There's no such thing as the "EU high court". This was a ruling by the British High Court.

Your response shows that you didn't hear. The beta is an experiment that has failed. Accept that and move on.

Beta must be abandoned as a failed experiment. It is awful - not due to bugs, but due to the intention behind the redesign. Your existing 'audience' is what makes slashdot. If you want a larger audience I suggest you create a celebrity gossip website. Awful.

Tell him it's an industry standard, and give him the names of a couple of websites that use it: pannasonic.com for a start,

What, like people who sell eye-patches, parrots, and wooden legs without asking for ID?

I'm down to 2 Windows machines now; My wife's laptop - she needs IE for remote access to her work PC, and my media center - the games I want to play run fine on Wine, but I'm still haven't been able to get a user friendly bluray setup (which means disk goes into drive and plays without further user intervention) on linux. Irritating.

You don't realise how big a 128-bit address space is. As for a 1024-bit address space, why would every atom in the observable universe need over 10^200 IP addresses?

Texas got Explorer .

Maybe his language of choice is Prolog.

No. The NHS does not work. The reason US politicians who are opposed to universal healthcare always use the NHS as an example is because it is the among the very worst state healthcare providers in the developed world. The NHSis an example of how not to do state provided medical care - many countries make public healthcare work far more effectively (and US healthcare is an example of how not to do private medical care - many countries make private healthcare work far more effectively).

That's why pension funds typically move investments into lower risk assets as the ages of the owner approaches retirement.

Most boring story ever?It's not even the most boring story today. Gears of War 3 released is - derivative sequel of derivative sequel of original that fails to be anything more than just another FPS with nothing to distinguish it from any other example in a crowded genre.

A compacting GC is often a win over naive manual memory management - they improve cache coherency and speed up dynamic allocation. Of course, using smarter allocation techniques (small object pools etc) instead of general purpose allocators (new/malloc) can provide even grater benefits to GC - but that's what Google were talking about when they said "extensive tuning efforts". In other words, a C# or Java application using GC can outperform a naive C++ application because of, not in spite of, GC. The worst case is when somebody decides that every dynamic allocation belongs inside a shared_ptr *shudder*.

Sounds more like misconduct in public office.

We can't evaluate the methodology because the methodology hasn't been published. From what we do know, neither the testing nor the data released was objective - the tests compared bleeding edge releases of IE9 to an obsolete versions of Chrome, and the data they chose to publicise focussed on the single areqa in which IE9 triumphed, despite it performing poorly in other areas.