...while Google's search engine 'prevents them from making decent money online... There is only one way that newspapers can break out of the prison...

Or they could find other ways to make money with news online in this new century. Looking at the Netherlands, nu.nl (Dutch online newspaper, started out as a news aggregator, employs its own journalists now) is doing fine. Bailing out of Google is bad for traffic, even if Bing would start to see more users. If there's something that newspapers do not want, it's less traffic to their sites. So, if they're not stupid, they'd find some other way to make money and just stay listed in the Google index (and with Bing and all the others).

That's a big "if", though.

That's rich. First you disregard the correct terms the law has set for copyright infringement and theft of property, then you admonish people for not obeying that same law. All without the use of proper punctuation!

> ultimately that will screw poor people who don't have money to buy it.

You mean HEALTHY poor people.

Well, that's not true. If a company fucks something up, like take stock value over efficient delivery of the goods they provide, or prefer short term profit over long term investments, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Sure, you can go to a "competitor" who is equally bad because their bottom line is stock value as well, not consumer satisfaction or crap like that. How is that free market thing working out for you?

At least with a government run utility, you can vote them out of office. I totally agree that that's not working out for most Americans either, but at least you can theoretically change that with your vote.

Also, you don't really think you're not paying for the private companies' investments, right? You're paying for them after the fact, which is good, but you keep on paying for them even when they're paid off. Which bad, unless you own stock in the company... which you're funding by yourself, partly.

Please read the GP. He's talking about the difference between Miss Kittin and Scooter. Scooter! There's a difference between "broadening your taste" and licking out a septic tank.

Are you aware of the Chrome (not Chromium) binaries?

http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel scroll down to Mac and download the dmg.

Exclusivity agreement with the telco.

Though your point is fair, the other side is what you have now. Bottom line is (short term) profit measured in dollars American, not customer satisfaction or cultural significance or being leaders in the online community or any of that socialist crap. Shiny green dollars.
So what if you live in a moderately large city without a good deal on dsl? So what if your neighboring city does have decent broadband? So what if your connection is flaky? There is no competition due to the exclusive license and the way to make the most money is to squeeze every last cent out of you through dialup, then low cost dsl.
Sure, there's loads of dark fiber, but that would screw with the current business model.

All the while, Japan and Europe, especially Scandinavia, are laughing at your slow and expensive connections.

See, I understand where this is coming from, the status quo and a thorough belief in free markets and all. What I don't understand is that if there's a clearly better alternative that would involve government involvement or anything remotely socialist, suddenly loads of people (who would directly benefit from the change!) are against it.

"What is a Social Contract?"

Correct! For $1000!

The Atom is nothing to sneeze at and should do more than fine for a SOHO fileserver, but it's not a C2D processor. The Mini as advertised here is a full blown desktop PC with all bells and whistles, and it _still_ only uses 16W idle. That's where the additional cash goes.
Also, it's not easy to find a decent (80+) PSU with good efficiency in the lower watts. The PicoPSU is great, but adds another $40 plus around $40 for an adapter. Which should also be 80+ again.

With EXTREME PREJUDICE???

Also the Hero has Windows Mobile 6.5.

Yeah, and what's with the name: Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft?

Copyright Theft? Is that where I catburgle Universal HQ and make off with the copyright papers for the latest hit artist? How can a copyright be stolen?

On the other hand, have you ever seen a Mac with a virus scanner? Sure, you can get them for free too and they're not half bad, but most users will go for brand names anyway, like Symantec or McAfee. And what about spyware scanners? The good ones are free, but is the time spent scanning for *ware free as well? You could have been doing actual work.

- Strong command line (svn, ssh, scp, grep, the entire unix command suite like diff and tail -f and tee and xargs etc)

- Very decent and free native IDE (XCode)

- My current favourite IDE for Java, IntelliJ IDEA, runs well, no crashes or slowness (though it works well on Linux and Windows, too)

- Built-in apache, native mysql, all in a server-like environment due to the BSD underpinnings

- Hard to describe and very cliche sounding, but OSX has a high get-out-of-your-face value. No big borders, no nag screens, no activation, just the apps you need

Downsides:
- No TortoiseSVN (I don't mind, the command line svn and IntelliJ's built-in client are enough)

- MySQL tools are lagging behind Windows development sometimes

- Sometimes slow with the Java updates

OS's these days have to be usable by anyone, from grandma to hardcore developers. Windows solves this by going lowest common denominator on you. You can bend the OS to your will, no problem, but the nagging is always there (sure you want to open the program files folder? I mean, you could break something!!) OSX is easy enough to use for a granny as well and definitely has its quirks, but you only have to whip open the terminal, type sudo and you have true access to everything.