I'd prefer some light Head Mounted Display that offered a full field of view and good resolution. We haven't even managed that yet (at least not in any affordable way). I've been waiting for a decent HMD for over 20 years and we still aren't close. I remember getting particularly excited about the Virtual Retinal Display in the late 90s. Basically low power lasers being fired into your eyes, but the great thing is that the focus of the pixels can be varied, so you have to refocus on things in a normal way rather than the usual infinite focus trick. Yet again though, lots of virtual reality promises, but no delivery.

There are plenty of HMD's around of course, but they all have tiny FOVs and often terrible resolution too. They all seem to use the same trick when selling them. They think of a large screen size, say 80 inches, which sounds impressive. Then they just work out the distance at which the pathetic FOV is equivalent to the impressive sounding screen size. Typically, if you adjust their stated distance to 2 feet, like your eye-monitor distance, it turns out to be equivalent to a 14 inch monitor.

The death may not be intended, but you can't call it an accident. Typically, that sort of crime is considered to be manslaughter. As soon as you assault someone, particularly with a weapon like a truncheon, you know you run the risk of killing them. That's why the police should only use that kind of force when their own lives are at risk. To use it against an unarmed, non-threatening individual is criminal. Sadly the police get away with such assaults on a daily basis.

Well he's right isn't he? You can't side-load apps. You have to use the app store which consists of Apple-approved apps.

I haven't bought a PC for some years. Is that because my smart-phone does the PC's job? No, it's because my PC doesn't need replacing. It's fast enough. In fact I don't even own a smart-phone.

It's not that mobiles are taking over, it's that PC's have been fast enough for some time. The only time the slowness of my PC has shown up has been with games, and that is frequently solved by just buying a new graphics card.

99% of consumers may mostly be able to do what they want 99% of the time with their locked-down overpriced mobile phones, but what happens when they do need a PC? There's nearly always something you need a PC for a some point.

I like Libre Office, but the Base part of it is not so good. I've been waiting for a good OSS replacement for Access for a long time.

The assaults on peaceful protesters surely are important. When you are pepper-sprayed for no reason or have your head slammed into a car for no reason, you don't need a "victim mentality". You are a victim.

If it was such a pathetically small number of people, why did the Police feel the need to use such force?

I should imagine the media in the US are much the same as the UK when it comes to the police. They do not like criticizing them unless someone dies. Even if there is plenty of footage of police hitting unarmed peaceful protesters it will just be reported as "Police Scuffled with Protesters".

It's not just calls either. It goes on (or at least it used to) in printed adverts in publications like Computer Weekly. Page after page of fake jobs to attract your CV. It's very annoying.

There should be a law against advertising fake jobs.

This isn't necessary and is in fact a potentially dangerous design if you are considering grey goo. Numbered instructions can instead be transmitted to the assemblers on a continuously repeating loop. Aside from being safer, it simplifies the design of the assembler.

I can assure you, we are quite capable of having nuclear disasters without the aid of natural disasters. In 1957 we had a major fire at Windscale which melted the nuclear fuel and released iodine 131 through the cooling chimneys. In 2005, over 80,000 litres of radioactive waste leaked inside the Thorp reprocessing plant. Sellafield limited were fined £500,000 for breaching health and safety rules.

Also, on the international level, neither Chernobyl or 3 Mile Island were due to natural disasters, so lets not get into the mindset that tsunamis or earthquakes are required. Nuclear disasters are usually down to bad reactor design (i.e. everyone agrees the design was bad once the accident has happened, and then go on to insist that the newest reactors really are safe, honestly) and human error.

I remember looking at the Onyx Concept Phone with some excitement. It pre-dates the IPhone.

, or at least the portable version PNaCl seems like a good alternative way forward. I know Mozilla and others are opposed to it, but I really think we need something a little better than Javascript if we are going to be writing sizeable applications. Most sizeable applications (word, excel, 3D software, Gimp etc) are written in languages that support static typing, classes etc. There is a reason Microsoft and others do not write their big applications in scripting languages, and it's not just about speed.

Alternatively, perhaps a new web language will come along which is more suitable for developing large apps. Something that is designed from scratch with large applications and JIT compilation in mind.

Obviously it's very important that browsers be able to run code, and increasingly large web applications are being developed. Given that is the case, it has to be asked whether a scripting language like Javascript is the right tool for the job. Clearly the interpreters have been improved greatly, but even so, speed is a real issue. It's not the only issue though. Writing a full application (like Microsoft Word for example) with Javascript would be a pain to say the least. Static typing is important for developing large applications. It helps you catch bugs early and greatly aids analysis of the code/auto-completion etc.

One way around this issue has been to develop plugins, e.g. Unity3D for games, but many users are put-off by the need to install a plugin and if everyone embraced this approach, we would be overwhelmed by endless plugins. Google's Native Code project seems quite promising. Perhaps the future lies there.

I agree, but I think you probably mean Statically Typed rather than Strongly Typed. I had to learn Python recently and as I was googling for different language features I hoped for (Constants etc). I encountered the same kind of zealotry as with other scripting languages. There seems to be a huge amount of resistance to adding anything that might help to catch bugs early (static typing etc).

Most statically typed languages also have some kind of object or variant type you can use to hold any type. It seems only fair that scripting languages should offer static typing, at least as an option.