now that we know that governments can turn off Google.

For some time now I have been happily reducing my reliance on both my memory and on paper records as I move all the stuff I need to remember over to digital storage. The pay-off for this is that "me+google+wikipedia" is smarter than "me+a few textbooks" and is a whole lot smarter than "me+ my half remembered facts from college".

The danger however is that should someone hit the fabled internet kill switch I would quickly revert from being 21st century cyber- man back into a clueless Neanderthal while the chap who has been learning tables of logarithms by rote would continue to thrive.

I love Opera. I use it on my dektop, my laptop and my phone. I love the way it all integrates together. I love the look and feel. I love the way it has so many useful features built in as standard (things like clone tab and view tabs side by side). I love the speed dial page that doesn't try to outguess you (looking at you Chrome). I love the option to enable server side compression very useful if you are on a slow network connection or subject to a download cap.

I love all of these things but Opera is the buggiest browser I have ever used. Version 10 was particularly bad in this respect with a number of serious bugs making it through beta and into live (incompatibility with many web forms for example). At this stage in 10's life most of the bugs have been addressed but I am worried it will start all over again with 11.

For those who didn't get the reference above to Jozin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4aqM_wu6Ns

About 15 years ago my rural dwelling brother law was a leading light in a somewhat successful local campaign against the "radiation masts" that were sprouting up around the country side. As a city dweller who lived even then in a veritable sea of electromagnetic waves I was pretty sceptical of their protests and today , 15 years later, I am amused at his constant complaints that he cannot get a decent phone or internet signal.

I am old enough to remember the tabloid headlines that predicted pocket calculators would make us all dumb because no one would know how to do long division by hand any more. Well here we are forty years later and sure enough most people can't do long division by hand but it doesn't matter because they have access to a tool that do enormously complicated calculations in the blink of an eye.

I think that all tools, whether they are pocket calculators or internet search tools make us smarter by greatly expanding the things we can do. Google has become an extension of my brain and today thanks to the miracle of mobile internet I am almost never without instant access to an enormous library of information. Because Google remembers everything I don't have to. That doesn't make me dumber that makes me smarter because I can still find the answers whenever they are needed and I can use my brain cells for genuinely new ideas.

I went to college in the early 1980's and we could only dream about new fangled 1980's technology like the 8088 and 6809 while we cut our teeth on 1970's era 6800 and 8080 processors.

Will existing PCs with an AM3 socket be upgradeable to bulldozer, anyone know? I see a few people asking on forums and stuff but I couldn't find any authoritative answers.

Sounds like a good law to me but I assume that a complementary suite of protection is required to indemnify the employer against any activities undertaken by an employee under the protection of privacy. For example if an employee sends you a hate mail using a company email account then then you cannot sue the company.

Sturgeon astutely pointed out that 90% of everything is crap. In this era of information overload it has become impossible to sensibly sort out the good 10% from the crap 90% so the only rational solution is to narrow your focus to the first few non-crap pieces of information you happen to stumble upon. We nerdy types often berate non techies for the non-optimal way they use technology and yet for the vast majority of people life is just too short to figure out the "best" way to protect your files against antivirus or the quickest way to rename a group of files. It is entirely rational that most people latch on to the first method they stumble across which sort of works and stick with it.

Apologies in advance for jumping on this bandwagon but I too am not happy with Thunderbird 3. My two favourite shortcut keys (G for grouping and \ for compressing groups no longer work). I guess I am not a huge fan of the tabbed mail concept either. I always seem to be left with mails hanging open in tabs.

Mind you in a fit of disgruntlement I had a go at using gmail as a mail client and I am happy to report that even with its current troubles Thunderbird is way better. If you get more than a handful of emails per day the usability of gmail stinks and gmail is probably the best of the web email clients.

Yes this is awesome but before you youngsters get too uppity about it I remember a time when all arcade games were basically like this. You actually controlled a little toy car or a little submarine or whatever. Mind you in those pre-microprocessor days the games were laughably crude compared to Jehmlich's masterpiece but us old timers gotta grab every chance we get to adopt a condescending air of "seen it all before"ness

I think its more serious than that Chowderbags. Most budget desktop can play modern games with a simple graphics card upgrade. Perhaps not with all the bells and whistles turned on but they will play them . This was the entry route to PC gaming for most people. When that same would be gamer discovers that there is no way to upgrade their laptop graphics then that is the end of the story.

I spent this morning browsing high street computer shops helping a relative to buy a new machine. I came away convinced that the "home desktop" will soon be a thing of the past. The shelf space dedicated to home desktops has shrunk to almost nothing while the shelf space dedicated to laptops, netbooks etc has grown and grown. Most significantly the price of a general purpose laptop is now lower than the price of a general purpose desktop. This isn't going to affect casual PC gaming like Farmville and pop cap games but it is certainly going to shrink the market for serious graphically intensive PC games.

The funny thing is, I have been a PC gamer for over twenty years and there has never been a better time to be a PC gamer. Thanks largely to digital distribution the quantity and quality of games available for the PC at at extremely low prices is just awesome.

Are you seriously willing to risk a stay in a Chinese prison just because you can't do without your internet fix for a few days? If you lived in China then trying to bypass the firewall might be conceived as a heroic gesture against oppression but for a tourist to risk it is just foolishness.

I am not familiar with US taxation and benefit systems but I wonder is there a way to fiddle this by pretending to be gay just to get a pay rise?