I have no dispute with your figures - but I was referring specifically to the computer industry. Mrs Thatcher and her ministers frequently proclaimed how we were behind the Americans, even though we had more advanced hardware (transputer) and software in many areas. The public proclamations wrecked our comuter industy's image, and made funding impossible to get - even privately - because the perception was that the government did not want a British computer industry - so why invest in it?

EDSAC was inspired by a trip to the US and a lot of what was developed came from the US originally.

Not exactly the whole truth: During the war, computing ideas were shared between Bletchley Park, whose interest was in language relatied stuff, and Los Alamos, whoe interest was Numerical Computing. There were many transatlantic trips, and knowledge was shared.

After the war, the UK hid all its knowledge for security reasons. In the US, the knowledge was used for commercial profit. Its a cultural difference. The UK was ahead of the US in many ersoects in computing until the Thatcher era, wnen all the industry was trashed, morally and physically.

You are so 2012 - these days people (here in the UK) increasingly are deliberately asking for Android, because their friend was sold a Windows phone and there were no upgrades at all! (or apps). Everyone in the real workd knows the SGS4 is awesome, and those that cant afford it, get a Samsung Galaxy &*%$ instead, which is OK but not great.

Also: plastic or aluminium backs are irrelevant - people put the phone in a fake leather case anyway.

The vast majority of Android phones are Samsung, and here in the UK we often get monthly os upgrades from our carriers (I am on 3, but I have friends on other carriers get upgrades too). The lack of upgrades in the USA is a US problem, not an Android problem.

My 3 year old HTC runs the latest Cyanogenmod the hardware supports (bloatware drove me crazy), and I also have a Symbian phone with the latest Symbian 60 it supports (upgraded automatically by PC suite - the only reason I boot Windows).

In summary: If your Android phone is not running the latest version - dont sign with the carrier when upgrade time comes - and if you actually care, go Cyanogenmod and remove the bloatware.

Most Apps for any OS are diabolical crap - I have paid (or donated) for stuff I wanted, that worked, but I wont pay for stuff I dont want, or stuff that wont work! 95% of crap developers target Android because the barriers to creating crap are low.

Always check the app does not have permission to send premium rate text messages before you install it

and shit rainbows out of the USB port when in Debugging Mode.

If my Samsung phone can do this, I want to known how to disable it!

Well three problems there:

1) Not really a Rogue kind of guy. It isn't my sort of game. I like more story in my RPGs which does, of course, preclude random generation. It is a tradeoff.

2) When you play a game made for a PC, it doesn't translate well to touch. Touch dictates some things be done rather differently to work well, and these do not have the UI to deal with that.

3) As you said, they are old, I've already played them. I like new games, not playing the same ones over and over for a quarter century.

It still quite supports my and the GP's point about the lack of good games for mobile.

It has amazed me how hard it is to find good games for mobile devices. I'm a big-time gamer, I'd much rather play a game than watch TV for entertainment. It is my primary goof-off activity. So I have a nice powerful smartphone (Android in this case), and it would be nice to have some portable games for it.

Some I want just for quick things, like waiting in the doctor's office or the like. Those are reasonably easy to find, I have a small collection of simplistic titles that do the trick for that. Still though it took a good bit of wading through crap to find them, and there were some things that initially looked promising but turned out to be "pay-2-win" that wanted to suck tons of money out of your pocket.

However I also wanted some with more substance, for if I'm traveling or something like that. Those... Well results haven't been great. I've bought some of the highest rated and reviewed stuff and so far it has been at best ok, either than Plants vs Zombies (which I already had on my PC). These are games that would be 5 or 6 of 10, maybe 7 in rare cases on the PC or a console, but are the "best" you find. Symphony of Eternity, NFS Most Wanted, etc are ok to play, but they really aren't up to what I'm used to.

Then some games that used to be good go to shit. Like Zenoia. Not a wonderful game, but at least a reasonably competent Zelda type. I have the first two. There are more... but again they are all pay-2-win crap.

Now compare that to the PC. I have more games then I can play. I have games on Steam I literally haven't installed yet, because I don't have time to play them yet, and I have another list of games I'd like to buy, if I have time. My problem isn't finding games I want, it is finding the free time to play them all.

I'll believe iOS or Android can compete with Sony and Nintendo if I start to see some serious amount of high quality titles out. Not a small handful, many of which are ports, but a real library that regularly sees new releases.

X-Com is a great example: That launched a year ago for consoles and PCs. I played it and loved it. So now had I waited I could get it, with lesser graphics, and a rather cramped UI to be touch enabled... No thanks. I'll stick with it on the first-flight systems, thanks.

If you did, you'd know you can take out as much of your money, any time you like. Things like ATMs have daily withdrawal limits to help prevent theft/fraud, but you can go in to a branch and cash out your balance, any time you like (or transfer it to another bank electronically).

With any regular bank or brokerage, you can take your money out whenever you want, on fairly short notice. This applies even if you have tons of money in it. Now, if you have a lot, like lets say multiple billions of foreign exchange reserves, then placing a sell order on all of it will drop the value, the price will have to go down for all of it to sell, but you can do that, if you wish.

Heck that was part of the problem in the big downturn a few years ago. People were panicking and selling their whole portfolio at reduced prices, which of course feeds back on itself. A guy I know is a financial manager and he would try as hard as he could to convince people not to, since it would realize big losses for them, but they wanted none of that, they wanted it in cash (or bonds, or other safer stuff) and they wanted it NOW. So, he did as he had to and followed their wishes.

As the parent points out, the reason Bitcoin wouldn't let you is ponzi type reasons. If someone big cashes out all at once, that could cause the value to drop a lot, which could cause the whole thing to tumble down. They are trying to make sure that doesn't happen, to prop up the farce.

lynx runs fine

oh, wait ... you are not running Unix on your 11/70?

Consoles are focused on lowest possible cost of their hardware, since they sell to consumers at a loss, or at the best a slim profit. They need their suppliers to give them hardware for bottom dollar. That means you don't get much profit per unit.

Now that doesn't mean AMD is getting screwed, I'm sure they are making money per unit sold, but make no mistake: The reason they got the contracts is they could offer the lowest price and that means a thin profit. So 10 million chips sold in the console is less profit than 10 million sold in a desktop or server or the like.

It is not the grand prize of hardware contracts.

On another note I find it hilarious how fanboys relish in the concept of a competitor doing badly, as if we all wouldn't be more screwed if there was a single company. Personally, I like nVidia GPUs, they work better in my experience. However I'm real, real glad AMD is around. Why? Well if they weren't nVidia could, and would, charge more than they already do, and they wouldn't release new tech as fast.

So if you are an AMD fanboy wishing the death of Intel and nVidia, what you are really saying is "Gee I hope AMD will be able to overcharge me for lower end technology when they have nobody to push them!"

There is a benefit that no one has mentioned yet: HFT can cause the market for a stock to oscillate out of control very, very quickly, and that oscillation can disrupt the trading in the stock. The "circuit breakers" the NYSE put in to damp out-of-control oscillations are pretty much defeated by HFT. Further, HFT disassociates the value of the stock itself from the perceived value created by short-term movement in the market, and so affects the capitalization of a company trying to do business. HFT is also a way to quick ruin, if the algorithms used are not tuned carefully enough -- and particularly if two trading algorithms get into harmonic resonance: think Galloping Gertie, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940.

http://www.vgchartz.com/article/250982/2013-year-on-year-sales-and-market-share-update-to-may-18th/

Relevant part being lifetime sales:

PS3: 77,313,472
Wii: 99,574,394
Xbox 360: 77,311,669

"Every gamer you know" is not a valid metric. Anecdotal evidence is not useful.

Also this is only the 7th gen. Step back to the previous one and the PS2 is the best selling console of all time, over 200 million sold.

Sorry if it shoots your off-the-cuff rant to shit, but Sony is a force to be reckoned with in the console area. So in Nintendo.

So my guess is the reason they did all this stupid shit is publishers. The game publishers are extremely whiny, and extremely dumb, when it comes to the idea of consumer rights. They seem to think that extreme DRM is needed to prevent piracy (not that it has ever worked) and that they'd have way more sales if only they could do that. So there's the "Check in once a day thing." They also HATE the used game market, they really, honestly, act like it is money taken right out of their pocket. So there's the resale restriction. Also they, of course, hate indies, since those guys sell games without publishers, sometimes very popular ones (Minecraft). So there's this latest shit.

Now the reason for MS to do this would be to make publishers happy and thus to try and bribe them in to exclusives. Convince them to release games only for the Xbox, or at least first for the Xbox. Get a library that nobody else has or can have.

Well if that happens, then who knows where it goes? Maybe people stay mad, they say "fuck you" don't buy the console and so on. Publishers will, of course, go where the money is in the long run and the Xbox will get largely abandoned. It'll be a big failure.

However maybe gamers decide they really want those games. They forget or rationalize away their anger and objections and buy the Xbox and the games. This makes publishers happy and the Xbox gets more games and so on.

Never underestimate how short people's memories can be or what a bunch of pansy-asses gamers can be. An instructive example was Modern Warfare 2. They badly fucked over the PC version of the game and it had a lot of gamers PISSED. There was a "Boycott Modern Warfare 2," Steam group. Had a lot of members. So what happened on release day? You guessed it: Tons of people in that group had bought it and were playing it. Their anger was not enough to keep them from doing what they wanted (http://dbzer0.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Boycott-Modern-Warfare-2.jpg).

Personally I think MS is in for a world of hurt, but we'll see. If they appease the publishers, and the publishers in turn deliver what gamers want, well maybe it works out. I hope not, but it could happen.

You might want to look up your terms. MS is not anywhere near a monopoly on consoles. They have about a 30% market share, same as Sony. Nintendo has about a 40% share. This is for consoles, MS has no handheld.

So sorry, but you can't whine about monopoly here, because MS hasn't got one. They are only one player of three, and not the big one. That is not to say this is a smart move (it isn't) but this isn't some case of a big monopoly throwing their weight around. You aren't a monopoly unless you have total or near total control over a market and they don't.

More likely, this is MS trying to make publishers happy to get more exclusive games. The traditional publishers are extremely whiny about many of the things that the new Xbox is supposed to deal with, like reselling games, indy titles, DRM, and so on. The publishers probably told them all the things they wanted, and MS said "Sure!" That looks like it is going to bit them in the ass big time, but we'll see. Maybe MS ends up getting a lot of exclusives and gamers decide they want those, forget their anger, and buy it anyhow.

Either way, knock of the monopoly whining. A monopoly isn't a large company you don't like, it has a specific legal definition.