Love my Lumia 950, it works very well, does everything I need. Occasionally there's an app I wish I could use, but not enough to be a deal breaker. Microsoft did a great job making its apps responsive and I enjoy using the same software on my laptop and phone. I'm sure this will be an unpopular opinion but there was and still is nothing technically wrong with Windows Mobile. Sadly it looks like it won't be getting any further feature updates but the current version is still supported for quite a while yet.

Pretty much the only reason I let my "smart" TV connect to the Internet is for firmware updates. Don't think I've had one in a while though now so assuming they've stopped being developed I may disconnect it soon.

BASIC on the Commodore 64. You could just turn it on and immediately start typing lines of code :-)

Indeed, I too have noticed this. I come here for what is usually interesting, intelligent and informed discussion, but the whole scene changes when the topic is climate change. I guess the subject causes a lot of cognitive dissonance and people find the reality of the situation harder to come to terms with than I had realised.

Seconded. The comments and discussion are the main reason I visit Slashdot several times a day. The new design is an absolute nightmare for reading comments, as they are squashed into an extremely narrow column.
Simply put, if the new design becomes the norm and there's no way to fall back to the current (non-beta) design, I will be visiting a lot less, and will consider it a great loss.

I suspect that game licensing is precisely what it's for. My guess would be that the console will require verification of a newly introduced game disc at the moment it's loaded. There are no useful user-friendly reasons for this always-on connection that I can see. I think the main reason it's required is for game DRM.

You're right. According to Ars Technica (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/01/microsoft-messenger-service-not-going-anywhere-just-yet/) XMPP support will remain until October, and then the network itself will be turned off in March 2014.

I was trying to prevent confusion, not be a "smart ass", so I apologise if I gave the wrong impression. However, this is nothing like comparing versions of Outlook. Outlook has always been an end-user e-mail client, wheras the two messengers in question are not alike. One is an IM client, the other was a built-in Windows system service that one typically interacted with at the command line ("net send" etc.).

Unrelated - the old Messenger service is nothing to do with MSN. The GRC article even says so: "The first thing to understand is that the Windows Messenger Service is completely different from, and not in any way related to, "MSN Messenger", "Windows Messenger", or any other well-known instant messaging system."

Makes me wonder what they're going to do about the Messenger clients built in to: Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone 7, Xbox 360, etc. If these clients are going to stop working, will they push out replacement updates for all of them in time? I doubt it. The current version of Windows 8 Skype app is awful - if that's going to be their primary IM solution on Windows 8 then they're going to have to improve it pretty rapidly between now and mid-March.

Same here. The company I work for recently moved offices and we didn't bother getting a phone system in the new place. We got a bunch of USB handsets that were desgined to be used with MS Communicator / Lync, but they work great with Skype.

So far the outcome is overwhelmingly in favour of keeping their current "SRR" and Data Use Policy, by about 10:1.

Your snarky reply implies that we cannot continue without fossil fuels. If that's true, then we're just as screwed once they run out. So, we can either transition to clean energy sooner, or later, or never - pick one.

Agreed. We may or may not be at peak oil, but either way there's a heck of a lot more fossil fuel left to dig up, and I just cannot see any way that business will let themselves be denied that wealth.