...the London Underground, on a per-mile basis, is one of the most expensive transit systems in the world, so to say that the wi-fi is free is totally misleading as the cost is covered within the extortionate ticket prices.

Just to give people outside the UK some idea, two weeks ago the missus and I went to a concert in London. I drove the car to Hammersmith in West London and parked there, we got on the Underground to travel two stops to Shepherd's Bush, no more than two miles up the road.

The total cost for 2 return tickets was just under £14 or around $20.

I think that speaks for itself...

You're just jealous because RaspberryPi is British design.

Not to mention the fact that there are still large coal reserves under the British Isles which are not being mined much now because it became cheaper to import it.

With ever increasing fuel costs, at some point it presumably becomes economical to start mining coal here again, I assume the Draft Energy Bill covers that eventuality also.

Not that I am aligned to any UK political party at this moment in time, but anything that stops my taxes being spent on organisations like the UK Carbon Trust built entirely on unproven Al Gore loony theories ("I didn't massage the global temperature change figures by 60 years, honestly I didn't") is a good thing in my book.

...tickets for the "How many days does Ballmer have left" sweepstake went on sale today.

I am not unsympathetic to current events in India and China but why are the economic events taking place their now any different to what took place in Europe and the USA around a century ago?

I have Indian colleagues in my work team and even they will fully admit that personal wealth plays a big factor in Indian society and the caste system that still exists there - I suspect the same is true in China where the new rich there are able to use their new wealth to buy properties in London and spend their money in the West.

Wealth is a new thing to many people in Asia and therefore those people haven't yet learnt or focused on some of the consequences of attaining that wealth that we in the West identified decades ago - why do you think we came up with employee unions to fight for workers' rights or made sure that, for example, coal-miners were equipped with protective face masks to restrict coal dust exposure and resultant lung and respiratory problems?

The best people to change poor working conditions in the less developed areas of the world are the people that work in those conditions, simply because that's what everyone else in the West had to do at some point. No corporation is going to ever give anything to anyone away free unless it hits them directly in their profits - and if workers get organised and angry enough to withdraw or restrict their labour en masse, that's when conditions get changed.

If anything, the developing nations now do have an advantage now that the West didn't have then because of organisations like Amnesty International, the United Nations, etc. that exist to bring pressure to bear on bad living or working conditions. But they're not going to do anything unless the workers themselves take their eyes of the money they are earning and want to change it.

Let me put my cards on the table - I could care less about Apple.

I've been using computers now for more than a quarter of a century and never felt the least bit inclined to buy any Apple product because nothing they've ever made would ever have enhanced my computing experience - and, yes, as a techno-geek I keep abreast of as many new products as I can, Apple or not Apple.

At this moment in time, I use mostly Linux - but even that doesn't do all I need a computer to do which is why I also do a lot of work on Windows - and even have some killer purchased apps on Windows that don't have Open Source equivalents that are anywhere near as good. But that's just the way it is, using a bit of both I can get a computer to do all I need a computer to do.

As such, Apple have no effect on my computing experience, they are entirely irrelevant to me and if other people like and buy their stuff then so be it - knock yourselves out.

But Apple or not, I do have a problem with people who believe that aligning themselves to a logo or brand makes them better than anyone else - if anything, doing so demonstrates a greater need to be with the "in-crowd" rather than buying something based purely on its technical or functional merits.

Case in point...

I recently purchased a new Asus laptop with Windows 7 pre-installed. I've nothing against Windows 7 but currently it does nothing for me that Windows XP won't and I therefore see no point in learning a new OS that, in every other respect, is just change for change's sake in the way that everything has been moved around and renamed by Microsoft.

I have a shop bought copy of XP but discovered that despite XP still being supported, Asus doesn't have drivers for all of the hardware in the laptop for XP. So in this case I resigned myself to keeping Windows 7 on the laptop.

I'm mainly a Linux guy and wanted to partition the laptop to dual boot Gentoo Linux. I backed up the Asus Windows installation partitions and then trashed the hard drive with the partitions that I wanted. But when I re-installed Windows 7 from the back-up, it trashed my partition structure and put itself back on exactly as it was when I bought it.

A friend of mine is an MSDN subscriber and gave me an ISO of Windows 7 Home Premium, exactly as on the laptop originally. So I partitioned the drive as I wanted it and installed from the Windows 7 installation DVD I had made from the ISO. When it came to putting in the W7 License Key, I copied in the one from the base of laptop, but when it finished installing W7 it told me the License Key was invalid.

I read in a magazine article that an ISO image of W7 contains all W7 versions and you can prompt W7 to ask you what version of W7 to install by removing a config file from the ISO image and reburning to DVD.

So I repeated the installation and, sure enough, I got asked which version to install - again, I chose W7 Home Premium as the laptop had come with. But once again it rejected my license key.

Having done a few searches on Google (I'm reasonably competent with Windows but more Linux orientated), I discover that I have only an OEM license for Windows 7, which basically means I am piece of shit on the bottom of Steve Ballmer's hand-made shoes and am therefore not worthy enough to install the version of Windows 7 I legally have a license to use from an installation DVD that has that version on it.

At that point in time, I could have got a W7 license key from the Internet, or maybe scrounged one from my MSDN-subscribing friend but I'm not into using pirated software any more, for the simple fact that when the time I stopped using pirated software about 5 years ago, I have never had a virus or piece of malware on Windows XP since.

As of now, I've given up with W7 on the laptop, I actually wish I'd not accepted the Microsoft T&Cs and got a refund because it's of no use to me - instead the laptop is now a Linux-only PC and I shall put my legitimate copy of XP on as a VirtualBox VM.

I do wonder if I have a case under "Fair Usage" with UK Trading Standards in this instance since it does not strike me as unreasonable to want to partition my hard drive the way I want to and to then install the provided W7 installation files onto that partition structure so I could build a dual boot.

Maybe the BSA would be interested in taking the case up as someone who, despite being treated like shit by a software company, has not chosen to pirate software as an easy solution to the problem of getting fair usage?

Yep, it's fine, very big, and filled to the brim with honest people with spines like me whose dicks are big enough to admit they're part of the problem.

Oh please STOP with the typical fanboi elevating yourself on a lofty pedestal and sneering down at the rest of the Great Unwashed.

I don't own one single Apple product because I don't buy into walled gardens, it's that simple. But my study at home is full to the brim with products made by Asus, Samsung, Netgear and probably even a Foxconn motherboard in the very PC I'm using to type this response on. And I'm sure every single one of those devices is assembled by Asian hands somewhere in China or Korea.

You, as an Apple fan, are NO DIFFERENT to me or anyone else that uses a modern piece of electronic equipment, so get used to it!

And, quite frankly, much as I don't like to think about people working in Oriental production lines earning less in a month than I probably do in a day, I am as much of the cause of that as you yourself are. If I'm completely honest, I actually don't care very much because ultimately this is about capitalism and supply and demand - people in the rich West want iPads, laptops and Android phones, and people in China want better standards of living and are prepared to do those jobs.

And if they don't like those conditions then they can go through the same processes as happened in Europe and the USA around a century ago when workers formed unions and fought for proper employment rights and better pay.

Don't get me wrong, I don't *LIKE* the fact that workers are exploited so that the few rich at the top line their pockets even more, but the fact is that because I buy the goods they make that would make me a hypocrite unless I stopped buying those products.

At least I have a backbone and can therefore speak honestly, rather than trying to mask foaming-mouthed fanboi-ism in some non-existant social conscience.

So kindly shut the fuck up and stop pretending you are any different to the rest of us.

...organised ourselves the world over such that for just 24 hours, not one person on this planet bought or downloaded a single piece of music.

The fact that we could organise a single mass protest of that magnitude would send send earthquakes through the RIAA and the rest of the music industry and the whole issue of copyright would change overnight.

But unfortunately far too many of us are selfish, greedy "have-it-nows" with too much money in our hands. (Yes, I include myself in that.)

...for me the concept is true.

Incidentally, please don't get me started on music downloads and the "Pick 'n' Mix" concept behind music distribution, I'm an album enthusiast, I like sleeve notes to read on the toilet and a nice shiny disc to file alphabetically and anally on shelves. I'm a music snob, proud of the fact and don't get me started on "... but there's only one or two good tracks on every album" because I'll just tell you to go buy music by real musicians as a response.

However, I do have a big music collection, I probably buy 10-12 CDs a month and I personally think £10 or so of local currency is a good price for a piece of music I'll hopefully be listening to over the next 30 years or so - all the better if it's a nicely remastered classic with a few interesting bonus tracks.

If I do see an album I like the look of, the first thing I do is go find a copy of it on Usenet or BitTorrent to listen to it first. If it's good, I can never be satisfied with someone else's sub-quality rip of it so I go buy it myself. If it's crap, I delete it because I can always use the hard disk space for the albums I do buy and rip myself to FLAC.

The result of this is that I never buy a crap album, music is therefore always a good value product to me and therefore I am happy enough to continue buying it. In other words, a bit of "temporary personal piracy" on my part benefits the music industry and artists in the longer term.

And I also go to many live concerts and spend money on tour shirts, overpriced gassy beer at concert halls and the odd meal before or after the gig - so everyone's happy.

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I've got a good bunch of friends who I have know for something like 25 years now and we actually met through a role-playing club that I started in my local town during the mid 1980s - these days we also meet socially and our various girlfriends and wives (yes, we DO have them!) have become a good circle of friends also.

After about 10 years we started to move away from tabletop RPGs and board games to LAN gaming, then on to World Of Warcraft for several years (though not me, WoW did nothing for me when I tried a month's membership).

However, they've now got bored with WoW and in the past couple of years we've now gone back to tabletop board games to the point where we now meet once a week to play games like Zombies!!!, Ravenloft, Star Fleet Captains and Thunderstone. We all still PC game but now it tends to be the occasional Left 4 Dead session or single player games like Skyrim, Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas.

There does seem to be something of a revival in board games, especially those that provide a semi-RPG element where everyone these days is too busy to write "pen and paper" RPG campaigns. And rather than all sitting in our various homes in front of networked PCs on a server some where, it's now face-to-face board game sessions, the social aspect of which cannot be beaten in my view.

I think major games publishers are now flogging a dead horse anyway.

Microsoft, deliberately or not, initiated the slow death of commercial PC gaming by fragmenting DirectX versions over Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 and there's no denying that the number of new PC game releases has dropped over the past few years as a result. With fewer new bleeding-edge games coming out, the need for PC upgrades has also dropped which has meant that hardware manufacturers have gone over to newer products like netbooks and tablets.

I personally believe we are approaching a renaissance in computer gaming, whether or not the PC ultimately survives as a hardware platform. One of the best things to happen to gaming is the rise of lower-powered platforms and more simplistic and independent games, meaning that huge game production budgets are becoming less important and smaller teams of programmers, or even individual programmers, can now get back in the game and produce good games. This goes back to the Golden Age of Computing in the days of home computers like the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Commodore Amiga, as well as many others.

The best thing that can happen is that big publishers continue with their greed - they will ultimately kill themselves off, or at least move away from developing on the PC completely - paving the way for the "little guys" to come in and get a "piece of the action" in programming games on what is essentially an open platform anyway.