The art of prognosis: Say one thing and allow for the other.

Every third rate investment letter writer knows that trick. That way they can later pull out the part of an old prognosis that makes them look good.

Color me unimpressed.

You are a very funny fuzzyfuzzyfungus :)

After all his "End of History" prognosis was spectacularly wrong.

Your pessimism is warranted. Here's what I am hoping for:

This may allow for some breathing space for some actual labor organization to happen. While they are under scrutiny violent suppression of such effort will be more difficult.

Independent unions are currently suppressed in China

Constructing an iPad will require some learning curve no matter how much the process is broken down. Walk-outs will be costly and disruptive, especially in the gadget industry where products have a short shelf live.

The situation in China is similar to where the Western world was 100 years ago. Labor struggles will be fierce. The unions won't always win but the record in the Western world shows that overall concessions can be achieved. That is if independent organization is not violently suppressed. Not that it wasn't violent in the US as well. If you want to read up on this fascinating bit of under reported US history I can recommend you a book.

This is probably the next best option as long as these workers are not allowed to unionize and negotiate their labor terms.

The ruling family is the ones that created this religious extremism in the first place to control their population.

They like to sell us their people's oil to enrich themselves and call themselves "our allies".

They are not.

Up here in Ontario Canada, teachers earn a good salary with excellent benefits and are required to be highly qualified.

The results speak for themselves.

Well, according to the screenshot you can actually run quite some useful programs (Firefox, Abiword etc.).

They are not coding against a moving target but a known entity i.e. XP. So I don't see why this project shouldn't eventually grow out of Beta. Attract more developers and that'll happen all the sooner.

I have two old educational Windows programs for my kids that no longer work on Win 7. I have an old XP machine for them but it bugs me that XP is no longer supported and vulnerabilities won't be fixed. React OS would make for a good alternative.