Agree, my Casio with ten year battery life is all the wristwatch I need, it has non zero odds of outliving me.

I might buy a smartphone one day, though the lousy battery life has put me off so far.

I see the Sony Xperia T2 Ultra Dual claims a 46 day standby time now and even an iPhone is up to 10 days.

Exactly, the weapon design bureau currently known as Pivdenne, one of the largest industrial enterprises in Ukraine, with 13,000 workers is located in Dnipropetrovsk in the East. Presumably this is what Russia wants to get hold of with its occupation of town halls by special forces. Given that Russian propaganda though blatant and obvious is being lapped up by the people of the world there is nothing anyone can or will do about this. The Syrian regime uses exactly the same methods and everyone sided with Putin over Syria.

The sooner the Americans get a conference together to organize handing over Eastern Ukraine to the Russians the better. The less said about the EU initiative that started this war the better.

American politics from outside seems framed in the terms of what politicians are doing about forcing your own world view on other people who do not hold that world view. In other words politics is framed as a religious war on unbelievers. In this way it is no different to the Iranian theocracy for example.

I remember being at University in Cardiff in 1979 and chatting with the Exeter or Bath or Bristol operator on the South Western University's Network or SWUN or similar. We conversed as I typed on a teleprinter terminal, each letter I typed being printed on the two foot wide paper roll scrolling out in front of me by a buzzing print head. No screen. So we had instant messaging. We also had email and 3d graphics on the textronics video display units. You could run realtime jobs on any of the computers on the network if you had a login.

The only thing that has changed is that business has taken over from academia and the military and we now use this amazing network connectivity to do other things. We order pizza on it and lose money betting through it and get instant updates on what everyone else had for breakfast. So no progress there really except for better interface hardware. We old farts invented all that stuff that the smartphone does nearly 35 years ago and boy are we bored with what it has become. A means to funnel money from people into businesses profit lines by paying for "apps" and services that remain free on older hardware.

The fledgling internet was opened up to the public in the early 90's through dial up and TCP/IP using trumpet winsock. First stop the CERN snowboard club.

It was obvious that the covers were not intended to represent future trends, they were often works of art that didn't even get the technology of the time correct.

Maybe modern journalists should be taking a cold look at the modern world instead of lazily looking for things to mock in the old.

For example the cell phone has mutated into a games machine that everyone on the planet appears to want to own. We don't need swipeable screens or flappy birds to build nuclear power stations or do open heart surgery. However Microsoft for one is attempting to destroy the tools that run the modern world because they don't look like the more profitable smartphone.

Let me remind you of the digital watch. They were popular for a few months in the late 70's and only exist now as novelty's. The smartphone is the same in that it will look laughably stupid in 30 years time.

Making consumer hardware is a fashion business and the only certainty is that today's fashion will be out of fashion tomorrow, remember that the next time you promote stuff in the smartphone toy market.

Meanwhile we 'almost' have Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy from 1978. A product that accessed the entire knowledge of the galaxy, could play sound and vision, all without noticeable power needs.

Show me a poxy smartphone that doesn't need charging at the end of the day.

Turns out that democracy is just as rubbish as dictatorship.
 

Completely agree, the bitcoin miner is just the headline. The rest of it is to scan the contents of the NAS, I wonder which government owns them?

Never mind what dialogue a clever psychologist has planted in you Pavlovian brain.

So you want to kill people.

I hope your house is the remote one that doesn't get a signal and is the first to lose POTS.

I look forward to your urgent need to call an ambulance and your untimely death.

If you don't need civilization then the rest of us can do without you.

That is what the guy just said - Walmart competes on marketing - meaning that they dont tax everything they sell to spend on harvesting the morons who respond to advertising.

You can bet that the person who wrote this article has made or will make a ton of cash out of this sick idea. Its all over the web.

Secretly people enjoy the idea of torturing people they do not like, so its struck a rich vein. It is the antithesis of civilization and should be resisted.

Looks like the monkey cant quite get down out of the tree and forget its animal nature.

Actually no one gives a monkeys about the planetary science program, its deeply unpopular because it uses genetic medicine and genetically modifies organisms to survive drought and it supports evolution and it ends the war on drugs - it is fundamental Science.

NASA should spend more money on that Russian space station, because we get live moving pictures back which make the news. Air time gets funding.

Actually America is just about done now and the rest of us are just waiting for the Chinese to take over the role of leading the world in real science.

See they have this dictatorship that doesn't need tv ratings to do things.

I despair.

I am very sorry to say that it appears to be because the cold war is over and that the reasons we fought the cold war were being constantly repeated to us to justify the cost - "they don't have free speech, they don't have independent legal systems, they oppress minorities". Apparently now we no longer have that enemy we are fighting for those reasons its OK to openly do all the things that we were supposedly fighting against. Its very sad.

This is what I keep thinking but dont say.

I agree with you that you can do lots of entertaining things on a tablet or phone interface and that is great for domestic consumers. However they are locked out of any expectation of creative use of computing by the interface and applets. Its sad that it took only 20 years for the internet to become no more than a metro app.

I think you will find that they will squash you like a bug if you make a fuss. Is this really something worth fighting for?