No, ME was basically windows 98 done wrong, and a complete dead end. You're thinking of a NT based OS.

Problem is, if they sue or not, the people lose...

SANRAL should be Suing?!!!

For some context, SANRAL misappropriated a pension fund. A won lawsuit against the city of Joburg would just result in an increase of rates and we'd still have to pay E-tolls on top of that. The city of Joburg may be incompetent in the extreme, but SANRAL is just pure evil.

I am slightly saddened by the fact that you felt the need to link to the wikipedia pyrrhic article. Does anyone here seriously not understand the term?

[rant]I ran into a classic one yesterday. Some Information Services 'engineer' telling me I must use his packaging machine PLC code standard to run his Power Factor Correction System. These guys often have no idea what forces they're playing with. The standard is brilliant for packaging machines I'm sure, which are largely sequential lots of VSDs and axis control, but this is most definitely not the sort of system that can work on this standard. It is completely inappropriate. I applaud standards. I love it when a client gives me a well defined tag naming convention, and a logical plant structure, but keep the bloody IS guys out of the actual engineering please.[/rant]

1 might be related to dual graphics cards. I have to manually disable the disccrete card on boot up (yeah I could automate it, but...) and then I get comparable power consumption. Admittedly I am on Mint 12 (Lisa), but if it ain't broke don't fix it. Sadly Linux does not yet seem to have decent support for the setup where you have a discreet card and a built in intel one. Perhaps when wayland comes, this mess will be sorted, but I have my doubts. Not sure whats up with your phone. Did you at least check the dmesg output?

We could not afford chairs, so we had to sit on piles of money instead...

As it happens, yes...

Yes, they take a lot of the Jobs in SA. Mainly because they're more willing to work and often better educated than their South African counterparts. In any case, since the SA government props up Mugabe, it is sort of a self-created problem. If all the Zimbabweans went home (and former Zimbabweans like myself), the economy here would take quite a hit... Still, you can't empty an entire country...

South Africa isn't too bad. Not too good either, but it passes. The real issue is pretty much nowhere in Africa has a functional democracy. South Africa's does partially work, but not completely. It is really depressing, I know. I lived through the worst of Zimbabwe. If SA goes the same way, I guess I'm leaving Africa. I would be very sad to go though. Africa, despite it's issues is an absolutely amazing place to be.

In the recent elections people were hit by both, so it is progress... Just not progress from a non-Zaunu PF point of view...

When Mugabe refused to allow the UN to administer the money the British were sending him to buy farms for the war veterans (because then he would not be able to steal it, and also, pride "Zimbabwe is a sovereign Nation!"), the money stopped and he had nothing to give the war veterans who then revolted. What happened next was highly predictable in hindsight. He printed money to appease them, which they squandered and inflation ate. So they demanded land and took it.

The problem is, when you're riding the tiger, if you get off it will eat you. I could almost pity the man, except for the slaughter of his own people in the 80s... In any case, if Mugabe dies, the Mujurus and so forth of Zimbabwe will drag it into civil war, since they control the police and the army. He clings to power because if he loses it, he is dead. He once stated he'd leave power in a coffin, and that is likely true even if he resigns. He is actually a very intelligent, though very nasty, person. Most blame his wife who is basically evil incarnate.

Zimbabweans are a peaceful people, they don't easily become violent. If that weren't the case, he would be dead by now. In essence, I guess the people get the government they deserve, though this could have gone an entirely different way had we had someone else as leader.

What the solution is, I don't know. Perhaps a free and fair election could transition power, but Tsvangirai isn't actually good leadership material. Essentially, the cancer has spread to the point where the organism that is Zimbabwe basically may die. Zimbabwe had such amazing potential.

Many do, but many stay because hope is a triumph of optimism over experience. Also, where do you propose they all go? Given the literacy rates a significant proportion of the population can use a computer. While I love the idea of Mugabe sitting alone in a ghost town, it isn't really practical...

Those gadgets? Guess where they come from? I suppose the Chinese could have trained them up in the interim, but for a large part they seemed to be following instructions from their Chinese overlords last time I was there... A couple of ham operators I knew got into fairly serious trouble over the things they were saying back in the mid 2000s, but mainly because they used their own callsigns. To be fair, I did not get my internet through tell-one, who probably did censor things, but instead through Econet, who did not(they had their own satellite link). I never ran across any blocked sites through them, or through the state sponsored university internet. I haven't been back for more than a couple of weeks in 3 years though, so things may have changed, but in the towns you can access pretty much any site you like.

You might be a little surprised if you visited Zimbabwe. The (one and only) thing Mugabe did right was push education, which means a lot of arbitrary schools in the middle of the rural areas have computer labs and things like that. There is a thriving business in old computers there, and it was almost enough for me to support myself.