There is a saying that one shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

We joined an economic community which has since morphed into an unaccountable political superstate. The political superstate has done nothing useful except start a war in Ukraine which proves that the size of the European Union provides no protection against blindly following American instructions.

Give us free trade and let us write our own law and the EU is just fine.

Winning an election is far more important than good policy. Democracy is at its most flawed at this point in the electoral cycle. Expect bad decisions and bad legislation for the next year.

Cant say I am enthused with either the "Nannying and high taxes of the socialist nightmare" or the "Law and Order, free market gravy train for the few" that will be the choice at the election either. Not a lot to choose from, a plague on both their houses.

UKIP are a nationalist party with no policies except xenophobia and whatever the civil servants tell them to do. They are likely to get a lot of votes, maybe even a very large number of votes because people are frustrated by the political establishment.

People will vote for whoever has the most attractive bribe.

We already have zero hour contracts and more part time workers than fully employed so yes, the EU probably prevents us from replacing them with slave prison labor.

I am one and I agree. We have Chav politics for Chav people.

The place is run by the tabloid press and whatever the latest Witch hunt happens to be. It suits the wealthy for the plebs to be at each others throats demanding jack boots on their own freedom. Bread and circuses.

You couldn't make it up - Foaming mob demanding the death of Pediatricians force Government to disconnect the internet and replace it with Disney, Netflix and Sesame Street.

Having said that, the enlightened Australian equivalent has already installed their own great firewall of China "The web filter will also block access to websites about politically sensitive issues which have changing criminality statuses e.g., euthanasia and abortion".

Enjoy your totalitarian prison convict.

Just because its posh propaganda doesnt mean it isnt propaganda. The Torygraph so nicknamed because of its history of right wing editorial has always been the subject of derision for its political bias. In that respect it is the same as a tabloid in that it tells its readers what to think.

yeah, bring back the small black patches you attach to your equipment to make it sound better, and oxygen free cables that only work in one direction.

The Dre stuff is about a lifestyle, a lifestyle that does not include musical appreciation it seems from the shit reproduction quality of the headphones. They look quite nice though.

Reminds me of when ghetto blasters changed from portable boxes that could play music to funfair theme ride decorated light boxes, funny as heck.

Keeps the youth entertained though and boy have they got purchasing power these days. Bored suburban youths love aping the product that Dre and similar market to them. Disaffected poor people are just what rich suburban youth want to pretend they are. Its hilariously funny. I am sure Mr Dre works very hard providing his fans with the product they want and richly deserves his 3 billion payout from Apple.

Apple though are dorks and will never pull off keeping this brand surely. It would be like replacing the interface paradigm that has worked for the last thirty years with one that suits third world farmers on low resolution cheap phones. Oh a big tech company already did that.

Maybe your next Apple product will randomly invite the entire population of earth to your house for a party. All television channels from now on will be devoted to watching the resulting carnage. It will be great!

Ideal for entrapping the stupid public who have no idea which sentence they utter will prove beyond all doubt that they have broken the law when later selectively played back.

This is going to make a lot of innocent people guilty, so its not as wonderful as it sounds.

People just have no idea how their words will be used against them. Never, ever, speak to the police if you can avoid it.

From your super articulate post I am sure you don't have any trouble making your way in life. Have you ever considered what happens to people who are not as smart as you? (And why we spend a fortune to keep them in prison?)

Hey, if your lifestyle is only achievable if society uses slave labor then maybe you don't earn enough money yourself.

There is enough wealth around to pay a minimum wage and yes it does come from somewhere, its achieved by wealth re-distribution and works in most civilized countries, including the USA. But we could improve the minimum wage into a living wage without our economy crashing. After all the profits that would probably pay the living wage now just go towards the one percents increasing raft of wealth instead of being spent in the economy.

There are only two constants in life, death and taxation. Ask any civilization whether it be run by pirates, kings, governments or snow white and the Severn dwarfs.

Your view is not congruent with mine. Banking staff just increase their annual bonus following the sophisticated application of the Banks way of doing business - Basically take sweets from babies, steal, kill and burn to death anything in the way of increasing the takings and ones own three times annual salary bonus.

So no, its pointless trying to send people to jail for following the rules of the game.

The problem is that the regulators are basically working for the banks, as are academics, as are media commentators. So no surprise that they all got together and shafted main-street.

Sending Bankers to Jail is pointless until the regulators actually regulate instead of taking home bribes.

The fact that the bankers knew they were screwing, and indeed still are screwing the rest of us we will leave for their consciences to deal with.

The real blame lies with the Politicians who would rather surf the wave of the boom whilst they are in power rather than take any long term action to prevent the inevitable crash. After all boom and bust is good for the economy, its just a bit hard on all the people it fucks. Lets hope that this incompetent handling of the economy doesn't ever fuck you, as you seem quite happy for it to continue. After all you believe that the free market will be perfectly fair and will operate just like the theoretical model of a free market that seems intellectually fair and optimally successful. There is no such thing as a free market, its either run by the government regulator, the mafia, a powerful entity overseas or the local criminal who has invented their own tax on you.

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.