101.225.229]
5 49 ms 48 ms 49 ms ae4.br1.syd7.on.ii.net [150.101.33.34]
6 204 ms 205 ms 206 ms te0-2-0-3.br2.sjc2.on.ii.net [203.16.213.158]
7 204 ms 204 ms 203 ms xe-11-0-1.edge1.SanJose3.Level3.net [4.53.208.13]
8 204 ms 203 ms 204 ms Savvis-Level3.Dallas3.Level3.net [4.68.62.106]
9 206 ms 225 ms 209 ms cr2-tengig0-7-3-0.sanfrancisco.savvis.net [204.70.206.57]
10 266 ms 266 ms 266 ms cr1-ten-0-4-0-1.chd.savvis.net [204.70.192.134]
11 259 ms 258 ms 258 ms hr1-te-12-0-1.elkgrovech3.savvis.net [204.70.198.73]
12 268 ms 265 ms 264 ms das5-v3029.ch3.savvis.net [64.37.207.146]
13 258 ms 268 ms 256 ms 64.27.160.194
14 257 ms 265 ms 265 ms slashdot.org [216.34.181.45]

Trace complete.

Wow... these comments make up a lot of assumptions about my character. What's with all the hostility? One guy called me a cunt! What's next, threats?

You made a logical and totally reasonable suggestion, but it went against his religion. His internal conflict caused him to lash out at you the messenger.

10 years ago I started getting stiffness and numbness from my right wrist up to the shoulder. I switched to an ergo keyboard which helped a bit, but the DynaFlex Powerball helped a lot. Since then I've gone through 3 powerballs. A couple of years ago my knuckles started stiffening and freezing up on me. To help with that I've been taking Fish Oil, which I didn't think was working until I stopped it for a week, and have been using this great ergo mouse.

for single people its $90 a month for the carrier bill

Holy shit, that's a lot of money for cellphone service.

Bloody oath! I pay $10/month for 1GB of 3G + about $5 worth of calls and SMS, so $15 total per month for me.

I already had a customer balking about installing java. Now it seems certain we'll have to port everything away, a huge undertaking. (Even though we'll end up porting it to C++ and have multiple times more vulnerabilities when we're done, but I guess at least they'll be specific to our application).

There is no way in hell I could recommend taking a team of Java developers and getting them to port their application to C++. Actually I've seen this attempted back in 2003, and it ended up generating a bunch of C++ code that had to be trashed and rewritten by a team of competent C++ programmers. The problem was mainly all these design patterns that Java programmers use that are based on garbage collection being present, and all the weird and wonder hacks that were introduced to try to add some kind of memory manangement scheme on top of a bunch of code that was written without any thought about object lifetime management. What about other languages like C#/mono? that will at least allow a basic like for like translation of everything below the GUI layer?

Barium is an element does not vanish and can certainly be sterilized to any degree desired. So, why do they apparently not recycle the stuff?

Because not much is used in medical practice, so it's not worth it. The main use of Barium is Barite which is a Drilling Fluid for drilling bore holes. You may have heard of white mud?

I think the underlying intent of the article is to show that the Microsoft Surface is a waste of time, and so it was Windows 8 focussed. They compared a Microsoft Surface with an Acer W510, and the Acer tied on power and won on performance. But also the Acer runs all Windows apps, so why would you buy the Microsoft Surface over the Acer W510?

Just thought I'd add to your bit that says:

you'd have to be particularly crazy to develop a game that requires DirectX 11.1 any time soon

Given a pragmatic developer I can't see how that would happen, unless they were doing a tech demo. Most of the DirectX utility and sample code sets up the device like this:

1. Try initializing Directx9
2. Try initializing Directx10
3. Try initializing Directx11

so now you add:

1. Try initializing Directx11.1

All the fixed function stuff is gone now. You do your own object-local-to-word transform in the vertex shader, and then the world-to-view transform using the projection matrix. If you have stereoscopic rendering, then you have 2 projection matricies in the shaders.
Thus in the above tests you get back what version of DirectX is running, and load the corresponding set of shaders for your world, lighting and material renderers. You'd need the option to turn on or off stereoscopic rendering anyway, so it makes having an exclusive Directx11.1 renderer highly implausible.

Hard drive usage doesn't affect speed. I've got Terrabytes of data on on number crunching machine, and it still runs just as fast as it it did when I was writing the software and had only a few GB of random test data.

Gelly Roll Classic Fine 0.3mm. It's what you need. They're cheap, pick one up and try it. I know it's thicker than what you want, but it's real easy to write with.

98 SE was better. I've not been a fan of the NT line

No way. I had NT 3.51 as my main OS (circa 1995). That was the good version before they killed it with NT 4.0. This OS gave you the OS/2 experience with a Windows skin (If you used OS/2 2.0 then you know what I'm talking about), and OpenGL to boot (no DirectWhatever). The multitasking was butter smooth, and it came with a C/C++ compiler bundled in the OS. I was doing user/programmer tech support at the time, and all the 98SE machines I saw that came years later sucked arse.

NT 4.0 with the Windows 95 skin was a backwards step. Apparently Billg had a bee in his bonnet about beating MacOS at the automated bytemark benchmark in word processing or something, and so the OS guys had to move GUI stuff into the kernel to get the benchmarks up. It was downhill from there.

Oh by the way, if anyone's looking for a 39 yr old programmer with a boat load of experience (150 different skills), I'm open to offers... just though I'd add that in, in case someone reads this, as some of my clients have hit hard times recently, hence I've....

HTC is a Taiwanese manufacturer, Apple is more of a Chinese manufacturer. That aside I think that the argument should be that Samsung are so far ahead on Android, that Nokia need to be number 1 on something else as they can't compete with Samsung. Looking at the build vs buy numbers wrt to writing the OS, buying from Microsoft was most likely more economical than trying to go it alone.

I haven't personally used Eclipse for 3 years but, as I'm primarily a C++ developer, I left the IDE choice to my full time Java developing peers who informed me that Eclipse sucked hard. I had assumed this was an informed opinion. The problem I've found with NetBeans is that we are using Ant for the build process, which seems to work like a shell script rather than a makefile. I've found I'm faster in C#/VS2010 mainly because the intellisense seems to work better with that combination. As someone who is continuously changing languages and platforms I find intellisense quite valuable.

Java has something C# lacks: a good IDE. Java has eclipse.

Wow, where did you get that opinion from? Using a beta version of VS2005? VS2001?. The team I'm in right now is coding Java for Android in NetBeans because Eclipse sucked hard. But coding in C# in Visual Studio 2008/2010 is way better, way more productive. Hell even coding Javascript / HTML in VS2010 is better than this.

In the last couple of years I've seen more and more C in code bases for mathematically intense applications due to requiring C for GPU programming. OpenCL and Cuda are C based and from where I'm standing are the two main choices for GPU programming at the moment. Something on the horizon that looks interesting is Microsoft's C++ AMP stuff which fullfills the same need.