I'm happy with Netvibes. It has a widget view like iGoogle and a Reader view like Google Reader. I find the latter to be better now. It integrates with Facebook and Twitter, if it's the kind of social stuff you want. It won't push what others like to you, however. That's what Twitter is for.
They sure can't win in court as they're not informed that they're being judged before the judgment is passed. There is no possible defense.
> on something as difficult to prove as "neglecting to secure your internet access"
If the Hadopi said they caught your IP, the evidence is given. They don't have to prove you neglected to secure your access, it's you who shall prove you didn't neglect it by installing a government-approved spyware on your Windows-only PC.
Personally, at the first warning I will get a VPN. The defense is simple.
>They sure can't win in court as they're not informed that they're being judged before the judgment is passed. There is no possible defense.
You seem to be misinformed about the process. I don't remember exactly what the final process is, but the fact is, you can always appeal the decision to have a real hearing.
>If the Hadopi said they caught your IP,
You can always say that your IP was spoofed, that you had a trojan on you machine, and so on... It's really really hard to prove that you didn't do your best to secure your line, and simply giving an IP harvested on a tracker isn't going to cut it.
There are several activists who downloaded a lot just to get caught, with the hope of going to court. They will get good lawyers to make sure they win, and then the decision will do "jurisprudence" (I don't know if a similar concept exist in American law), and that will be the end of it. Well, probably, I don't know the future :)
As far as I know, Eurozone businesses and individuals can have their bank account anywhere in the Eurozone. Paypal and Stripe may only have offices in Luxembourg to serve all EUR countries. That's the upside of a unified market. The UK and other non-EUR countries have renounced to it.
You don't even have to be in the eurozone, I know UK companies which have euro accounts with international banks such as HSBC, which sit alongside their sterling accounts. The same goes for dollars, and probably other major currencies as well.
They just replaced the pretty but useless wallpaper on the desktop by a full-screen version of the start menu. Start typing 'wo' and you get the link to Microsoft Word (and WoW, and your 'wonderful.jpg' file, etc), just like in the old start menu.
The main 'revolution' in this Metro UI is that it's a tiling window manager, one that was made user-friendly with gestures to manage tiles. It leaves the WIMP desktop metaphor to an easily accessible legacy mode (and MacOS). Tiling WM are not especially keyboard-unfriendly, nor reserved to small screens.
Personally, I think Microsoft is moving in the right direction.
Windows Azure seems pretty cool. At least it has the best relational database of the big three clouds, and the best blobstore+CDN solution. However, it makes IIS mandatory, which seems (I'm still learning) to be optimized for short queries. iisnode should make long-polling and websockets possible.
I have a 17'' (1920*1080) laptop at home and a 27'' iMac at work.
For displaying the likes of Netbeans, both are comfortable. I don't display the browser in full screen on the iMac because it's ridiculously large. For watching videos however, the 27'' are impressive. I would say programmers don't need huge screens nor multiple ones but I suppose it depends on one's preferences and habits.
I don't think the critics of the NYT where out of touch with reality. The big 3 French newspaper (lemonde.fr, lefigaro.fr, liberation.fr) are all much easier to scan than the likes of the NYT.
