On Ubuntu Linux I use Firefox with Ad Block Plus. I don't see adverts.

I tend to keep the original OS, but resize and repartition the HDD so that I can install my preferred set-up but still have the original spyware for when I want to sell the device down the track.

If I can buy a good-spec (64bit, separate vid card, good RAM, good HDD, good number of USB ports) chrome book AND put Ubuntu on it then I might end up with another laptop.

Chrome Books are great for enterprises that want to avoid the Micro$oft tax, and that have a majority of users that only need to use browser-based resources.

Agreed. Politicians have this tendency to be easily bribed. :(

DMCA only applies to slaves owned by the USA government (in turn owned by large multi-national corporations).
Citizens of other countries, and businesses not seeking to trade in the USA, don't have that problem.

From Microsoft:
"We use a variety of security technologies and procedures to help protect your personal information from unauthorized access, use or disclosure. For example, all data sent from the Windows 10 Technical Preview to Microsoft is encrypted in transit and we store the personal information you provide on computer systems that have limited access and are in controlled facilities."

In other words: "We transmit the data using SSH and store it in a datacentre."

Specific versions of Linux has been available for multiple platforms for how many decades now? Does Microsoft consider that they're "innovating" by doing this?

Why is Californian law an issue? Mozilla developers are located all around the world, as are Mozilla users. This is a world-wide Open Source software development community, not a USian business.

The reason why USAian broadband is so "slow" is because vendors (all vendors, everywhere) only supply a product that is "good enough", and no more, for people to pay the price they're paying. In the USA broadband is very cheap for what is being supplied.

In other countries around the world people can only dream of having that amount of bandwidth for that price. Suppliers outside of North America simply don't offer packages that cheaply.

If M$ is releasing a new iteration of MS Windows every year, then how will this move impact on support for previous releases of MS Windows that were sold with PC hardware sold to consumers within the last 5 years, or disk image builds deployed new into enterprises in the previous 5 years?

I think M$ is building a rod for its own back that it won't be able to sustain.

> Far too many nations either have their money fixed against the dollar (China being the best example), or
> manipulate (I will exclude for the time, but easy enough to show and prove).

The USian economy is very week and unable to maintain its own position in the financial market. Those countries who are maintaining parity with the USian dollar mostly also have dynamic rapidly growing economies (ie China) that are effectively using the blinkered "reduce costs" mentality that is common to the economic thinking of most of the Western World to attract new business, improve the quality of their manufacturing and technology base, and grow their economy.

While I don't like what they're doing, they should at least be congratulated for being highly successful at building their own economy - and more fool us for letting them do it that way!

Nothing will change in that respect so long as the primary economic focus of Western economies is on external trade..

> Have a tax break or temp subsidy for energy STORAGE. This group of ppl will buy excess electricity and sell
> it at a higher rate and provider the electricity that is needed.

Expecting tax-payers to subsidize a second-rate solution is not a valid answer.

Ultimately what you really need are cheaper methods of generating electricity.

> Thank the engineers who designed and built the power grids for that — but don't thank them too much. Their main goal was reliability; keeping
> the cost of electricity down was less of a concern. That's in part why so many people in the United States complain about high electricity prices.

Can't agree with that. In New Zealand the main goal of the engineers who designed and built the electricity infrastructure also was reliability. The cost of electricity in NZ, while it has increased massively in recent times since the electricity industry was deregulated, is relatively low - and continues to be cheaper than in the USA, Canada, the UK, and most if not all of Europe.

> Some armchair economists (and a quite a few real ones) have long argued that the solution is deregulation. After all, many other US industries
> have been deregulated — take, for instance, oil, natural gas, or trucking — and greater competition in those sectors swiftly brought prices
> down. Why not electricity?"

Deregulation is not the solution.Many essential aspects of infrastructure were deregulated and privatized by successive right-wing governments over the years. The net result in each and every case was increased prices being charged to consumers, and/or reduced quality of service.

So, we can certainly say from experience that "deregulation" is NOT a valid solution for problems in infrastructure areas that are a natural monopoly such as electricity, gas, water, telephone lines, rail, roads, and television. At least deregulation is not a valid solution unless you want to see prices triple!

This sort of legal bullshit only demonstrates how bad the USian legal system is!

Yeah - double doors do seem to be the sensible way to prevent dust blowing in so long as both can't be open at the same time (which would kinda defeat the purpose of having double doors). :)

The idea of keeping the cases of the computers in a (relatively) dust free environment separate from where the people using the computers are situated is also a good solution.

not sure if both are needed. :)

This is rich! Microsoft's software has the poorest interoperability capability of all Office Productivity suites.

Why should MS bitch about this when it's own software cannot even open basic documents created in other office productivity suites?

1600*1200 at 80Hz in a 19" monitor is good for most purposes.

Unfortunately Most LCD screens don't have 1200 vertical pixels in the same physical space as CRT monitors, and their images don't seem to be as sharp. :(