And of course, it also make's it very expensive for large companies to come up with a slew of extremely embryonic ideas and patent them.

Of course, it does help the small inventor by quickly showing him that any creative effort on his part is a complete waste of time, and he would be better off getting a job making the coffee in Microsoft.

Damn right.

Netcraft couldn't confirm a restaurant booking.

You forget that this settlement was agreed with the EU by Microsoft.

The original position of the EU was probably that Microsoft was abusing their monopoly position and they should be denied the right to ship a browser with Windows at all - which would put Windows at a serious disadvantage.

Remember that a similar case in the US had the DOJ at one point looking for the break up of Microsoft.

This browser "solution", while farcical to you is in fact the best compromise that they could come up with, and given the alternatives I don't think your point of view would be supported even by Microsoft.

Or "First Post"

Damn you!!

Trademark the name McAuroch - you'll make a fortune.

Microsoft don't have any tools that can effectively read that format.

First, why does market share make any difference at all? I'm not going to use IE ever and no amount of statistics is going to change that.

However, when companies and governments provide products and services they will always target the most popular browsers and they will most definitely include the version number, and that will go on the side of the box.

These figures now mean that I, with my firefox 3.5, will be given the best and earliest consideration when services are provided, followed by those using IE8 - so for instance when I go to buy some thing off a website, my experience will work, while those using IE6 (bless!) will have to suffer (Mwahahahahahaha!!!)

The total figures are just for fanboys who want to claim Microsoft is better than Linux or vice versa or whatever. Good luck to them, I'd rather have stuff that works.

How can you possibly predict that next year will be 2010?

I quit 4 years, 3 months, 9 days, 7 hours, 14 minutes and 52 seconds ago.

And I don't miss them at all.

I must be misunderstanding you...

You seem to be suggesting that someone with no self-esteem is worse off than someone who is the deceased victim of some deranged Thomas Harris-styled lunatic serial killer?

That's really going to help raise their opinion of themselves.

This was extremely useful in the 1980s when certain television channels were available from Sweden and Holland but only in a scrambled form.

Hang on, I read that wrong:

"National Satiety Alert System".

I thought it was something else. My bad.

Red, definitely Red.

Can't I have both?

That's disgusting.

I know this is petty - but what the heck.

CajunArson, what hope is there for me reading 20 odd points of a complicated patent application, when you can't even read 9 characters of a user name?