George 2 ???? George 3 for me! That's what Galdor moved onto after Flossie left and we moved on ICL 1905Fs.

It does not have "12KB" of ram. It has 2K of 48 bit words. Each word can contain 2 instructions. It is a decimal machine so each word can contain 12 digits. It also has (only) one accumulator (of 12 digits). Whilst this particular example has an indexing mechanism (actually a "pre-modify" instruction) which was added from a 1302, the standard way of indexing is by using "live code" i.e. doing arithmetic on the code on fly. The "2 instructions per word" structure actually makes this very easy to do. It was designed in the late 1950s and built in 1961. One can program it in machine code (very easy instruction set), an assembler, various obsolete specialist languages and, of course, COBOL. There is no C compiler. Flossie is very musical. She can play many tunes.

Did you know that, here, we can go to one of several websites and buy a new car from any manufacturer, usually with a significant discount over list, together with a mandatory manufacturer's warranty that has to be honoured by that manufacturer's service outlets?

The Health Service is creaking a bit though...

Depends on how paranoid you are and whom you think is out to get you :-)

Set one of these up, together with some surveillance, train the device to recognise the mark and where he is (in conjunction with the now mandatory CFL bulbs as well as the tv and computer screens) and when you gets to just the right place - let off the shaped charge. It's clean, capable of discerning whether there is any collateral damage potential (and wait until the mark is alone) and economical as well (only use just the charge you need).

I know that there are some pretty exotic coatings in use today, but I can't help feeling, considering the number of disks likely to be sold, that this is not going to help conserve the already overstretched usage of noble metals (e.g catalytic converters etc). If Seagate bring this to market at a competitive price, then that will would be another reason to invest in noble metal mining shares (or even metal, if one can stomach the ride).

Toshiba have demonstrated fuel cells for laptops since at least 2006. They may not be pretty, but the principle should not be patentable (at least by Apple). http://www.pcworld.com/article/157606/toshibas_fuel_cell_laptop.html

After all, when one of these super volcanoes goes off, there will likely be some seismic consequences and if the other volcano is ready to pop, that might just provide enough omph to make it go too...

Afterall it is now being done with a rather blunderbus approach. With all that extra processing power we could target people so much more effectively.

Some of us what are old enough see so many "new" things that are repackaged "old" things that have been either forgotten about or simply over looked. Methinks this is another example. The implementation details may be different, but this idea was first promulgated in *1960*! http://www.xanadu.net/ refers...

The UK airlines flatly ban *all* electronic equipment from being switched on during take off or landing. Although the official excuse is always "to protect the delicate navigation equipment", this is demonstrably rubbish as aircraft equipment is pretty well screened and filtered. It *is* true that in pre CE certification days, certain mobile equipment did have some unfortunate spurii, but CE testing got rid of all of them decades ago. Which means that we are left with either a) the cabin crew need to demonstrate who's boss or b) the airlines don't want equipment flying about if there is any nasty tail waving or bumps during take off or landing.

One wonders how light stable this system will be compared to existing DVD coatings. My suspicions would suggest that it may be worse.

And the Japanese have had them even longer...