All this hype about new 4G and it only does 21Mbps? Telstra have had that for a quite a while here in little ol' Australia (as a theoretical lab speed, at least), and I thought that was 3.5G at most. Very much the same thinking on data allotments, alas.

You appear to be unfamiliar with Bigpond's excessive multi-year lock-in contracts that they rely heavily on once customers realise the full cost of their plan after the honeymoon period of half-price access that made them look competitive to the layman.

Yeah, there's a reason the Aussie film industry is suffering. But it's because so many of its films are depressing arthouse stuff that no one thinks of in association with the word 'entertainment'. Consequently, I sincerely doubt there have been thousands of downloads of Australian movies.

I can't help but notice that Firefox is taking great liberties to make sure I understand that connecting to that site may not be safe for me.

"or 2) increase company profit by trying to coerce hackers into buying a copy by not allowing them this download. Since the latter will never happen, all MS is really doing is simply missing an opportunity to increase security because they *think* they can increase profit."

Ok, 2 points there:

1) Since when are hackers the only ones with illegitimate copies of Windows?

2) Will *never* happen? Really? Big claim, no evidence.

Wow. Your local computer store is pretty cheap. EB out my way generally charges about $110 for any new title. I don't think they sell COD4 for less than $100 yet. Initial price seems to be on the rise too.

Don't get me wrong, it is a useful feature. It can be really annoying to write out a new file name only to have it wiped for forgetting the file extension, for which you have to restore the original file name to discover.

The really frustrating thing however is that Windows simply refuses to let you discover what that file extension is without making you go through the tedious task of turning them all on. How hard could it be to list it in the properties window for that file? Or perhaps be wildly radical and actually even let you change the file extension there! In fact, if it unequivocally told the average user what the real file extension on a maliciously named .exe actually was, it may just be helpful to some of them. Instead, they just tell you which program has been associated with that extension. I honestly can't believe no one at Microsoft has ever even considered this. It's one of my most common grievances.

For a minute there I was thinking that this Simpson's quote finally (almost) made sense:

"She'll go 300 hectares on a single tank of kerosene."

The other day I had a small business for a client and was amazed to discover that they were running a significant network through a 10Mbps hub. Being able to upgrade that to a (rather affordable) Gigabit switch was quite satisfying.

Windows 2000? Might be pushing your luck there. Compatibility mode in WinXP generally works though (You have to use it on setup.exe). Although you lose LAN I think.

Is this going to be the latest in the recent spate of games that really should have been designed primarily for PC, but instead have been detrimentally console-based? What's the deal with that anyway? Are console games harder to pirate or something?

Bah. My dodgy dial-up connection is so painfully slow that I find it amusing to install trojans and watch "hackers" try and control my computer.

The real test is convincing your friends that you're actually a bot. I was once lanning Counterstrike with some mates, using a dodgy 3rd party utility to provide bots. These bots had some pretty amusing chatter, and after a while I decided to change my name to one similar to the bots. I pretended my name wasn't showing up due to a bug (which wasn't hard to believe with this program), and then started dropping increasingly more personal messages directed at my mates. Had them quite freaked out until I couldn't stop myself laughing any more.

Yeah, my IM buddy may be a bot, but I gotta say, Skynet made his real world counterpart pretty bloody convincing. He does have a habit of trying to kill my dog though.

Being forced to look at Telstra Wireless as my only option for "broadband", I gotta ask, what is Siebel, and why is it bad?