I have a strong hope desalination will get vastly cheaper when the need manifests. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that. There's already a number of small scale concepts that can do it cheaply. I don't think we're too far away from being able to utilise the oceans as potable water, but it's just the little countries that need it right now so why bother? As soon as Vegas (or similar) starts to wilt, I'd expect funding in this area to gain some traction.

Your android has still crashed more than his WP7, and mine for that matter. I've got a galaxy S too, and if its battery would last more than 4 hours, I probably still wouldn't use it because android is a slow buggy unresponsive sack of shit when compared to WP7 and IOS.

Unless I've misunderstood you, I think your timescales are out. 'Modern Humans' (as in Homo Sapiens) have probably been about for around 200,000 years - even if it's 400,000 it's still the blink of an eye. Behaviourally modern humans (i.e. ones you could tell apart from apes with pointy sticks) are about 50,000 years old. The entire genus Homo has only been around 2.5 million years, and austrailopithocene (the ancestors of the ancestors of humans) are about 4 million years old. If we did have a raft we could survive on for a million years, it'd be interesting to see what would happen given the starting point of such a relatively shallow gene pool. I suspect we'd still end up with different species landing the craft, than the one's who launched it..?

Hurrah! Good effort there lad, well done! Not everyone will put that amount of effort in when a someone's PC goes wrong and instead will berate them about not having off site backups stored in a nuclear bomb proof shelter in central Alaska. This sounds just about typical when my close friends computers start dying. I won't do this for everyone, but if it's a good mate, I'll do my damnedest to get as much data back as I can. It only really pisses me off when they start complaining about how long it takes, cheeky fuckers! If I ask a mate to do something for me because that's what he does for a living, I sure as hell want him to put his best effort in and do that job to the best of his abilities. eg I've got a carpenter mate who did a lovely job on some flooring for us, but while he was doing it there was something up with the joists that he was laughing at me for not knowing - did he just replace the wood?? Nope he got right in there and got his plumber mate around to reroute some overflow that was causing them to rot, solving the problem for the future. He didn't just swap bad for good, because that would have been cheap, he actually went the extra mile - now his PC also runs tip top at all times :)

Still doesn't make sense, there's more to consider than the single fact alone. Like the fact that the restaurant serves a million people a year and only made you ill once. Unless you're extremely paranoid you give them another shot, especially if they server awesome food.

I like microsoft food generally, so even if their WinMo entree gave me the shits once before, I'll try it again if they change the recipe :) YMMV

Stupid analogy.

Steak made me ill, do we never eat steak again?

3 Sentences consisting of 1 line of reasoning and 2 ad hominem attacks. Nice.

Not everyone is so prejudiced as to automatically think that everything Redmond puts out is "rubbish". A lot of it, or dare I say, the majority, serves its purpose very well - in my opinion. I mean, conservatively, three quarters of the worlds businesses have decided that the percentage point of extra stability afforded by swapping to some or other variant OS is simply not worth the loss in compatibility, available labour, ease of deployment and myriad other advantages 'M$' products hold over whatever your OS of choice is. Whatever you may think, their products are usable, performant (mostly, although they rarely top the charts for chest thumping purposes), reliable (enough), and in the right hands, secure (enough). You have a support structure that is second to none, and I'm not talking official channels here - the community is pervasive and helpful. You can see from my post history, I like MS stuff. {ducks!}

So, back on track, when Microsoft is on the back foot, that's when it tends to release its best software. IE Vs Netscape (& now chrome), Active Directory Vs Novell etc. Given how it totally fucked itself in mobile prior to WP7, you could argue this is its biggest challenge yet. Given that & the pre-release videos looking pretty good, I was excited to give it a whirl, so I did. And you know what, I f*cking love it! I'll spare you the details why, that could be an article in itself but suffice to say I've owned A BB Bold 9000, iPhone 3GS and currently have a Galaxy S from work. None of those have seen the light of day since I got my winmo 7 - they don't come close.... Who said "Shill"? Come on, own up!!

It IS pretty rare to totally fry a component from static discharge. The more likely outcome is that any stray ESD that you generate overloads the transistors in the chip to such an extent that they can become susceptible to bit flipping during operation. They'll often be fine for some time (minutes to weeks, months at a time) then randomly flip a, or some, bits and cause a crash you can't figure out.

There's a reason respectable repair shops use those wrist straps, anti-static mats etc.

here here! Customers are all dumb fucks who need to learn to grow up. They run around waving around legislation that they haven't even read, much less understood, shouting and screaming, claiming all manner of things they're not entitled to. True, there are things frontline staff can do to help, but a) they're not miracle workers, (sometimes your ONLY recourse is a repair) and b) they have discretion to only give that extra help to those who aren't complete assholes - like this guy clearly seems to be. Hope the company wins and Apple ban the dickhead from owning any more of their stuff.

That being true, why does a sketchbook cost around as much as a hardback book? A sketchpad as much as a magazine?

You're paying the price the market will bear, nothing else. Also, if you're buying a digital copy of said content, you still cut out a swathe of people who no longer need paying - truck drivers, warehousemen, logistical planners etc. Not to mention the infrastructure costs of the distribution channel. The cost of the digital equivalents are insignificant as the infrastructure is (more-or-less) borne by the vendor whether or not they distribute digitally, and it requires significantly less investment in people to distribute digital content.

We're being sucker punched by the publishers every day with this argument when their costs are being driven down due to digital distributution, the prices for goods are going sky high. "Cough up more dollars, bitch, there be mouths that need a' feedin back at the publishers."

The SD card market is chock full of dodgy cards, even from reputable manufacturers, in this case it seems Microsft is not actually pulling our chain:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918

Also, they've done a KB explaining what happens when you change cards:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2450831

Agreed, the UK's IMR is more reflective of their society as a whole because the UK is full of middle class wealthy people walking around in bowler hats. What's more, they only have a tiny immigrant population, of which 98% are billionaire refugees.

They'd still get made because there's still money to be made by doing so. We already, to all intents and purposes, live in a DRM free world, where movies and music can be had for free, in all-but-an-instant. Yet, people still go to the movies, the still buy the dvd, the dvd special edition, the directors cut dvd, the special edition directors cut, the blu-ray... and so on.

e.g. X-Men origins, famously leaked before hitting the cinema, had a budget of $150,000,000 and grossed $373,000,000

Heck, I don't know why the media companies don't just give up and allow you to pay an indemnity which protects you from prosecution, but allows you to download as much as you please. The people would operate their distribution platform free of charge, with 99.9% reliability! If it was reasonably priced, I'd actually support them prosecuting those that don't pay as hard as they currently try to.

That's pretty much the opposite of my experience. I would say that it's quite often those that go away and examine the implications of any new information they receive, before making a snap judgement on whether they think they've 'got it' or not are often far better informed than those that assume they understand it straight away.

You must have seen it where people go away, read a book, think they've understood it all and start putting it in to practice and screwing a bunch of other systems up because they've not weighed this new information with their existing body of knowledge. They may have fully understood the primary information given in the book in an isolated sense, but running that information though future scenarios and weighing it up against what you already believe to be true and subsequently adjusting your beliefs/plans accordingly takes time. If you think you get something straight away, you probably haven't - in that case you've just understood things superficially.

That's not to say that group are completely dumb though, as long as they learn as they go along they'll eventually arrive at the same point as the deeper thinkers.

Wait 'til the teachers get told to start teaching this gibi crap at school. Suddenly all the recent graduates are talking exbi this and zebi that and you're still talking exa and zetta, and all of a sudden you're looking like a dibinosaur.