Without regulation to prevent it, why wouldn't the monopolist start a new company of it's own to undercut the competitor until it runs out of money and then wind down it's new company returning everyone to the monopoly, or keep it running with slightly lower prices to make it look like there's competition where none exists.

It's a segue way to deep packet inspection and bandwidth metering/shaping.

You all know how IT Dilberts can get away with pure lack of inspiration or willingness to provide service by using the "it's a security problem" trump card...

I thought it was in this case (I saw it on the BBC teletext pages a couple of days ago and laughed and the innovative idea - people will love the "win money" together with "spy on people like the Big Brother house" idea) but I wasn't sure and couldn't be bothered to RTFA. Not that it'll stop people whining about how terrible Britain is as a CCTV nation.

Personally I'd rather have the CCTV that can help catch criminals by tracking their movements while police get to the scene than having any idiot who has the money carrying a gun!

Although it's typical for thin women to have little cleavage, sometimes you see the rare thin woman with large breasts.

I know a woman like that, and hers are silicone. Hint to any young females out there who are thinking about breast augmentation -- silicone gets hard as it ages. When you hit forty, your tits will be hard as rocks. Hers are.

I suspect you've hit the nail on the head.

If you don't care to stretch yourself much and just want a machine that does e-mail and web browsing, pretty much anything will do. If you want a bit more, then the built-in apps for the Mac will cover you better than 3rd-party software for Windows.

But, if you really want to stretch and need to do something different, chances are you can't do it at all in within the limitations of the Mac (no worries about how to make 3 monitors work, for example), but you might have a problem doing it on Windows, so you'd ask for help.

Well, maybe his Display Name is Bob Morgan.

Really?

The Windows XP support policy was detailed on the all display stands and web pages where WinXP has been sold on a Netbook in the past year?

This isn't just about people who read tech websites, Microsoft have sold plenty of WinXP licences in the last year to people who won't have had a clue about Microsoft's support policies.

I'd be very surprised if your copy operation didn't encounter errors. You won't notice them because of the error correction techniques employed. Of course, genes have error correction too - it's just they can do it on-the-fly without having to recopy the source data to a new area on the genome...

Unless you're getting paid for that research. Then you hold out until every proponent of your theory realizes there is satisfactory evidence to discount it.

Then there's something about the dwarves digging too greedily and too deep...

Seems Microsoft hasn't really released anything worth protecting via patent in quite a while. At risk of sounding flame baity, I humbly submit one simple question:
What would it help globally, if they were able to unilaterally enforce software patents?

The knee-jerk reaction is to think of all the licensing revenue and such, but we're used to thinking in that manner. We've been force fed this rhetoric for years, whether we agree to it in principal or not. Thinking more realistically, I don't believe a truly innovative company has much to gain by spending dollars and raw efforts with such nonsense. By the time anyone would be able to reverse engineer or copy such innovations, the market has often caught up or moved past what would be covered by the patent anyway.

I think it makes more sense to simply go back to striving to be the best, rather than the biggest in your field. I think Microsoft has forgotten how to do this, and they're starting to feel the pains of this "new" direction. Back when Chicago ...err.. Windows 95 came out, the entire world was squirming in their seat to get it. There was true innovation in there. When Windows Vista came out, we were collectively cautious and ultimately soured. Stark contrast if there ever was one.

I'm sure some of the world's top talent is employed by Microsoft, but aren't able to let their works shine due to the mechanics of the large slow moving corporate machine.

Corporations vote with their wallets, and those votes carry much more weight than the vote of a person.

But corporations are legal persons.

It's not that I'm not buying Wii games deliberately out of spite. I'm not buying them because there hasn't been much that has interested me. I'm looking forward to Contra Rebirth on WiiWare and Super Mario Kart whenever the heck they decide to release it in North America.

Another annoying thing about Nintendo for me is their love of peripherals. Wii Motion Plus should be $10 max, not $25 (Here in Canada). So now if you want to buy a new Nunchuk/Wii Remote/Motion plus combo you are coming in at about $100! A tad pricey IMO. At some point I may break down and get it when a game I want warrants it, but since its rather expensive I'm not buying it without thinking twice. I think Nintendo is hurting themselves by pricing it so high. I know the high price sentiment has prevented other friends from buying it and the games that work with it, especially since so few games do at the moment. Yeah I know it is packed in with Wii Sports Resort and Tiger Woods 10, but if you get Resort you pretty much have to buy another Motion Plus since its predominately a multi player game. No thanks Nintendo, I've already blown enough on Wii peripherals for the time being.