Personally, rather than buy ebooks (been there, done that, not happy with the results), I buy all tree-books, and then jump on #bookz on Undernet, and grab an e-book copy of it. In many cases, the pirated ebook IS a better product, and not just because of DRM. I was looking at buying an ebook on programming, the official release was clearly scanned pages, the file size was enormous, and there were words lost in the shadow on every margin. Tankfully this was plainly visible in the preview. Rather than waste my money, I had a look on #bookz, and THE SAME BOOK was a nicely formatted epub, with the images in tact, text flowing correctly. The publisher should pay THESE GUYS to do their ebook editions, instead of telling the janitor to scan a stack of books.

And who do you blame when the one you didn't take seriously is real? The Boy who Cried Wolf has two morals, you know. One for the child, to not make frivolous cries for help because someone may not come when you really need them to, and one for the adult, to treat every threat as credible, because this one could be it.

You don't want to be a pirate with your DibLoons? Digital Loonies for all! Yarr!

When I said that movie lacked depth...

It may not be sophisticated, but MHDD is what I use at work (among a couple of other tools). Other tools are more reliable in different circumstances, but my first stop is always MHDD, because it will give me a comprehensive R/W delay test on a disk. Extremely practical for a workshop, perhaps not practical for a data centre.

Assuming every day is April Fools is the only way the news doesn't induce instant mass suicide, I think.

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. With a Blackberry, I often find myself scratching my head, but with an Android phone, even in the early versions, disarrayed and beta-ish as they were, and the current versions, laden as they are with manufacturer crapware like TouchWiz, I've never been left wondering "now where do I find that feature?"

Too true. This is a prime example of what happens when you fail to innovate in the face of a changing competitive landscape. Blackberry used to be the last word in mobile email, and while they remained very good at email, every other manufacturer caught up, and did far far more, while Blackberries, model after subtly different model, didn't expand their feature set at all. They introduced startling revelations of technology like replacing the trackball (which I didn't mind) with a laptop-style trackpad, which I couldn't stand, and they upped the resolution of their OS a bit. Everyone else offered bajillion megapixel cameras with a solid metric fucktonne of apps, and a proper, i.e. NOT WAP web browsing experience. But hey, Blackberry owners could still get their email, right? By about January last year, I'd say the only people buying Blackberries were people who already had Blackberries and had never tried anything else.

I'll grant one exception to my laptop, but let it be known it's a grudging exception: Most of the R&D is probably done by Indian and Chinese immigrants who may or may not be American educated.

The US designs stuff, now? Pretty much everything in my house is designed by a Japanese or Thai or Korean company. A US company might have designed the basic idea for some of it more than 60 years ago, but nothing new or interesting comes out of America today.

Wifi security, including WPA and WPA2, is already broken. It's the equivalent of locking your house up with a six pin tumbler lock. It keeps the honest and the curious out, but it's nothing to someone who really wants in.

From what I've seen, it's mostly an American thing to call things by their brand name rather than description. In Australia, we say "sticky tape", you say "scotch tape", we say "photocopier", you say "Xerox machine".

The world ends toward the end of this year, duh! Of course the chance of hitting the Earth is 0%, because we won't be here!

and your average product of Australia's high schools.

Do yourself a favour, and play with a Transformer or Transformer Prime at your local electronics store, compare the price tags, and then tell me others are struggling to compete on price for something "tolerable". True, Motorola haven't put out a good device that's lasted more than six months since the original Razr, Toshiba really cheaped out on screen quality, and Samsung aren't doing enough to really be different in appearance or utility (not in that they're copying but that there's no reason to get a Galaxy Tab compared to any other tablet), but Asus are easily wiping the floor with Apple in the tablet market right now.