Luckily few people without some kind of vested interest in this believes a word of this any more.
Frankly you'd have to be a special kind of stupid to after so many years and no evidence whatsoever.

I fully expect to be sitting here in my house in the year 2030 shivering in the snow being told that it's the 50th consecutive hottest year on record
(And that's why we have to pay more tax again....)

Sorry but no... Just no

There are a a LOT of very good "indie" games out there from small studios.
A lot of these games are far more imaginative that those from the large companies, but perhaps are not better games overall because the tiny companies don't have the resources to make the art great and to finely polish the gameplay.
And they have no budget for marketing so few people get to hear about them.

As EA seem to have decided to abandon a large section of the market, hopefully a little more attention will be focussed on the smaller games, and they'll get a little extra sales allowing them to polish their games a bit more and produce great games :)

Don't get me wrong,I dont think EA are stupid to do this either, there is nothing wrong with looking at your sales and market and costs and working out in which areas you think you can do best for your company.
If they think they can make good online games that people will want to buy, then everyone is a winner!

But I think it's also good for the rest of the industry too, and games in general :)

I'm not worrying about it, I'm using it every day. I use it for my ISP, google and google mail. Facebook, and several other websites. it just works,

Because you spent all your money on an expensive car and have none left to pay for data? :)

This was a few months ago so perhaps things changed - 1) It was slow and buggy and crashed a lot. It didn't work on internet explorer. 2) You couldn't use it for your ordinary email. It tried to replace it rather then extend it. 3) It was horribly confusing. It tried to do too many things but it wasn't obvious how to do any of them! But the idea was great. Hopefully something will spring up from it's ashes.

So what free alternatives are there to wordpress? And by free I mean software that doesn't try to take away my freedom to license my own work as see fit.

I don't agree with the premise at all. It's just that it only recently become possible to make screens that were good enough, and mobile CPUs that were fast enough, and memory that was small and cheap enough to push mobile devices into a large consumer market. Now that it's possible to make these new things that work reasonable well in way they didn't just 5 years ago, of course lots of different companies are going to be experimenting to see what they do better than anyone else. That will likely continue for 5-10 year in exactly the same way as it did with large computers until it gets to the point where any device is "good enough" and innovation will move on to a different aspect of technology.

It's not the cost, it that nobody *wants* to do video calls. Nobody wants to tidy their room, comb their hair, change their clothes etc. before making or receiving a call but people would feel they had to. Most people I know in the UK have had video calling on their phones for the past few year. Maybe not most, but many. And everyone I know tried it *once* to see if worked and went huh that's good... and then never did it again. We're supposed to believe it's new and exciting because it's on an iphone but in fact it's a feature that most other phones had for years and is actually disappearing from phones now because nobody wants it

I'm less sceptical than the vast majority of posters here about this. First of all there is nothing evil about them choosing not to give their product away for free. Many of the posters here seem to think that because they want paying for their work that they are evil in some way! And I imagine they've thought this through... Sure, if they simply stick up the same news that's available anywhere else and try to charge for it then this will certainly fail. But hopefully they have enough sense not to do that. Imagine instead though that at the bottom of each major article in the print newspaper they have a code, something like "See code 123XYZ" online for more information on this subject. That if you for example read an article about the situation in korea, that it links to a page with the history and analysis of the situation there by proper writers. And to links to all the previous articles, not just automated keyword links but a proper index written by an actual journalist. It could be pushed quite heavily in the print newspaper, and could have deals where paper subscribers get online subscriptions free for 3 months then reduced price. The point is to integrate the two parts so that the print part is lighter and easier to read but "hyperlinks" to a much deeper version online, and the expectation would be that you would subscribe to *both* generally. The problem with "free" news sites is they are very superficial. Because that matches their readership. They just want to know the news and move on. Pages of analysis of the news and the history written up properly will only appeal to a tiny minority of their readers, but on a subscription site it's likely that people have subscribed exactly for more in depth coverage than they could find in a printed paper, or on a random free news site. People on slashdot complain about news coverage being superficial but this could bring together enough people who are willing pay a little for deeper coverage. If that's profitable then it will happen... I certainly think this could work for them. At present the online part probably makes little money from advertising, has significant production costs, and steals people who would other wise have paid for a print version. If they do this right they they will spend a bit more money on it, but have a much better combined offering where the print and online versions don't compete with each other in the same way. But they'll probably just put the paper version online with a few extra bits, and hope people send them money...

I've noticed that whenever I watch a video on youtube that google use some my MY bandwidth too to send it to me! They seem to think they can just do this without paying me a penny for it! How dare they! :)

Will it let you install your own applications on it however you like? No? Well it's still an essentially useless toy then.

All of the articles I've read about this seem to confuse DNS and BGP. My guess is that the IP of one of the root dns servers was being "hijacked" by the Chinese by announcing a route to it and that route was being picked up externally so some people thinking they were using the real dns root were being diverted a chinese root server giving out different IP addresses for lookups on these domains. Does that make sense?

Correct. Anyone who says that a kilobyte is 1000 or a megabyte is 1000000 is simply ignorant.

The guardian? Don't make me laugh! They are probably the least objective newspaper in the UK. They have a huge agenda of pushing public services and the taxes to pay for them

If your camera is going to record a vast amount of data only to throw away 90 percent of it when you compress, why not just save battery power and memory and record 90 percent less data in the first place? ..

Because it's hard to know what is needed and what isn't to produce a photograph that still looks good to a human, and pushing that computing power down to the camera sensors where power is more limited than a computer is unlikely to save either time or power.