This isn't about taking market share away from Google, or Bing, or whatever; it's keeping Google out of what Apple views as an increasingly important source of market research. Right now, every natural search performed on the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad goes through Google - so Google can view that data and use it to refine/improve/develop their own competing smartphone OS. By further locking in users to their own search engine, Apple effectively closes the pipeline of free research to Google - unless users explicitly go to the webpage of their search engine, which will only be done by a small, small number of users.

At my current university, there are two undergraduate networking courses and one undergraduate security course. There's one network course in the graduate curriculum, but that's meant as a recap of the two undergrad ones if you didn't get your undergrad here. I would love to load up on network and security classes, but there's simply none being offered.

As a current college student, I use my laptop (OneNote ftw) often for note taking. However, during a really boring class, even I'll start surfing the web. I notice a lot of students playing games, watching movies, doing online shopping, etc.

However, instead of just banning laptops, there's a lot that the professors and university can do to make students want to pay attention. First off, Powerpoint has ruined the university lecture. Most textbooks will come with companion slidesets for each chapter, so often a professor will just throw those up on the board and reiterate the same content TO THE WORD that is in the chapter. You're basically paying whatever your university's undergraduate or credit rate is for an audiobook of that textbook.

Also, a lot of professors these days come unprepared for lecture, especially because they feel like they can just use the textbook powerpoint as a crutch if the need arises. I can't tell you how many classes I've sat in over the past year where the professor is teaching material out of order or not relevant to the current reading or homeworks.

Lastly, many professors have become incredibly boring and prone to ramble about personal anecdotes. I just had a server technology class where the professor droned on every class about some single incident in his own experience that wasn't even related to servers half the time. He also spent a good amount of time talking about the Toyota issue. Why would I want to pay attention to that?

If the university wants to ban laptops in classrooms, they should look inward and reevaluate their own faculty first. If they still want to ban technology in the classroom, extend that to the professor as well - I'd gladly pay attention to see how many of these professors and doctors can't swim without their beloved Powerpoint.

There's no reason for a Windows user not to be running anti-virus nowadays. Microsoft Security Essentials is so lightweight and unobtrusive that most users I install it for don't even know it's there. And it's free.

And I have to add the Bing search engine provider add-on in Firefox. And in Safari, I can't even change my search engine provider. This is just par for the course.

I thought that was the ignorance siren that I heard. Where do I start?

150 million wasted on the latest rebranding of their failed search product. No effect on marketshare

Actually, it stole a percentage point of Google's market share last month. I don't think anybody expected it to gain 70% market share overnight. Except maybe you?

Mass numbers of suspicious posts on Net messageboards all parroting the same talking points: "I'm a long time Google users and I decided to give Bing a try and By Golly! I'm switching!"

Suspicious? Really? I saw somebody the other day on a Macbook Pro using Bing willingly. It's anecdotal evidence. There's nothing suspicious about it. It happens to some people, not everyone. I'm sure there are people who used Live Search before and switched to Google or Yahoo.

Paying floundering Yahoo to use their search engine

I won't argue with the state of Yahoo, but this has the potential to double the usage of Bing, and make it a much more formidable opponent to Google. It was a good deal.

* Putting up fake news story items on Microsoft web pages that are really nothing more than hidden Microsoft search links attempting to inflate the search marketshare

Haven't seen an example of this yet. Provide one and I'll yield this point.

* And now this crap The rate Ballmer is throwing billions at their failed search efforts looks like it may actually outdo Microsoft 8 year long Xbox fiasco for.

Read the first few comments - it goes to your default search provider, which is Google if you set it to. And I hate to be the bearer of bad news for your anti-Microsoft sentiments, but the XBox division is doing pretty well for itself right now. They've made Sony a laughing stock this generation.

I want to run away from their product even if the patents are not invalidated. They're all pieces of crap that rely heavily on Java applets and fail to support updates for browsers when they come out, like Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, etc. I remember two years ago, there was a period of time where they told users not to upgrade to Firefox 2 or IE7 because they didn't have support lined up for them yet.

So you would have preferred Microsoft follow up an OS that was not received well publicly with another OS that wouldn't be received well publicly? I swear, the company can do nothing right for some people. Science forbid a company deliver a product that is better than its previous one, which garnered many customer complaints. The reason pre-orders have exceeded Vista so quickly is because of the huge price drop Microsoft gave to pre-order customers. Many people were going to buy 7 anyway; why not pre-order it and save half the cost (or more)? I didn't know common sense when it comes to discretionary income was news.

When a company considers migrating to Windows 7, the only thing preventing the project from getting the green light is not the price of hardware that is needed to run it (which is cheap these days) or the security aspects (quite good) - it's the fact that Windows 7 comes with the standards-compliant IE 8. In other words, IE 6 is gone for good. Almost every company runs at least one web application or portal that only works in IE 6 because of years of standards breaking on Microsoft's part. If they migrated to 7 as well as IE8, many of these applications and portals would break. The developers behind these applications (sometimes within the company) would rather not redesign the site to work in IE8/Firefox/Safari/Chrome; instead, they tell management that any migration away from XP and IE6 is suicide. Despite IE8 having a "Compatibility Mode" as well as the fact that it defaults to the old IE6 standards when visiting Intranet sites, many companies are too afraid of breaking their mission critical web applications. The problem with migration to 7 is a browser issue, not an OS one.

Actually, I think it'll end up hurting Opera. There's a lot of user dissatisfaction with IE; in fact, there's so much that users will go and actively seek out another browser (hence, why Firefox became popular). Chrome, while still not as fully fleshed out as Firefox, is a better browser for many activities that everyday users care about (email, Youtube, etc.). Users will be more content with Chrome than they would have been with IE, and thus will not seek out Firefox or Opera.

But that's not the niche they're going for. They are looking for the people whose heartstrings they can tug on in order to sell these things. They're not even thinking about law enforcement and its applications, even though your point is valid.

Part of the advantage of instant film was being able to see how the picture was that instant, thus giving you the ability to retake the picture if you weren't satisfied. Digital cameras, with their screens and additional features, do the same job but do it even better. There's no need for instant film anymore.

For Linux to catch up to and overtake Windows, hardware vendors need to up their game when it comes to providing drivers and support. Unfortunately, they have no incentive to do so.

Why? Because they're quite content with the software-hardware-industrial complex they currently partake in with Microsoft. Every new version of Windows has increased hardware requirements, which leads people to buy new computers and/or hardware to run them. All of these computers have Windows on them, of course. Intel, nVidia, AMD, etc. are all happy - everyone's products get bought (even if they're not that great) because the user simply doesn't have a choice. If they want to stay current, they need to pay for a multicore processor, an extra few gigs of memory, or a bigger hard drive.

On the other hand, you have Linux. Jaunty Jackalope runs just as fast (actually, even faster) than Feisty Fawn did on my three year old Dell laptop. You have Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux that take advantage of even older and less capable hardware. Linux makes old hardware useful again and enables users to be content with their current hardware. Why do they need to buy a new computer when their 7 year old gateway that used to run Windows ME now runs Ubuntu without slowdown or problems?

Software is the route to fixing this, as once enough people get hooked by native, killer applications, hardware vendors will have no choice to support Linux or else they won't be capitalizing on a growing market segment.

$99/month may be good for them compared to what Time Warner is charging. I know that in the city in Philadelphia, 80 channels plus the basic cable Internet service costs me $110 with Comcast. And that doesn't have phone service, which these citizens are getting with their $99/month.