Google "Poe's Law".

But the thing about the cellular network is that it's incredibly resilient. Some years ago we had a major earthquake here that wiped out significant chunks of a city and the surrounding area. No power, no water, nothing. The cellular network partially functioned (on banks of lead-acid batteries at many cell sites) until crews got generators in as a priority (which included, among other things, competing cellphone providers servicing and powering each others' gear), and cellphones themselves were battery powered and kept going while (mostly) mains-powered radio receivers went silent. So the cellular network, while overloaded due to the scale of the disaster, continued to provide service. For the subset of radio stations that were still operating, very few people were able to listen.

Good technical summary, but there's another point you missed: Why would I want to use my retina-display facial-recognition streaming-video touch-sensitive camera phone as a freakin' 1930s-vintage wireless set? My phone (Chinese-made) has the FM radio componentry in it, but the only thing I've ever done with it is remove the icon for it to stop it cluttering up the desktop.

Asking the Betteridge's-Law-confirming "Does Lack of FM Support On Phones Increase Your Chances of Dying In a Disaster?" is equivalent to asking "Does Lack of a Wagon Singletree (for horse-hitching) on a Car Increase Your Chances of Dying In a Disaster?". For both cases there's probably some form of specially-constructed disaster you can come up with for which the answer is yes, but in practice, the answer is no.

Well you have no-one to blame but yourself for that, if you'd remembered to tape on your Brilliant Pebbles with Teflon Tape, plug in your Tice Clock, and outline the speaker in Green Pen, then you'd have noticed the difference immediately, with strong bass in impact and quantity, clear mids, nice extension and clarity in the trebles, and one of the best soundstages in the market, the physical properties of width and depth producing a sense of great size and space when listening (except that final bit where the third cellist from the left paused to scratch their elbow, which upset the recorded acoustic imaging a bit).

Yeah, but it's from Google, and whatever Google wants, Google gets. They've already done this with SPDY, rammed through the IETF with unseemly haste as "HTTP 2.0", with any objections either ignored or declared out of scope. I don't see how QUIC will be any different, the IETF will rename it to give the impression they had some input into the process, but that'll be all.

You bastard! You complete, utter bastard! Just out of curiosity I tried Bing maps and... it's everything Google maps isn't. I now actually like a Microsoft product.

Some day, I'll get you for this.

Of course they did, on the same people that Slashspot tested Beta on.

I have a permanent redirect for Google maps, just go to Google Maps Classic. Of course now that they're discontinuing it, the utility of the redirect will be limited (sigh). Now it'll be a toss-up between which sucks less, new Google Maps or Apple Maps.

(ObAppleMaps joke: A man using Apple Maps walks into a bar. Or a church. Or a cinema. He's not quite sure.

A sheep pen, a ewe,and three lambs with suspiciously human-looking features doesn't count there mate.

Well, except perhaps in Australia.

And that's what's really going on here, he was ducking into the lav to toss one off but since masterdebation is still illegal in Dubai he had to come up with this ludicrous red herring involving an iPhone and toilet paper. Suspiciously soggy toilet paper...

I know that sounds like cynical marketroidism, but sometimes you do need to do that to wean people off some hideously ancient version they're still running on an old 386 under Netware 3.1 bricked into a wall next to the second floor men's toilet. "Last 3 major versions" sounds like a pretty generous strategy, we do "last n minor versions", where n is usually spread over 2-3 years. In other words unless you have a long-term support contract, if you come to us with a problem in a product written in the heyday of Windows XP, you're told to upgrade.

It's kind of a surprise they shipped it at all. I didn't know what this thing did without a bit of googling, it appears that it's custom software that allows you to display multiple windows at once on your desktop, like, um, what's that Microsoft OS called that does that too? Not Microsoft Window (aka Windows 8), but the one where you can have multiple windows tiled across your desktop.

Oh yeah, Windows 1.0, that was it.

And I appreciate that, I really do, although I wish you had less crap on your machine, it's slowing down the warez site I'm running on it. Some of the other guys have been complaining as well.

Oh, and could you at least write or call your mother once a week or so, I'm getting sick of seeing her nagging in your inbox.

We're bashing LG here, not Samsung. It's their turn next week, after we do Microsoft on Monday.

Probably out of embarrassment. It may be called the Airlander but Flying Buttcrack

would be a better name. If that thing was flesh-coloured instead of white it'd be on porn sites.

I was rather shocked when I first ran Firefox on Android, I was expecting,well, Firefox, but what I got was some massively dumbed-down piece of junk that was worse than a range of no-name Android-only browsers from vendors I'd never heard of before. I eventually went with one of them, and at one point submitted a bug report. Within a few hours I had a reply, and a fix. It was everything Firefox should be, but isn't.

I've been a Firefox user since Phoenix 0.3, but none of my mobile devices runs it, and desktop is only hanging on because of all the plugins (of which, admittedly, about half are installed just to undo all the crap they've done to the browser in the last few years).

Still, at least they're hard at work on Firefox OS, which is what the market has been crying out for.