Even popular games that are shipping now do not run under it: that tells me it's obsolete.

I would guess that is only because DirectX 10 is not supported on XP - and the reason, I believe, is because MS wanted to force gamers to Vista(It was kind of problematic that people that were first movers did not really move to Vista)

Few garbagemen comes up with a great idea(Google, Skype, Facebook whatever) and become really rich men. So it's not really a valid comparisation just to compare the income of an average garbageman and an average programmer. You need add the Bill Gates', Janus Friis' and Larry Page's of the world when you calculate average programmer pay! :)

So you think it should be perfectly legal to run into a crowd and scream "BOMB!!! HE HAS A BOMB!!!!" While you start running away with your arms flailing?

Not that THAT was the case here, but there ARE limits to "freedom of speech". You CAN say what ever you want but if what you so directly endangers the lives of others I sure hope you will be arrested.

Go out and take a walk and ask people if they miss having a real PC. I bet they do. If they don't now, they will when the capacity for your servers approaches 80%, and then management will be unwilling to invest in more infrastructure.

So your argument is that if you implement thin clients incorrectly, it won't work? :)

I'm not really for or against them, but lets at least get some better arguments against them than this.

Doesn't trackerless torrents cut down significantly on the traffic in the tracker/bootnode end of things? So it gets even cheaper to distribute big amounts of non-infringing data?

So what is the downside for someone like Canonical to start using trackerless torrents for ubuntu? As far as I can see they would save on tracker traffic.

Why do IE lag behind? Html5 is a PROPOSED standard. Wasn't the original problem that everyone took proposed standards and started to implement them before they were finished?

...when they will think nothing of installing over a gig of .net framework to start playing with C#

Lets let Microsoft spread the FUD please - My installation of .Net takes up pretty much the same amount of space as Java does, around 160MB.

Come play some Fixed Limit in the poker room - in there you will absolutely adore the people that don't get basic statistics. Just remember to be nice to them when you take their money - and order lots of White russians in the process! :)

I think excellent is a pretty big word - there are still quite a bit of static methods that makes stuff like unit testing a pain. Even their newer stuff(Linq to Sql) has this problem.