This is what happens every time you hand a public monopoly to a private company. This is not how you privatize. You just get the worst of both worlds. This is flat out corporate welfare. If you're going to privatize something, you need to have competition in the market.

Obviously no such thing will happen. Money will go into general revenues, never to be seen again. Numerous empty promises and hand waving about improving Internet access will be made.

It's annoying enough already with cybersquatters buying up every domain in sight, there's just no need to add yet another one to the mix. If it was really not about a money grab, they would just give every .co.uk registrant the equivalent .uk domain at no cost, and then phase out .co.uk. Yeah, I don't see that one happening.

Didn't even read TFSummary.

Statistics isn't about being 100%. That's the whole point of trends and probabilities. If there's around 65% voter turnout in an area, within a certain deviation, and one polling station has an 80% voter turnout, that's an anomaly. Usually anything more than 2 standard deviations out is an anomaly, statistically speaking. Nothing implies this is 100% election fraud, or even election fraud at all. It just means something different is happening there.

The matching cannot be exact, and requiring for it to be so is an unfair burden. Equivalent matches in the PC world exist, without being exact. As a counter to this dumb argument, Apple will never match much of the clever and innovative hardware available for PCs. How much does a Mac cost then? Oh yeah, it doesn't even exist. If you want to go down the path "we have hardware you can't match", it's just not a game you will win.

That's pretty much what I said earlier. It's a dead end field. No one is interested in your decades of experience. They will tell you you're overqualified. No one is still working in this field in their 40s or 50s. They've either moved on to management, or left the field altogether. Why would you even go down this path, knowing you'll have to start over nearly from 0 somewhere else in your midlife?

Outsourcing has all but guaranteed these fields are perceived as dead-end careers. You're limiting your upward mobility and earning potential by putting yourself into a box bounded by foreign labour. 40, 50 year old programmers you can count on one hand. You're either in management by that time, or a completely different field. No one is interested in your decades of experience. Oh, sure, they will say they do, and in case of the truly expceptional, 1 in a million individuals that may even be true, but what they really want is cheap foreign labor, or young kids who will work their butts off for peanuts, don't go home after 5 and don't mind being preoccupied with work on their weekends, instead of spending time with their family. Contrast to almost any other profession, where being an experienced veteran is something people look forward to.

Well, it has been a while since we heard of something new and exciting cooking in the Apple oven.

This map situation kinda hilites it. To be honest, nothing has really changed at Apple. They've always been doing something like this. It's just that the competition has changed. Apple has been standing still. MacBook: nothing. iMac: nothing. iPods: nothing. iPhone: nothing. iPad: nothing. Just incremental improvements. Which is fine, but there's nothing _new_ on the horizon. Where's the next big thing? Aside from "it's Apple", what is the incentive to buy an Apple product these days over the competition?

NIH does not preclude copying. Almost requires it in fact. Hmm, those guys have something we want to use, but it didn't come from us, so we have to make our own.

Pretty much the definition of "fait and balanced" right there.

ME came between 2000 and XP.

BTW, as someone said, you typed a lot of words, but said little. (What is your day job, if I may ask?)

Windows 2000 was a significant improvement over 98 in terms of stability (NT based).

Windows XP was a significant improvement over 2000 in terms of UI streamlining and cruft removal.

Ditto for Windows 7.

Did you jump from 2000 to ME? Or skipped it?

Did you jump from XP to Windows Vista? Or skipped it?

If you didn't, would you in hindsight? Would you recommend "regular" people skipped those?

It's not fear of change, it's fear of version x.0. Wait until AT LEAST service pack 1, and preferably don't switch until whatever comes after Windows 8 is on SP1. Microsoft releases beta versions of their operating systems. It has nothing to do with fear, just plain common sense. Let early adopters fix the bugs and clumsy UI.

Windows 8 is the new Windows Vista/Windows ME, the first generation after some major paradigm shift in Microsoft thinking.

You have access to what you want to see, and read the things you want to read, and people you want to talk to. When you read a random magazine, or talk to a random person, or have random thoughts, something new and interesting might happen in your life or you might learn something new. Change! Avoid! Step outside your closed little box and take the chance to experience something different.

Yes, like talking to other people.