Vigorous uninhibited intercourse with your workmates is guaranteed to keep you fit - providing it is regular. Certainly seems to work in my job....

Already done in a Charlie Stross novel... people are walking the streets but appear as pixellated blurs... Anonymity in the crowd taken to the extreme... Also reminiscent of Peter Watts - Blindsight. We already knew that eyes are unreliable indicators at best, let's not worry until someone is editing memories...

There is a lot of tight-assed squabbling in the comments about who is the holier.... But hell, any country leaning on the hells kitchen/ dogs breakfast which is current US copyright law gets my support. This whole lawyer sustaining, corporate-intellectual-property-is-US-property bullshit has to be stopped... So go Antigua - and thanks for soothing my inner anarchist...

Elron was a grand jester who invented scientology just to show how it could be done - no matter how stupid or ridiculous the premise. ...And he was right, there are plenty of dumb people to jump on the bandwagon. He'd laugh about it if he could. He was also a very passable sf author and later shenanigans do not detract from the value of Battlefield Earth - a book just praying for a good movie treatment

Simak is not lost! He may be out of print, but all of his works (plus many other 'forgotten' authors) are widely available as bit torrents.... It could be the pirates will preserve the culture....

Don't you call me an Auzie - them's fighting words! The gen-u-ine Aussie is a true-blue, dinky-die, ridgey-didge phenomenom of our times - and you had better not forget it - cobber! (strangles croc and walks off...)

This would never work on me - I Skype too much to be deterred by my own echoes...

Since this quite probably the nearest thing in the world to real democracy - why knock it? I would like the access a Finn has to the policy making of my government...

Quote: 'Anybody know what the sales number is for iPads in mainland China?' - Anecdotal? Yes! - I live in Suzhou and teach in a local university. I see a zillion iPads a day, there are close to 50 million people within a radius of 50 miles of here and an awful lot of them have iPads - many more (per capita) than I saw travelling around Australia last month...Never kid yourself that China has a consumer market whose value can be discounted... these are the guys about to rule the world - with a lot more potential buyers than Europe and the US combined.

Quote: "Typically when you buy worldwide rights, it applies to the entire world, no?" Unquote... Definitely NO. The Apple name belonged to the Beatles and it always was an uneasy truce between them... the 'Hilton Hotel' name does not legally belong to the Hilton Hotel chain around the world - if you don't believe me, have a drink at the unassuming pub called the Hilton Hotel in Adelaide South Australia - not far away from the 'real' Hilton which has been forced to change its name by court order... McDonald's restaurants has multiple name owners in multiple jurisdictions. World wide rights don't really exist - since there is no super global authority to buy them from... Woolworths US and UK were two entirely separate entities - even I-pad has its rival owners. It is probably not a stretch to say 'world wide rights' are more a sign of belligerent bullshit than ownership...

Nice attempt at character assassination, but shows little knowledge of real context. Stallman is not a pedophile, he is a freedom fighter, and fear of the 'pedophilia menace' in western society is akin to the fear of terrorism... both are false positives. This was summed up for me nicely when my 5 year old daughter went missing in a crowded Chinese shopping center. A local man saw my panic and was bemused. "What's the worst thing that can happen?" he said, "An adult will find and look after your daughter until you get her back" He was right of course... Pedophiles are a rare breed, we have just been conditioned to believe pedophiles and terrorists lurk everywhere. 18 year old boys and 17 old girls does not mean pedophilia - it means situation normal...

I haven't bought a locked phone since the '90s (the SUPREME IS will forgive my capitulation in contributing to the never-to-be-sufficiently-ridiculed purchase of my daughters I-phones... I hope...) The truth is, we are all complicit in our greedy acceptance of the benefits of 'locked' whether it be SIM, DRM, or other... We all need (to put it mildly) to wake the fuck up - and understand the big picture. Until that happens - it sucks to be a consumer! STOP buying locked phones. STOP buying DRM'ed media, STOP believing good = cheap... and watch the world change!

Whatever happened to imagination? There are unlimited easily remembered algorithms no one is ever going to guess, mine are not necessarily easily remembered by you - but you get the idea...: 1) Add your birth weight in kilos to your age at the millennium in months, ignore the decimal points - insert the first 8 digits after the first 8 letters of the name of your hero... or dog, or spouse, or favorite spaghetti sauce... 2) Allocate the numbers 1-10 to the first 10 words of your favorite quotation. Take the sum of each group of 5 words, add your Gregorian birthday in day/month/year format, and add together to get single digits which themselves represent a word, insert the digits in the words they represent (1st 2nd or 3rd position etc...) for extra security translate the words into French/Hungarian etc.... 3) Take the telephone number of the apartment your first lover lived in - mix it with registration number of your first car, birthday of your second wife, and the number of tiles on your bathroom wall.... 4) Take the number of electrical outlets in your house/apartment - multiply by your age in leap years, take the first 4 digits of the resulting number to represent the first four paragraphs of your favorite book - then take the first (or 2nd 3rd etc) word as your pass phrase, but include the digits after every 1st or second letter... 5) Google some random trivia and bookmark it - use the use the fibonacci sequence to generate a pass phrase from the 2nd (3rd etc) para of the bookmark... I could go on like this all night - nobody needs a password keeper or generator - if you give a shit (and mostly I don't) use a a set of personal significant numbers and words in combination with some favorite easy algorithm (even rot13 is fine if the the foundations are inscrutable) And remember that your passwords are safe only insofar as you convince powerful folks they are not worth cracking...

Forgive my jaded perspective - respondents to this query are almost without exception fan boys of particular techie solutions. The real solution is far more commonsensical. I have every file I ever created from my 486 SX25 (circa 1990) onwards through a wealth of "blindingly fast' iterations of Pentium machines - my data, insofar as I ever wanted to keep it - is complete and has survived hard drive crashes, laptop and desktop thefts, floods, fire, misguided backup solutions involving CD and DVD, and the most malignant viruses the world felt able to bless me with. I have never had a raid array, a tape backup system - and I hasten to add - I spit in the general direction of your cloud solutions. Clouds are soft, vaporous and wholly subject to evaporation into nothingness. And I have never lost a file I wanted... The painfully obvious answer is - backup your hard drives - keep two copies (at least) of everything (preferably in different locations - I use family member backup and it has never failed) currently I have about 6TB of personal data - all backed up locally plus in at least one external location - this can be done with a handful of drives for an outlay of just a few hundred dollars - add a hot-swappable 3.5 inch drive dock or two and all your data is independent of all your computers. Just remember the rules: 1) The data on your computer is all temporary storage - never rely on it in the longer term - you should be able to reformat at the drop of a hat if you are doing it right 2) One copy is your interim (I don't care if I lose it) position 3) A 'cloud' copy is your 'this is convenient - but lets not pretend this is long term' solution for when you are traveling or using multiple computers in different locations 4) Two copies on site (on separate external drives) is your provisionally safe position (better still - keep one at the office) 4) Three copies with at least one in a remote location means you actually own your data - it is going nowhere without your say so and you will be able to bequeath your digital estate to those who are deserving (they in turn will be able to retain it - but only if they follow the rules above...) There! That's not so hard is it?