I do wonder what exactly one thinks Apple is looking to control beyond their devices and the user experience of those devices? As far as I can tell, the only evil Apple does is in their desire to control the use of those devices once they've been sold. I see no evidence that Apple seeks to dominate the entire media landscape, nor whole computer market. Apple is in the business of making the "best" devices possible - no more, no less. The control freakery is all about producing superb, useful products.

Of course there are knock-on effects in some areas and Apple isn't terribly interested in being anyone's partner. Nevertheless, every day I appreciate the user-focused design of their devices.

I do however miss their maker/creator-centric perspective regarding the iPhone (and presumably the iPad). Still, my iPhone is an indispensable navigation/information/communication tool when I'm out and about (I live in London and whenever I travel beyond the M25, O2 do a pretty good job so I can always figure out where I am and where I need to go).

So Apple will dominate the non-crap devices and Apple market, right? Sounds ok to me and very much in the spirit of free-market capitalism.

... creating Photoshop mockups of advertisements in the late 1990s. I remember being in a bullpen with a bunch of underdressed young folk who did little but check the stock price obsessively. It was a strange time and I created more than a few Director-generated .exe screensavers.

To say nothing of the unorthodox eBay shop I set up, only to be shuttered by The Man.

Oh those heady days ...

It's a shame Amazon doesn't run Consumer Reports-esque mini-sites for popular product lines. Now you've inspired me to contribute more reviews to the UK site!

I spent my adolescence staying up all night throughout the summer watching The Twilight Zone on WPIX Channel 11 from New York City (after Star Trek at midnight) and ticking off the episodes in my Twilight Zone Companion.

Although the narrative twists became a wee bit predictable when watched night after night, the humour and humanism of Serling's own scripts and choice of material from others kept the show fresh.

So many poignant moments that showed me what it meant to grow up and grow old, revealed the motivations of others in the adult world. I'm thinking of "A Stop at Willoughby", "Nothing in the Dark" with Robert Redford and Gladys Cooper, and "A Passage for Trumpet" with Jack Klugman - amongst all the other famous episodes.

Bernard Herrmann's music also thrilled me with the evocations of his work with Hitchcock and his own personal projects from the 1930's and 40's. And I was introduced to the work of Richard Matheson through The Twilight Zone and eventually found an old cheap edition of I Am Legend and wondered why it wasn't known more widely.

How I love this show. I need to order the complete series now!

I'm now in the latter half of my thirties and my girlfriend is in her mid-twenties and I was just rambling on about text adventure games. She looked at me like I had three heads and never heard of such a thing.

I distinctly remember a trip to a business with computers (and data stored on punch cards) when I was 10-ish and seeing the opening lines from Zork

A year or two later we bought a TRS-80 Colour Computer (with Extended Basic!) and I learnt to type by spending days and days and days with Pyramid 2000, Madness and the Minotaur, Raaka-Tu, Bedlam ... and went on to enjoy those early "graphical" adventures like the Dallas Quest. I didn't actually play Zork until much, much later.

It's a shame these sort of interactive fictions passed away after the advent of the CD-ROM and Myst.

Here's a link to my favourite, Pyramid 2000: http://www.figmentfly.com/pyramid2000/pyramid.html

My adult life has primarily been spent using various permutations of Apple's Macintosh computers for fun and (quite often) for profit and (always) to further my artistic goals. By day for the past couple of years though, I'm usually forced to interact with a Windows PC running the latest flavour of Win XP.

I really can't imagine why I would ever want to upgrade that PC and why oh why I would ever need anything more than Word/Excel/PPT 2003 on Windows. I really don't. I'm a geek and believe in giving Windows a go now and again and didn't think Vista all THAT horrible at PC World. It just looked like a very fiddly version of OS X Leopard. It isn't for me, but that's ok.

But in ALL of this, I cannot think of one compelling feature that will make my life more rich or work easier in Windows 7. Will Word create my letters? Oh no, that insane .docx file format already makes exchanging files a living hell. Will Excel becoming more comprehensible? Probably not (and forgive this slight troll, but I recently gave Numbers a try and was exceedingly surprised at how well it works - Pages remains a bit lame, though).

I would really love to see Microsoft innovate something that would make interacting with these boxes more pleasing, the manipulation of complex information more straightforward ... but I just don't understand why I would want to upgrade that older Windows PC.

So this will cost me £80 to install on my iMac? That's not all that bad, really.

Surely this is a way for government to clip the wings of a struggling section of the fourth estate? Governments - anyone in power - generally does not look all that kindly on aggressive newspapers that speak truth to power and hold governments to account. I'm sure someone thinks this an ideal way to neuter domestic media by hooking it on public subsidy.

Why not tax paper and create a print equivalent of the BBC? One could call it "Truth" or simply "News". Hmmm.