I yearned for a floppy disk drive while i pissed around with audio cassettes. Booting and running dos 3.3 from floppy (many years later) was sheer joy.

Why pay for a new system? Get rid of traffic lights, stop signs, yield signs and one-way streets and reap the benefits of increases economy and shorter journey times.

...they are using the wrong networking topology? Token ring is the way to go if you don't want collisions .

It made me think of the film Andromeda Strain (1969), but while googlising for a picture, I found this 1954 image from a nuclear facility.
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/tail-of-hot-suit-serves-as-entrance/
Yes, these have 'tails', but the climbing-in-through-the-back part is there.

Well, apart from when they were doing terroristy stuff in the forties, blowing people up and such. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun

The west should totally start reverse-engineering chinese products and learn how to make steel, computer chips etc

Management doesn't give a crap about productivity, never has, grow up.

To clarify, I found the blackberry feature-poor. It couldn't handle many file formats so I could not do as many things (read gutenberg texts, listen to old mp3 recordings of radio programmes, watch video etc) as the nokia n95 it 'replaced'. And the GPS was shoddy.
Email worked. I couldn't see/hear the attachments for the above reasons, but I could get them.
And it auto-formatted the sd card when I tried to migrate my data to it. That REALLY annoyed me.
Bag of crap. And so was LG Renoir.

Scuba diving? Watches are quite handy there, while phone cases might leak.
While working? You can angle your wrist around to see if it is nearly time for dinner without putting your tools/workpiece down, switching off the machine or crawling out from under something to unzip your overalls to reach your jeans' pocket.
In fact, it would be an idea to not take the phone to work at all if possible, I have broken 3 at various times as they get crushed in my pocket ( a colleague managed to break one of those Land Rover tough phones at work, but that was by trying to clean the swarf out of it with an air line ).
Cheap waterproof digital watches just keep on going, and you can use abrasive compound to clear enough of the scratches away to read the display. Or smear grease on it if you are lazy.

If they are depending on their hardware and OS to sell phones, their track record is not good.
They may suddenly leapfrog the competition in both those areas, but judging by the bag of crap they foisted on me, it will be one heck of a leap.

I didn't think it was ever supposed to render the same. I thought it was supposed to render in a way that made sense on whatever display the browser was set up for and how the user wanted it.
I might want all images suppressed, for instance, or all headings read out by a voice synth.
Marking up the text with tags lets the browser treat the document 'intelligently'.

Hah! Then Inflatable Ingrid and I are way above average. Our lovemaking can sometimes go on for minutes.

I agree that people should get paid for all the hard work they put in creating adverts, but you must realise that your industry is paid for by the advertisers and those advertisers make money by selling products.

Scenario one: I watch TV and (by various means) skip the ads, then go shopping and may buy products whose companies have paid the advertising industry $millions .

Scenario two: I watch TV and have to see ads, then go shopping and avoid products whose ads I have seen because I associate them with pushy jerks who interrupt the shows I like.

Take the money, make the ads, let me avoid the ads and it will all work out.

I thought that Britain is in danger of missing out on the economic and social benefits of superfast broadband due to The Pirate Bay being blocked.

Thankyou Ladies and germs. I'm here all week.

Really?
On BranstonCable https://thepiratebay.org/ gives......

The connection was interrupted

                    The connection to thepiratebay.org was interrupted while the page was loading.

    The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few
        moments.
    If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network
        connection.
    If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure
        that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

Http gives the virgin blocked page thing.