Remember the old adage: no one ever got fired for buying IBM? In the current corporate culture it's pretty much the same for buying Microsoft.

Yes, but I'm not sure that applies where tablets are concerned. It doesn't seem to help them in the corporate phone market.

Except that 'Metro' isn't just Windows 8, it is the future UI paradigm for Windows/Microsoft. IE 10 will have two versions, Metro and 'traditional'. I don't think MS is going to continue to create two versions in the future. Windows 9 will take things one steep further - probably a compatibility mode or VM for traditional applications - or perhaps eliminate traditional 'windowed' apps all together. Windows 8 is a transitional product release for Microsoft.

In which case I see a lot of people moving on from windows, especially in the enterprise, or doing as they did with Vista and just not bothering to move.

Can they afford to ignore the millions of tablets that are finding their way into offices and everyday use?

I think the question is more whether anyone will care if they do release it. I think probably not.

If a palatable alternative reigns supreme on tablets, will companies convert to the alternative in lieu of MS Office on the desktop to insure document compatibility?

Well this is an interesting area of thought. Some enterprises are already turning away from it now, I guess we'll see.

Metro is going to be a disruptive change for a lot of companies,

Really?

Everyone's happy with Win 7, and IIRC Win 8 has a traditional mode, so I'm not really seeing it on the desktop, and on the tablet or mobile, MS is a non-entity.

I guess I can see the attraction of running powerpoint presentations from the iPad, but Office in general, is there a point?

I can't imagine you'd want to be doing a lot of text input on it, would you?

This in mind, it seems to me the whole thing is a non-story. MS is now an also-ran in the phone biz, and has no footprint at all in the tablet market. Office or no office, it doesn't seem to matter.

But there are illegal prostitution gangs that smuggle women into the country and keep them confined, basically enslaved. Those would be good things to break up.

Jesus.

These cretins ought to be dealing with people traffickers, gang crime and other actual Serious Organised Crime.

That they are taking down music sharing sites is ridiculous. The justification I heard recently was even more laughable. It was serious organised crime because it cost the record labels 15 million.

Ah, record label mathematics, even better than cop math!

I don't doubt that these sites are hives of illegal activity. What they are not is a serious threat to the British public, which SOCA should be concentrating on, not pissing into the wind trying to clamp down on piracy.

Vaccinations do not necessarily give less of a spectrum of resistance than real disease, your one example was fallacious.

But keep on believing your nonsense, it's your right I suppose.

The people that could acquire those things that enjoyed them a little too much would slowly become addicts after a year or two, and be dead from overdose in another.

You know that heroin addicts can, when given access to a supply of known strength that's not contaminated, continue to use the drug and be functional in society for many years, right?

Your other point, that it becomes pretty un-cool does work though. Apparently new addicts are quite rare in Switzerland, now that the young folks can see people the older addicts queueing up outside clinics to get their fix in the morning.

Must learn to proofread - "increasing is really increading" should just read "increasing"

Do you have any links that show that it's wrong, or at least some non-circular arguments for why it is wrong?

How about you backup your claim that vaccine-resistant strains occur as a result of vaccination? Because after searching on this all I can find is conspiracy sites mixing this in with their other bullshit claims.

A quick search on pubmed turns this interesting looking paper up - Vaccines and their impact on the control of disease.. From the abstract - "Despite intense (and often successful) attempts to control infectious diseases through vaccination, there is still rather little evidence of the emergence of strains of pathogen resistant to vaccines.". It goes on to say it's certainly possible and should be planned for, but seems extremely rare.

Quite a few, actually:

Those pressures are only against being in the same host body as another virus. The proportion of people with a given virus at any one time is pretty low, low enough that this is pretty irrelevant. You're not talking about competition between strains in general.

What you are arguing for is for people to be permanently infected and suffering from a disease, in order to try to prevent another disease emerging or spreading - a state which would more likely lead to adaptation of viruses to these conditions.

Many elderly people were immune to the 2006 H5N1 "bird flu" because they had antibodies against a close sibling, whereas those previously inoculated did not have the same resistance, and required re-inoculations against the particular strain.

Sure, because nobody had been vaccinated for a close sibling to that sort of flu either. Not entirely sutre what you're trying to say here, but if it's the old "Natural Immunity is better!" canard then I'd ask you to think about how many of the older generation are not carrying forward such immunity because they're dead. Those currently getting vaccinated against particular strains don't have to be.

Any one of these would be enough to give an advantage to a virus without less deadly siblings in the wild. Do we want to increase this risk to save a whole bunch of lives today? Apparently, yes. I won't say it's the wrong decision, but I do respect those who think otherwise.

I disagree, the first four only apply to the case of multiple infection and are irrelevant. The last is effectively a vaccination anyway (see cowpox and smallpox.)

There's little evidence that this risk you point out is increasing is really increading. besides which I do not believe for a second that this is a real concern to many people who are against vaccination.

It doesn't mean there can't be.

Firstly, the people within Corporations could stop acting like frakking arseholes all the time, and have some principles. And no, I don't care about the principles of capitalism, the people in charge absolutely can and should be blamed for being amoral bastards.

Secondly, and we already see this in some arenas, consumers can start spending their money only with corporations they consider ethically sound. The effect of this would be that in order to slavishly follow the maximum available profit, corps would have to act ethically or be outcompeted by those that do.

I know that both situations are a pipe dream, people care more about price than ethics and most business practices will not change and most people will not demand they do.