Those "lots of people" don't count, the government counts. Let's not kid ourselves here --- democracy in the UK means choosing between a discredited Thatcherite party (red logo) and an undirected Thatcherite party (blue logo) as our preferred autocratic rulers for the next five years.

They don't need to do anything to regain power. Gordon Brown is the best thing ever to happen to the Conservative Party.

one cannot, for instance, easily say, "Sharia law is sexist" without inciting any kind of Muslim action

There, fixed that for you.

We've dramatically cleaned up our environment, achieved energy independence, freed ourselves from the political constraints of fossil fuels and massively bolstered our economy with a whole new class of green businesses.

What planet do you live on? I'll take the next hyper-shuttle there.

It doesn't "start up" like a fossil-powered car. The motor idles at 0 rpm, rotating only to drive the wheels. Further, on similar cars (Volvo S80, etc) the doors will re-lock when you move away from them, and the car won't be driveable for very long without the key inside it either. I imagine the makers of this car, having previously engineered a virtually brand-new powertrain, will be able to properly implement keyless entry.

"What? It competes with our own services!? Delete it from the Store! Then bring me the developers' ashes on a plate with a glass of red wine..."

I honeslty don't know when exactly Linux added the feature to let you swap desktops easily.

That would be about 1965, or whenever it was that UNIX was conceived. UNIX has had the capacity to support thousands of users simultaneously since the beginning of time (literally). When X appeared in the late 80s, very little changed in this regard.

Since Windows 95, Microsoft has been trying very very hard to add sensible multi-user facilities to Windows. The fact that consumer releases prior to XP were unable to prevent users logging in without a password, let alone prevent users from having full write access to each others' files, is perhaps irrelevant considering those users each had permission to delete the Windows kernel as well.

The NT kernel supplied XP with the capacity to handle multiple users securely and XP introduced fast user switching, but the damage was done --- most of the apps available by that point had to be run as root, and the attempt to bring the system a tiny fraction further along its long journey to UNIX-level user security was one of the more significant nails in Vista's coffin.

I reckon MS will eventually (too late) do what Apple did (also too late) and replace the entire thing with a bastard UNIX system running the shell from the previous system, and provide a compatibility layer. Indeed, it might be the only way to save it. Meanwhile, Wine continues to make it increasingly obsolete.

for a Google router there's no particular business model other than spying on the owner

You are aware of the idea of selling routers, right?

I've seen this advertised on TV in the UK for a production car, I think it was the V70; and it's mentioned in the first sentence of the Safety section of the S80's website: http://www.volvocars.com/UK/ALL-CARS-MY09/VOLVO-S80/Pages/default.aspx... they call it Collision Warning with Auto Brake. Really, this is old --- the current model of the S80 is a couple of years old at least.

The X window system on my Debian box crashed at 23:59:59 UTC --- when I returned from watching the fireworks on TV, the clock was stuck at this time. As usual it wouldn't kill, so I have just finished repairing my Firefox profile due to the ensuing hard reset.

When will people stop capitalising the second F in Firefox? Or are we all going to use FireFox in future? Perhaps InterNet Explorer and SaFari could join in.

Fixed the taskbar?!

You forgot Volvo. :)