Even if true, which I doubt, it's irrelevant. Paris can only control their environment, not the industrial policies of another country. Like it or not, they're doing what they can do.

Oh, no they haven't - they're still here but have been modded down to -1. What level are you browsing at?

So Comcast should give you a cable box (or card) - which subscribers don't get for free - send an installer to hook it up, even if you aren't wired for cable, do the internal paperwork to turn on the box and then when the Olympics is over, back it all out. All for a one-time fee. Sure. Gonna happen.

They certainly are! Sorry, someone had to complete the joke...

What problem are they trying to solve? They want to recover the cost of managers. They can't get rid of the technical staff - they actually need them - but they can get rid of that expensive middle tier by automating the tracking part of management. Which all they think there is to management.

Before you all say "Woohoo", think of this: The CIO is now your boss. You are no longer a person, you're a resource. The only way he knows you or of you is a set of numbers on a report. You either make whatever metric they use to gauge your performance or you don't. They don't care if you're sick, or if you're taking care of a child, or if you've got a personal problem - you don't make the numbers and you're gone.

Ok, let's assume in this wondrous future, you are being driven (can't exactly call it driving if you're not in control) on some country roads and you encounter a very large bull standing in the middle of the road. Your car recognizes that there is an obstruction, stops and waits patiently for the road to clear. The bull waits patiently for the car to go away. Unless they've come up with automated cattle in the future you've got a problem. Since the car has no horn, you (the passenger) have to figure out a way to get the bull to clear the road. You try waving your arms. The bull ignores you. You yell at it, fueled by you annoyance. It calmly looks at the source of the noise and goes nowhere. The car finally figures out the obstruction is permanent, executes a perfect u-turn and runs out of gas because it didn't include having to backtrack when it calculated your course.

Anybody who thinks this is unlikely has never driven on back roads. Will they get rid of horns? I hope not.

Yay! Someone with a good memory. For a long time, the highest quality, highest resolution digital cameras were Kodak. But they were for professionals only. Kodak's big mistake was not wanting to cannibalize their film market and for that they paid dearly.

As the GP said, they still exist. Those of us who still use film (I have two medium format cameras) can still buy Kodak color or black and white film and motion picture film is still available.

Oh, yeah. That'll work ever so well. Everybody will do things in a way that is completely inoperable with every other company and it will be left up to yet another party to integrate it. I mean, it worked great for the American telcos, didn't it?

Didn't imply that that they did, just that I've been working with computers for a while. Could have said Teletypes, card punches or DECwriters rather than CRTs...

As someone who is suffering from declining eyesight because of too many years looking at CRTs, I have to disagree. I recently switched from a first generation iPad to a higher version and have to say that the increased resolution means, to me at least, that the screen is a lot easier to reed. The extra resolution makes the characters on a web page or email a lot less fuzzy and I don't have to concentrate to as much to make out what it says.

Degrading in the sun doesn't do much good when most of the bags are buried in landfills.

They're sold for street use because they have to be. The FIA requires manufacturers in the GT classes to produce 25 cars for the car to be homolagated (allowed to race).

Not to mention that they make very nice rich boy toys, just like all of the other super cars.

Never been to San Francisco, have you?

Let's say all of the BART riders start driving in. They will find themselves adding more traffic to an already congested highway system that will never, ever, get any larger. There simply isn't the space. And once they get to work, good luck finding some place to park...

Yes, but would most people eat a handful of aphids all at once? There's a huge difference between eating the odd insect part or two because they were accidentally introduced in the process and choosing to eat them.

They may, possibly, delver to an outlying area but next day or even second day service is nonexistent. Not to say that it won't keep them from still accepting packages and charging you a premium price for two-day service that they don't intend to honor.