But if any group of people out there will be able to predict the success of a product offering and be able to voice the opinions of the market, it's this group right here.

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

(i.e., you don't have to squeeze your way out of your vehicle while trying not to bang the next car's door)

That brilliant plan has two massive shortcomings:
1) You still need to squeeze back into the car when you're ready to leave (assuming there is no "unpark" feature)
2) What are the odds that the driver of the car parked NEXT to your in your overly narrow space will ding your passenger side door trying to get into HIS car?

Federal laws prohibit discrimination not just on race, but also "national origin" -- which would include "from china", regardless of what race a person happens to be.

I don't understand this new trend in making new hard drives with only 1-2 years warranty. The same goes for SSD.

It's very simple, really: Because they can.

The main reason is that there's only three hard drive manufacturers left in the world: Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba. (Samsung & Hitachi's HDD divisions have both been aquired in recent years, although you can still find drives with their brandname on them, for now)

Out of those three, only WD and Seagate manufacture large capacity 3.5" HDDs. It's essentially a duopoly.
When there's just two players left that are both manufacturing at pretty much full capacity, there's very little incentive left to offer long warranties -- that just costs them money in the long run. Warranties have been trending downwards, and it's unlikely that'll change any time soon.

Does his RSI prevent him from using a mouse? How does he cut and paste?

If you actually watched the video, you could have seen that he was using voice commands to select blocks of text and cutting/pasting them that way as well.

I'm assuming he means Amazon.com. Newegg is big, but hardly a 1000lb gorilla, and there really isn't anyone else major selling anything online

amazon is far in the lead indeed:

Amazon 2011 revenue: 48 billion
Rakuten / buy.com 2011 revenue: 4.7 billion
Newegg 2011 revenue: 2.5 billion

(Supposedly Newegg is the #2 online retailer in the US though, a good portion of Rakuten's sales are in SE Asia)

If he were to win, it would set a bad precedent. Consider this: how would forcing corporations like apple to automatically redirect Web traffic for a valid domain to a DIFFERENT domain 'because they should have known that's what I meant' be in anyone's best interest? It would be a bad day for ANY website that's not already in the top 50 most visited sires on the net...

Keep in mind: One of the big reasons for the airline data sharing between the EU and USA is the US visa waiver program.

Basically, this means that citizens from EU countries (and a few others, like Japan and Australia) don't need to apply for a visa when traveling to the US. The EU sends over the 'relevant' data prior to their departing, and the traveler him/herself just has to fill out a piece of paper in the plane prior just prior to arrival. A few years ago the EU was questioning why they should provide all the requested info to the US in the first place after privacy watchdogs had complained about the practice. the US reponse was to threaten to discontinue the visa waiver program unless the EU would continue to send passenger information ahead of time.

So... Should the EU indeed stop sharing the info after the latest scandals, then it's quite likely that the visa waivers will be discontinued as well. That would mean that all of a sudden each and every EU traveler would have to deal with their local US embassy and apply for an actual travel visa ahead of time for any trip, instead of just being able to hop on on a last-minute plane trip...

It's hard to say whether what will happen, though: discontinueing the visa waiver program would make it a LOT less convenient to travel across the atlantic, and would in all likelyhood significantly reduce the number of people traveling from the EU to US, thanks to the major added inconvenience in doing so. Can the US airline and tourist industry cope with that loss of traffic?

Do you want to be the first to jump into the water, or see what happens to the other person when they jump in the water?

Ask Micrososft how waiting for a market to have established itself first has been working out for them lately...

The Entire point of Win8 was to try to leverage their massive desktop monopoly into saving their dismal mobile offerings.

The idea being that people got used to Win8 on their desktop PC, and when it's time to buy a phone or tablet people would pick the windows version because they would already be familiar with it. Metro had to be front and center and pretty much 'unavoidable' in order to push that agenda.

In addition to that, as an added bonus it would enable them to follow Apple's lead and position their own appstore with a 30% kick-back because 'of course' all app developers would want to be able to tap into the nifty new launch screen.

What Microsoft always seems to forget is that outside of the MS board room, Microsoft ISN'T cool or desirable. Never have been, never will be. Microsoft is the 'boring-but-it-does-everything-i-need' option, leveraging 30 years of legacy software support. By throwing that out the window and forcing such a radical change, they are alienating their entire customer base. A PC with dual 24" monitors is NOT the same as a 4" mobile device, and you absolutely can't treat them the same way.

I've ran into three different people last few month that started ranting to me about how they just bought a new PC but returned it to the store because they absolutely despised the operating system. People didn't like Vista either, but I don't know anyone who returned their computer over it.

Hell, I'm not convinced that MS is even going to EoL XP on the scheduled date in 2014. There are still a lot of big companies (and not a few governments!) stuck on XP, and I think many of them are asking MS how big a dump truck of money they have to drive up to their door to get the expiration date pushed back indefinitely.

Thing is, Microsoft has released patches for end-of-lifed software before... But the catch is that they charge through the nose for each such update.

For example, a number of years ago the daylight savings dates changed which caused some fun side-effects in Outlook (calendar times are based on server, offset for DST. Due to the changed DST dates, calendar appointments could be off by an hour all of a sudden). The DST fix for Exchange 2003, 2007 etc. were free. The fix for Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000 was created as well, but MS charged $4,000 for it.

Just because they may fix problems for people with deep pockets, doesn't mean they'll have any intention of making them freely available to everyone.

never run an anti-virus, never got infected

That you know of.

Ignorance is bliss.

Same problem -- it basically runs a copy of XP in the background, and it too will become vulnerable to exploits once the critical patches stop coming.

1. It's unlikely that the version she currently uses does not run on Win7

Unlikely? Spoken like someone who has never had to support niche software on a corporate network.

One big problem is older .net applications, that are compiled explicitly against .net 1.0 or 1.1, which conveniently are not available to install on Vista / Windows 7 / Windows 8. Even with dot net 2,3,4, etc. installed those apps often flat out refuse to run because .net 1.0 subrevision 23B can't be found.

Another issue us that quite a few of the really expensive niche software products still uses hardware dongles to enforce compliance. Changes to the windows driver model between XP and Windows 7 alone can keep those things from validating. Or, the software can lock itself onto other hardware components such as motherboard serial number, etc. Any re-install on a different server by itself could result in thousands of dollars mandatory 'installation support' before the vendor will authorize the new server and activate the software.

And that's aside from the problem that running medical software on a platform that it is not certified to run on can become a costly endeavor if there ever are big security problems or something and you're found to not be in compliance.

- How unusual is the username portion on the email address? There have been a lot of spammers over the years that blast random emails to commonname@yourdomain.com. Mike, John, Bob, etc. are more likely to receive spam than sdvjsdvkj@domain.com

- Is the email address in question visible to other people? e.g. registered forum members for the software in question? Sometimes people sign up for a forum just to be able to harvest the otherwise hidden addresses of other forum members