Max Planck was told in 1874 when looking for a university course "it is hardly worth entering physics anymore because there is nothing important left to discover”

This was long before the days of the atomic model, quantum mechanics, radiation, wave-particle duality etc. All that good stuff that brought us all our shiny electronics and the internet,.

The same is still true - the more we know the more we realise that there's a lot more we still don;t know. Just in the last week I've read about gravity dipoles in qyuantum vacuum fluctuations, and discovery of very dark planets to name but two (ok the latter is a discovery rather than an idea, but we'll now need to work on explaining it, which may lead to new tech., or it may not). It just takes a very very long time for these esoteric ideas to turn into actual useful every day stuff.

And if one of those "few innocent bystanders who die" was your kid or your partner, would you still say there doesn't need to be a law?

ahh... I thought so...

What utter rubbish. Just think for 2 minutes.

Firstly... "Once one buys it, they have precisely no rights to dictate how the product is used"
So if you buy a hunting rifle, it's perfectly ok for you to go and kill citizens on the streets? Or buy a car and drink a bottle of whiskey and go out for a drive? The "I own it I can do what I want with it" attitude is bullshit.

Secondly ". Now, you're paying for a chip that could have been sold at the higher clock speed" But you paid the price for the lower speed, not the higher speed.

The difference is that Intel are making ONE version instead of several, you pay for the performance you want. It's irrelevant if the chip CAN go faster, if you wanted/could afford the faster chip you would buy it. Manufacturing one version that can run at several speeds and is sold at different price points is no different to ylu that consumer than manufacturing several versions that can only run at one specific speed. You are stll getting exactly the performance you paid for - perhaps at an even cheaper price as the manufacturer gets the benefit of reduced prooduction costs.

Later if you decide the chip is too slow you can just pay an upgrade fee and have the better chip, ehich would be cheaper than replacing the chip.

You actually win ion this deal as upgrade cosst are cheaper. The manufacturer also wins due to cheaper p[roduction costs.

"Who is the youngest MP?

The youngest MP is Pamela Nash, Labour MP for Airdrie and Shotts, aged 26.
What is the average age of an MP?
- http://www.parliament.uk/about/faqs/house-of-commons-faqs/members-faq-page2/
Following the general election of 2010, the average age of an MP was 50."

Hardly "old" 70 on is "old" 50 is middle aged and 26 is barely out of nappies.

"And PC's are in the same sort of categories - few people have a desktop PC nowadays"

Nonsense.

As I sit here at work I see hundreds of desktop pcs. At home I have a gaming pc as do my three kids. my wife does have a netbook but she only reads blogs and watches the news. I do also have an iPad and an iPhone bit it's still gonna be a long long time before I give up my desktop pc. Most of my friends are the same.

"vacuum tubes...I've never used one, don't own one " Yes you have, and yes you do.., "I have only CRT " google for what a CRT is.

So let's get this straight... You take a bunch of encrypted numbers, never ever decrypt them but somehow still add them together to get the right encrypted answer.

WTF???

No details in TFA but HOW does this voodoo work?

whoa, that's rather bitter.

I commute 20 miles each way on the train and work right in the city centre. Guess what, no wi-fi anywhere from me stepping out my door at home to arriving back again. The train service is a branch line, so no wifi there. OK, there's free wifi for the 2 minutes I'm transiting the train station in the city but other than that.. nada.

At home, why pay for two phone services when I can get unlimited texts and near unlimited free calls on my iPhone plan. More and more people are ditching their landlines in favour of the cell phone plan, or even skype.

so yeah, the smartphone is becoming ubiquitous but to say people should stop using it because the towers can't cope is ridiculous, They need to build more and bigger towers. They can afford it with the money they rake in from users. (e.g. Roaming charges, though getting better, are ridiculous)

Stop being so bitter

So I can't check in with a full bladder now?

>And you're wrong - there are provably secure operating systems.

Citation please?

"I think it's feasible to think that there may come a day when security gets tight enough"

Umm the intertubes is a couple of decades old now and we're still no nearer to this. Your own example counteracts your argument

So... call me, I'll be waiting... (oh and there's another small problem - you can't prove that a system is unexploitable)

Step out you door, head towards a shopping mall. Within you may find something like an entertainment store (HMV/Virgin in the UK) who still continue to stock and sell a surprisingly large amount of these "CDs" containing what some would call "music"

I'm with your OP on the confusion front - not only is increasing the amount of debt bad enough, but the rate of the increase is growing too, Surely sometime soon whoever they borrow money from (and where do you borrow trillions of $ from anyway - something else I don;t understand) want some repayment. I read on the wikipedia article someone linked that US debt is 90-some% of gdp. How the fuck is that sustainable?

Someone point me to government economics 101 cuz I don;t understand this shit.

and you missed the part where they said "so the Galaxy Tab is the Winner, by a nose"

why would it only lock in landscape? that would be dumber than a dumb thing that's really dumb.

Of course you can lock the iPad (original or 2) into either portrait or landscape. You can configure the slider switch to be either your mute button or your orientation lock button (you can still mute by holding the volume down button for a second)

I concur. I work in the Financial sector as a web developer in the UK. 35 hours a week Mon-Fri is all I work. Maybe the very occasional weekend on release weekends (every two months) 35 hours is pretty much the norm in our financial industires in my experiance.