also with Russian corruption reaching 20% of GDP and the sliding internation perception of corruption now 154th out of 178 (higher is worse) you have to wonder about any investment made in that nation now. Even BP is sick of all the corruption and back sliding that they have pulled out even though russia is up to it's eye balls in natural resources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Russia

I can see a monty pythonish like skit on this in the making

IT Manager "yes sir as you can see 80% of our staff are female"
Govt official "are you sure, to be honest they just look like a bunch of men in skirts"
IT Manager "no I can asure you our IT staff are 80% female, just ask eeer John eerr itta any question you like"

article and change IT to "social care" positions and female to "male" and get away with it. Day care centres and nursing are predominant staffed by females so one could say those types of services are hurting themselves with e disconnect with about half of the population..

Nice try at attacking lawyers but the ACCC is a fully funded government dept who's job is to enforce consumer rights and corporate industry regulations ie they don't care about the money.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Competition_and_Consumer_Commission

When he gets down there he may find were the studios hide the unsold copies of Piranha II: The Spawning

I had an interesting chat with our MD and while he was in China they told me a very interesting story. He was having dinner with a HK investment and manufacturing company and they were talking about jobs and supplying product within China and dealing with main land officials. So the story goes one day an official comes to the factory in China and during negotiations he asks them to fabricate equipment that will fail at a set time. The logic being that once the product fails people will have to buy another one thus this creates jobs. Well our friend in HK said to the official he will think about it then never contacted the guy again because we pride our selves on making solid ISO spec products. Now this raises the question if the Chinese officials would attempt to tamper with a small manufacturer that "they do not own" or have even a partial ownership of then what would they be tempted to do with a company they actually owned.

One small problem with those benches, they are all single threaded bench's. A single core in a T3 tablet is slower than a single core in an iPAD but when you add all four cores in the T3 tablet together they work out faster. So testing cores yes the Apple iPAD 2 would win but when you multi thread the tests (need ICS for that and also the newest barely out of beta bench tests) things look very different.

I have noticed since the crack down more and more people have been taking NAS boxes to LAN parties and sharing files. The reality is I find it easier now to get stuff now than before (download 20 gig per hour on a decent LAN). People will always share stuff especially if they know someone who cant afford it. When I was in college in the 80's we used create our own mix tapes and share them all the time. I did buy music but only stuff I liked and the rest I got was just filler that I deleted after 6 months.

The mantra for the future should be "It's not the hardware or the OS, it is the content stupid". If you can create a device that enables the end user to easily access content of their choosing then you are on a winner. The issue has always been ticking all the boxes, apple was the first to do so and android soon followed. So yes Intel is dead on the money, the hardware is a minor player but at the same time important as it is one of the many tick boxes that must be implemented correctly.

Thew sad part about Saudi arabia is the males all do religious studies and the females all do degrees in medicine and accounting. It so bad now that over 70% of the skilled work force is now female and they earn over 60% of the average families income. The male population in the middle east is living a religious none reality.

marriage had nothing to do with religion originally, in fact for common serfs marriage was not even on the cards. Marriage was orignally a property contract between rich and powerful families.

1. this has nothing to do with China 2. USA is just as bad as China when it comes to covert internet access, just that China doesn't run around complaining like a little girl when it happens.

Yes but that defeats the logic of what makes a console good for both the consumer and the games developers. With a fixed hardware platform there are less un-knowns thus the time to market is faster as the debug cycle is shorter.

I think Copyright should have a none commercial use waver on all national culture of great historical significance ie MLK "I have a dream" speech would be a great example. When people can toll booth a nations cultural history especially with things of great significance it shows how truly broken copyright is.

I live in Australia and I have yet to see anyone with a WP7 powered device in hand. I catch the train to work every day and the train is full of people using their phones/tablets/tablets/mp3 players to pass the time. If you go to any mobile phone reseller WP7 handsets are never up front and in many cases are not even on display in the shops front window. I can only imagine the numbers Microsoft are showing are stock figures not actual sales especially considering most wholesalers are stocking up as the AUD dollar is very good (I work for a wholesale electronics company and our warehouse is full to be brim).