13 years == barely outside the factory gate. 25, 30, 40 years is old for a car but not 13

Time was when Ireland and a handfull of other countries did have to ratify some stuff by popular vote, but Ireland recently gave away that right. 2 or 3 times Ireland voted no on various steps towards the European superstate but the local politicians just re-ran the election when they didn't get the answer they wanted. See Nice Treaty, Lisbon Treaty

Expect scanned and even perfectly good text copies of this book to be on all good torrent sites around the time it's supposed to be released

Ordinary consumers don't tow range extenders. Most won't go near anything that isn't an ordinary saloon / SUV with a PRNDL gate transmission. Using a hitch and towing stuff is beyond the capability of most

Damn USAian barbarians just love their death penalty. Backward ould fools..

Maybe the current crop of adblockers don't download the ads and can be monitored using JavaShit but eventually one will be created that downloads the ads but simply leaves that section of the screen blank. These days most ads are recognised by URL and that URL is usually hosted on a different server to the site itself. Future adblockers could use a thunderbird anti-spam type algorithm to visually recognise ads and match them with a database of things that people reported as ads

The race is winnable alright. Even if the end result would be the demise of "free sites" who get rich off the ads or the more recent trends of sites not getting very rich of the ads but hoping for acquisition by some supermassive company who will plaster the said site with ads until all users leave.

They don't make discrete semiconductors or capacitors. No China == no more electronics for us. Even the stuff that Intel make in the States is often shipped to Malaysia or the People's Republic to be put in a case and shipped back.

Apparently at the Samsung shipyard this thing was built in, it's a good month if nobody dies in an accident that month. At least that's how it was in 2006 when they had almost made it a month without anyone getting killed, then 2 lads decided to fall to their deathsfrom a crane.

Why bother requiring authentication for a bit of bandwidth that costs about 0.01 of a cent per person to provide? If anything this will make the internet a less-free place, with a debit card & address traceable from every packet that's sent.

The only good thing is if the grubby mobile phone network operators get in on this, maybe we will see more powerful wifi standards emerging and we will eventually do away with the proprietary UMTS/LTE standards and hopefully we will eventually see the end of having to pay for bandwidth while on the move (everyone simply runs and shares their own AP, kind of like FON)

These have been available for years. I bought a no-brand Chinese one for my bike not too long ago, of course without the fancy batteries, sleek plastic cover on the hub and iPhone app.

If that's not good enough then here's a petrol version petrol version (engine inside the wheel! from 1901)

I am sick of the Android+iPhone duopoly and never liked either of those OS to begin with. Now if they could only make a phone with a hardware keyboard

It makes sense to say "feck it!" and live whats left of life to the fullest. Young people would have it in their mind that they are going to be around for another 50-100 years. As I get older myself I find it more and more tempting to try something just to see what happens. When you are young you start off nice and naive and with little to lose so you make risky decisions, spend a couple of decades as a boring risk-averse PHB type who worries about absolutely everything but then after a while you will get tired of that too.

The world is ruled by grey-haired folk who are still a good bit away from retirement, have lots to lose (career, assets, life). Which explains why the world is getting more boring by the day.

Good old Eircom, the feckers!

No bandwidth cap (adsl line connects at 8m down and 800k up, so there are probably people here with capped connections who can actually transfer more data per month than I can)

I run my own email server as well. Not hard to set up and maintain dovecot+postfix + roundcube (optional) at all but unfortunately a lot of people are a bit *too* addicted to convienience and have outsourced everything to the Big Bad GOOG

This is already the case in many ways, hence the popularity of web based apps and native applications that run their own webserver to be accessed via localhost. I actually found GTK+ easier to use than Qt, but there is no windows version for GTK3, not even one in sight so it turned out that I was writing a Linux-only program without realising it! GTK3 itself is not too bad to use, it's just a bit limited and needs work.

The Gnome desktop though, is a whole other story, it seems to be controlled by developers who lost the run of themselves and tried the Steve Jobs approach - "We're giving you a UI change and you're going to like it!"