In most respects the mobile interface is great, but one thing kills it for me. I simply cannot scroll on the front (story list) page. Every attempt to scroll gets interpreted as a click. Very annoying, almost unusable. I'm using a Samsung S3, Android 4.1.1.

So you didnt read the part in the summary where it said "already available in Jelly Bean, but also available via downloadable app" Anyway why would google want to provide an incentive to upgrade to a new phone? They don't even make phones and they give the OS away for free. It is actually in their best interest to have this new function available as widely as possible since they make their money through advertising.

Yeah I used to think like this - constant increases in automation will mean we will all be working less and less and having more leisure time. Reality doesn't stack up I'm afraid.

Go back 30 years and every office had a typing pool. You would write out your work long hand, give it to the typing pool, and someone would type it up on a typewriter. Then they introduced word processors, then PCs, and pretty soon some managers figured out that workers could type their own work, so they sacked the typists. Now those that still have jobs have to work more (not less) because they are effectively doing the work of the typist.

That is how the capitalist system works. The benefits of new technology do not go to the people whose work is done more efficiently - they either get to do more work in the same time, or if they are unlucky they end up out of work altogether. The benefits go to those who own the companies which have introduced the new technology.

I think what iFans hope would happen if Android did not exist is that there would be no other phone manufacturers. Partly that is what is driving the animosity towards Android. You see, if you think something is so cool, if you really believe in it, you want everyone else to believe too. Android stands in the way of that, because non-believers say "yeah, iphones are pretty cool. Some of those Android phones are pretty cool too."

Hmm... thats weird. Just tried http://www.google.com.au/?q=flights+from+mel+to+syd (ie using google Australia) and it also includes a selection of matching flights at the top of the search results. Is this new feature something other than this?

You guys have gotten it all wrong.

You are assuming that the idea is that we would all keep doing things at the same time according to the apparent location of the sun in the sky. How old fashioned! Instead we will ALL be waking up, going to work, having lunch, etc at the same time no matter where we live. Think how much easier it will be organizing meetings with our colleagues overseas - you can be sure that 9:00 am is a good time for a meeting no matter who is invited!

To make it fairer though, and since the rotation of the earth is no longer relevant to the time, we should change the number of hours in a day - maybe if we made it 30 hours instead of 24. Then everyone around the world would get to be awake during daytime hours every few days. Something to really look forward to if that co-incides with a weekend too.

This just looks like a house fire waiting to happen .... Even if it doesn't actually catch fire I give it 2 weeks before the box dries out to the point that it starts falling apart. Add to that, they are shipping what looks like at least twice as much cardboard as would normally be needed to ship a motherboard on the off chance that someone will need to wire it up the instance it arrives ... what maybe 10% of these will actually get used as temporary PC cases.

One of the design objectives of LTE is reduced latency (compared with 3g) - as low as 10ms. See this page for comparisons with various 3g technologies: http://www.radio-electronics.com/info/cellulartelecomms/lte-long-term-evolution/3g-lte-basics.php In fact the 3G technologies have also been improving steadily.

As someone else here has already noted - 48VDC power supply distribution has been standard in Telco exchanges since.... forever as far as I know. When I first started working in Telecoms (early 90's) the exchange would have a separate power room with rectifiers and huge battery banks. The resulting 48VDC was distributed through the equipment room using large busbars. In latter years this approach has mostly been replaced with smaller power supplies installed in each suite of racks, but the principle is still the same. It has always seemed somewhat ridiculous to me that one powers one's server by passing 240 or 110 VAC into a UPS, convert it to DC, charge a battery with it, invert it back up to 110/240, feed it into the server, which then converts it back to DC.

Very good point. If Apple had wanted it to be possible for third party developers to make software to interact with the iPod then they would have published the interface one should use. The fact that they have not implies that they don't want this to happen. This next step is an obvious extension when they saw that despite the lack of a published interface, others were still making third party software.

When buying such a device, the onus is on the purchaser to decide it's suitability for their intended purpose. The onus on the vendor is only to make sure it does what it is described as doing. Therefore, if you want a media player to use together with Linux, or if you want one to use with Windows or Mac and do not like iTunes, then probably the iPod is not for you.

Having said that, if I only purchased hardware that stated it would work with Linux, I would probably have no hardware at all.... so we really are between a rock and a hard place here.