MS has no new geographical markets. It's very mature and omnipresent. The only way to grow is to either expand into completely new markets product-wise which is what it tries to do with varying success rate (xbox, windows RT, zune etc).

In markets largely under their control (desktop, office suites, etc) they can only grow by leeching more money from the customer.

Actually it's "dying" which is a word that certain type of nay-sayers use for "growing" faster than during the recent past, mainly because of consoles losing ground with generation change. Right now, if you want gaming, PC is where decent money can be made.

Pretty much everyone who thinks it's dead should just be shown star citizen or similar projects. People are willing to pay tens of millions while the game is still on the drawing board. Piracy? So what?

If anything, most of the people who got called "paranoid" were actually too conservative in their estimates. That's the scariest part about it.

Actually it started in 1952 because during summer olympics coca cola company entered Finland and started their glass bottle recycling system.

Many people seem to miss that this isn't a legally mandated system. You don't have to use it. But with everyone expecting it, you will face backlash from customers who will ask why you as a company aren't making a basic effort to recycle your bottles.

Wikipedia page does mention that this scheme is in fact unique to Finland and no other country has a system like ours. Which is a bit of a shame, as it's very efficient - they claim over 90% recycling rate across all bottles and cans they work with.

I guess basic compassion is a sin where you come from.

Here in Finland we actually have a very functional PET and glass bottle recycling system. When you buy a drink, your bottle contains a "PalPa" symbol (palautuspantti - english "return pawn" as in pawn shop) with price of the bottle. You pay this price on top of the drink when you make the purchase. Then you can return the bottle into machine at the shop that will read the bar code, recognize the worth of the bottle and print you a voucher for total value of all bottles, cans etc you return. You can use the voucher in the shop for your next purchase.

The old system which was mainly used for glass bottles was fairly complex. They had things like smell detectors used to detect if bottle was still not clean after washing cycle since you couldn't actually break the bottles - you reused the same ones. Many glass coca cola bottles sold here back then had distinct marks of wear on the outer sides where machine probably grabbed them for washing and refilling. They were apparently reused about 33 times on average before they were crushed and glass mass was reused. But the process was somewhat costly because of the smell detectors and other extra hardware needed to ensure safety of the returned bottles.

Nowadays PET bottles just get crumpled up by the machine itself and then sent to factory for melting and being recycled. According to wikipedia http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palpa they get shredded and then reused as anything from new bottles to things like raincoats, bags and even ties.

Same thing is done for aluminum drink cans (apparently we have about 96% recycle rate on cans because of it).

The general idea is that you basically you pay a bit of extra for the container when you buy the product, and you get that money back by returning it into the machine at the shop. I.e. the container is pawned to your, and you get your money back when you return it for recycling. This creates strong incentives to recycle the product rather then just put it in the trash.

Your graphene question has been addressed by bobbied, and the answer to your other question is: right now. Modern GPUs can produce constant 60+FPS on crysis 1 at full details quite easily. In fact, they can do that for crysis 3 (think nvidia titans in sli). It'll just cost you quite a lot. But it's already doable.

The next stage is going to be 4k rendering, and for that, we're not quite at 60FPS+ yet. Though there we are not only hitting the output of modern GPUs, but even the GPUmonitor interface starts to be pushed to the limits.

In all the honesty, at least one part of sony (entertainment division) apparently got the message and has been trying to reform pretty hard. PS4 is a great example of it.

Remember: if you punish someone for past mistakes forever, what incentive is there to improve?

If it did, I'd swallow it and not care. Problem is, tax differential accounts for about 20-30% of the price differential. Small part of the rest is apparently used to "localize games (they don't localize for the part of Europe I live in), maintain offices (no offices here either) and other related spending".

Essentially they pocket the difference because European consumers can afford to pay more. Basically they have acclimated public to higher costs and now happily pocket the extra money due to lack of competition, or more specifically collusion.

Because electric safety rules are for pussies, real men use indoor electric appliances outdoors!

That really depends on the task. In some cases, like being a high level manager 24/7 on call is a reality today. The job description assumes this and compensation also accounts for this.

In some other cases, like base level IT workers, it can happen if you work from home without any kind of extra compensation and you're not strong enough to resist the employer's push. Many people fall into this category.

For many, if not most people it is. While seven fixed most of vista's epic failures to tolerable levels, it still contains quite a few.

Now you can in fact nullify most of the failures that are retained, largely using same software that helps nullify much of win8's fails, namely classicshell. But it's still worse, and personally I'd still be happily running XP if not for lack of proper 64-bit support (specifically lack of hardware drivers for 64-bit version of XP) and lack of DX11 ('m a gamer).

Other than those two features, XP is clearly better in my experience. I don't even mind EOL. I had a workstation in personal use that ran vanilla unpatched XP until well past XP SP2 age because windows update borked itself so hard on the system, it couldn't be updated. I just kept the infection vectors secure and it was fine. I.e. solid firewall, solid anti-virus software, up to date 3rd party software that could be used as infection vectors, no suspicious flash drives and so on.

Not a single virus. Hilariously, when I got myself an XP2 slipstreamed disk I forgot to unplug internet connection before installing. That machine got owned before I could install firewall software. I had to format and reinstall. But vanilla version with up to date firewall etc? No problems whatsoever.

This argument includes a massive lie of omission. It omits the fact that many of the IT services on the internet used by average citizens of those countries are US-based. At the same time few if any IT services used by US citizen are French/German/Russian/Chinese.

This turns the scenario from plus minus zero to one sided dominance. That does in fact have a serious chance of causing more then "scolding".

That said, considering the sheer amount of blackmail material NSA now has on most of the Western leaders and the fact that much of the EU agenda has clearly been driven by US interests in the last decade, we'll likely see more of the german style "verbal agreements to not spy" which will mean jack shit. But we'll see.

Has it ever occurred to you to look at the buildings they are installed in, and note the quality of roofing. I'd wager 10:1 that other parts of the roof, ones with older roofing will leak much, much sooner than the new part with bottle insert will.

You again forget the target countries and communities. Temperatures rarely if ever enter freezing there. This is like trying to argue that every house, including those near polar areas and at equator should have powerful heating and AC. It's simply complete ignorance of real world scenarios.

Even if they had a freak freeze, the ice would not expand enough to do damage, as temperature would simply not fall that much below zero. Essentially as long as the bottle holds, they're golden.