It may have failed to make a dent on the smartphone market, but it's made a considerable dent (more like a smoking crater) in the desktop PC market. MS claims that they'll fix some of that in Windows 10 (Windows Phone, aka. 8, being so had that they skipped an entire version number to get away from it), but I'm taking a wait-and-see approach.

And that pretty much sums up the problem with this survey, it's not really "How good is your audio system" it's "How much money did you spend on your audio system". Based on actual measurements with test instruments (rather than golden-ears subjective wank), my $150 O2 beats $10,000 amps ($50,000, $100,000, the sky's the limit), which means to answer this survey I'd need an option to choose "super cheap, excellent performance". Since the survey equates cost with performance, there's no way to do this. Perhaps if I got a Tice clock and some Brilliant Pebbles and strapped them to my O2 I'd be able to say "super expensive, excellent performance"?

Unfortunately in recent years the core half-dozen critical extensions are the ones you need to undo all the crap that's been done with Chromefox and get it back to being Firefox. Only after you've applied those can you start enhancing its functionality.

Still, without those you'd be stuck with using Chromefox, at which point you may as well just switch to Chrome anyway.

"No one quite knows where the moon came from, but it's as old as the Earth, or very nearly. And it's survived this long because it has the most perfect defence system ever evolved. It's Tidally Locked. It doesn't exist when it's being observed. The moment it's seen by any other living creature it freezes into rock. In the sight of any living thing, it literally turns into stone. And you can't kill a stone. Of course, a stone can't kill you either, but then you turn your head away. Then you blink. Then, oh yes, it can. And I'm sorry. I am very, very sorry. It's up to you now. Don't blink. Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead. It's fast. Faster than you can believe. Don't turn your back, don't look away, and DON'T blink. Good luck".

AFAIK the US banks' implementation of Chip & PIN is just "Chip". They haven't quite figured out the "& PIN" bit yet.

That sounds like you're comparing mobile Firefox to mobile other-browsers, not desktop Firefox. Sure, mobile Firefox sucks about as much as other mobile browsers, it's nothing like desktop Firefox, in which case why bother? I've been using desktop Firefox since it was Phoenix 0.3 and it's a decent browser (modulo its more recent Chromefox incarnations), but if I want a shitty mobile browsing experience I'll use the Android built-in browser, not install Firefox.

Zooms well, does it?

(Vario-Elmar-T 55-135, mmmmm :-).

That would be the Leica-as-Panasonic then? Same glass, but you pay Panasonic prices.

Speaking of Panasonic, that's what's pissed me off about their strategy with bridge cameras, after the FZ30 it took them ten years to produce a successor, the FZ1000, because they didn't want to undercut their GH line, and even then they only came out with the '1000 because of Sony's RX10. This did however introduce me to a completely novel experience, that of being glad Sony exists.

So you'd take some 1/3.2" cellphone sensor at 24MP over a full-frame 16MP?

Beat me to it. Outside of the photographer community, the most common use I've seen for expensive DSLRs is as $1,000 point-and-shoots. It makes me want to cry when I see someone pull out a 60D and take a few shitty, badly-composed snaps of their three-year old with the top of the head cut off, then throw it onto the grass so they're free to wiggle their fingers at them. In my day we had to make do with salt prints produced from calotype negatives using salt we licked off our backs after working 26 hours a day down at mill, and we were lucky,

Camera phones have taken over the role of the $1,000 point-and-shoot and, as you point out, this is just things going back to normal.

It's actually pretty simple to figure out, and is based on what the headline should have read, which is Why Gmail Has Better Security Than US Banks. I'm not aware of any European or Australasian bank that hasn't had 2FA for years (with the exception of UK banks, which are almost as bad as US ones).

Having said that, as a non-US IT person who occasionally has to deal with banks I think it's great, as long as US banks are running around with "please rob me" signs taped to their backs the cybercriminals leave our banks alone. Somebody has to be the easy-picking low-hanging fruit, and in this case it's the US.

(Sorry if this sounds like gratuitous US-bashing, but sheesh, how do your banks continue to get away with this? There are as yet undiscovered tribes in the jungles of Borneo who use Chip&PIN and 2FA, but the US doesn't...).

Even if it was available, what you're getting (if it's the same as Android) is some crappy third-rate copy of desktop Firefox with a fraction of the functionality and an inability to run most of the extensions you're used to. Tried it on my Android phone and it lasted about 15 minutes before I removed it again. So for all the iDevice users waiting for Firefox, don't bother.

After trying seemingly one of every mobile browser out there, the least sucky one I've found is UC Browser, which is available for iDevices (although the iPhone one hasn't been updated for awhile). It does most things I want, has AdBlock built in, and most importantly is actively supported by the developers. You can actually go to their web site and report a bug or request a feature, and someone will respond and take a look at it, unlike the Firefox developers who are too busy deciding how much rounding to put on their tabs and what random reordering of menu and command options will be most cromulent for this afternoon's release.

And that's what this art project was really about, it's not some solarlalalography thing, it's a performance art piece that reminds society how effective terrorism has been in the US.