Microsoft don't need to compete with Apple.
Microsoft are primarily interested in the corporate market - business and government.
Everything else just flows on with that due to the need to be compatible.

Apple has spoken recently of their inroads into business as a "collateral win", an unintended bonus.
They are putting zero effort into replicating or replacing the core feature set that any large business relies on (exchange, active directory, etc).

The reason that Microsoft is scared of Google is that they are actively attempting to make the underlying system immaterial as the Google services become the compatibility glue.
Who cares if the underlying system is running Windows, OSX, Linux or something else when the end user gets exactly the same experience?

That's what Microsoft is scared of, not a high end device manufacturer that interoperates with them.

That is exactly my fear, that the new legislation will simply move the existing MA15+ content to R18.
There's been zero transparency from the government on their intentions and to my cynical mind Mr Rau's pronouncement on the subject looks designed to deliberately fail - and then afterwards he can spread his hands and say "It's not my fault none of the other AG's wanted R18".
The liberal government did basically the same thing to stop us getting out from underneath the monarchy about a decade ago. Rather than make it a straight debate about republic vs monarchy, they clouded the issue with arguments about the specific type of government that would replace the current system.

As much as I respect the honesty and integrity of your unnamed friend at the ARB, I don't trust the politicians as far as I can throw them.

I don't know if a voluntary system would give us anything different here, the problem is that the lack of a rating within the codified guidelines result in a title being illegal to buy locally or import.

According to the code by which these classifications are made:
The Code
Under the Code, classification decisions are to give effect, as far as possible, to the following principles:
(a) adults should be able to read, hear and see what they want;
(b) minors should be protected from material likely to harm or disturb them;
(c) everyone should be protected from exposure to unsolicited material that they find offensive;
(d) the need to take account of community concerns about:
(i) depictions that condone or incite violence, particularly sexual violence; and
(ii) the portrayal of persons in a demeaning manner.

Look at A there and tell me how not allowing me (a 30 year old) to legally acquire something like Mortal Kombat or Left for Dead 2 is abiding by their own guidelines.

Just taking the existing MA15+ bracket and renaming it to R18 will not do anything meaningful.
We have a system in this country (Australia) that claims to be about classification, but is actually about censorship!

I (and many others) want a uniform system across all media, and unless something is illegal to make, it shouldn't be illegal to buy!

As much as I hate to admit it, 10 years of marriage backs this up.
No matter how much you will save, no matter how hard you try, not matter how good the outcome: Buy her the new shiny and make it HER choice.

The whole point of the Australian government is Representative Democracy.

By my rough calculations, 75% of our politicians should be self righteous, arrogant busy-bodies who think they know better than me regardless of anything so trivial as reality.

As an atheist, I can appreciate the sentiment, but as a realist I see the fact that all our leading politicians are currently zealots as simply an aberration that even those nominally religious abhor.

I would argue that encouraging participants to read the entire conversation and then respond once to all the previous discussion is a good thing.
Why deal with 4 separate single line responses?
If they are on diverging topics, surely they shouldn't be under the same thread any more?
The failure of participants to correctly quote is no more a fault of gmails than top posting is a fault of outlook.

The only other MUA (besides gmail) I have discovered that does it correctly is sup http://sup.rubyforge.org/
It's command line (which isn't a complete deal breaker for me, failure to render html or show inline images aside) but it stores all it's meta data (read, deleted etc) in it's own internal databases which are not reflected on your IMAP server (which IS a deal breaker for me).

I've been tempted to start hacking on the source, and if it was written in a language I knew I'd have already done it.

Every single time I see this discussion, someone pipes up to say "but thunderbird DOES do threads!".
That it does. And that has absolutely no bearing on the discussion at hand.
Conversation view as provided by gmail gives you a single page for each entire conversation AND it inserts your replies online as appropriate.
There's several other features that make conversation view work so well, but you'll have to actually try gmail to understand what we are talking about.

One that's smart enough to realise that if you do away with the ticketing system (ticket creation, distribution, ticket machines on busses, policing people not using tickets) the entire bus system can be run for the same money the local government subsidizes the system ANYWAY.
And because the entire system is free, more people use it, reducing congestion on busy city street.
Who loses out on this deal?
People who pay tax and don't use the bus. But at least when they are driving, their roads are easier to navigate.