Back in 2004 I visited my girlfriend in Japan. She had 100Mb symmetrical fibre and it cost her £23/month. They installed it early because they knew it would last decades and keep them competitive well into the multi-gigabit era. They don't mess about, and it allows them to offer advanced services that others can't.

BT always do them minimum required to stay semi competitive, since in many areas they have no competition anyway.

Excuses, excuses. I don't want to call you a fanboy, but this is a classic fanboy tactic. Blame the technology, make out it is so badly broken it's the technology's fault and not Apple's.

The reality is that hundreds of millions of people use wifi successfully and with minimal hassle every day. Yeah, it's not perfect but 20 years ago widespread low cost networking was just a dream, and now we have thousands and thousands of devices sharing the 2.4GHz band more or less without issue. If anything it's biggest problem is that it's too popular and has saturated 2.4GHz.

To look at it another way, all other major operating systems managed to implement it in a fairly reliable way. I come home, my phone and laptop connect to wifi automatically and just work, despite the congestion and mix of standards and vendors.

On the other hand look at the UK. We used to have two parties (the Arseholes and the Bastards) and a small third one that never got in but always had a few people elected to parliament. Then last time around the two main ones balanced out so evenly that the smaller third one became king maker and formed a coalition with the Bastards.

Now we have another contender, the Closet Racists, who are making waves. We have an election in May and it will be interesting to see how well they do. It's entirely possible they may end up in a coalition with some power. A decade ago no-one would have dreamed of all this, now it's a reality.

Things can change, it's just not easy to engineer that change. In our case it was initially due to a very close election, and then due to grass roots support for the Closet Racists and a particularly charismatic/offensive leader. If you don't happen to be a Closet Racist don't worry, in other countries far left parties have got in too so it can go either way.

Don't give up hope, it can happen.

Actually it seems quite reasonable for the money, assuming that the battery is new (re refurbed quality replacement cells). It's no screamer but a Core 2 Duo is plenty for most desktop stuff. The 1280x800 resolution is fine for a 12" display on an ultra-portable. 8GB of RAM max, and with an SSD it should be pretty quick. Even the GPU isn't bad.

Plus you get a nice Thinkpad keyboard, still pretty hard to beat, and Thinkpad build quality. If you want a secure laptop for business or general desktop stuff I'd say it is pretty good. Where else are you going to get something even half as trustworthy? In the EU all electrical items have a minimum 2 year warranty as well.

Cyanogen isn't a start-up either, they are well established and have been providing commercially supported operating systems (e.g. for the OnePlus One) for a while now.

The UK isn't doing very well. Many people can't get 25Mb because that's way above what ADSL2 can offer them and there is no alternative. I only have a choice of one ISP (Virgin) and they suck.

I remember back on 2004. My girlfriend in Japan had 100/100Mb fibre and it cost her about £20/month. Over a decade later nothing like that exists in the UK. That's how far behind we are.

I wonder how they came up with the 627,000 figure as well. Number of licences sold * average number of programmers per app maybe? Some people shit out apps all day long, ending up with hundreds or even thousands in the App Store in the hope that one makes it big. When are are 100,000 other flashlight/advertising apps the only way to have any hope of being picked is to create 1000 slightly different flashlight/advertising apps of your own.

The number is actually lower than 0.0001%, because by "interesting" they mean "downloaded how_2_pipe_bomb.pdf" and not "genuine terrorist threat worthy of further monitoring". Back at school everyone had floppy disk copies of the Anarchists Cookbook, and I imagine it is pretty popular with the kids online these days too. Terrorist suspects, the lot of them.

Thanks, I'll look for it next time I install.

Actually it's kinda dumb. They avoid tax and then complain that there are not enough skilled workers for them to hire. If it gets too bad there won't be enough people with money to buy their products.

Japan has the largest number of long-lived (50+ years) companies in the world. They pay their taxes and treat their staff well. Long term gain over short term profit.

That amount includes the stuff they can't dodge like sales tax and employment tax. In fact they should be paying around 40% on their profits of $40bn in the US, but by moving it all to Ireland they pay 0%.

My Panasonic TV was made in Japan, my Nissan electric vehicle was made in the UK.

Okay, I'm sure parts were made in China... Less so with the TV because Panasonic manufacture components themselves in Japan too. The point is that if Japanese electronics manufacturers (Sharp, Sony and many others also have factories in Japan) can do it then so can Apple. Even Samsung has factories in Korea. Apple only recently started doing to assembly in the US, that's it.

On aggregate they provide better value than the competition? $100 for 16GB of flash memory? Okay.

You would have to be crazy to buy a $700 smart phone these days. Look at devices like the Nexus 5 and OnePlus One. High end, very fast and usable, better specs than an iPhone in fact and similar to other Android high end phones. Yet they cost half as much or less.