There is no extrapolation from the computer industry. But quite simply there are a number of animals that don't appear to age significantly (they die of natural causes but without the death rate increasing with age), and plenty of even more extreme examples in the plant kingdom, of trees apparently thousands of years old. So there doesn't appear to be a fundamental problem with maintaining cells in working order, indefinitely.

Over evolutionary timescales though, organisms that evolve and adapt will always tend to outpace biologically immortal organisms, and as the other respondents correctly state, there is no evolutionary imperative to survive much beyond childbirth (and it is likely even a negative in evolutionary terms to linger around competing for resources with your children).

However, if people decide that regardless of the above, they want to live forever, I think it is biologically possible, and once someone finds some real traction on that problem, it will happen.

But exactly why do all these systems start breaking down? I agree we're not getting particularly close to 120 year lifespans with our current approach, which is tinkering with treatments for the ailments of old age. But I suspect there actually is a simple magic bullet somewhere - something to stop us getting old. I doubt it will happen in my lifetime, but I think at some point a switch will be found to turn off aging.

To clarify, by 'simple', I mean compared to fixing cancer, Alzheimers, Parkinsons, cataracts, osteoporosis, atherosclerosis, stroke, and so on ... We are still evolved to have a finite lifespan, and changing that will still be difficult in the extreme. But it can potentially be a lot simpler to fix the root cause and avoid being old, than fix the million and one knockons of getting old.

I wondered how long the car analogy would take! A more accurate analogy is if you innocently bought a fake Ford, and then took it in for a routine service. The garage discovers it's a fake. They therefore point it down the road and trigger the acceleration problem, destroying your car by smashing it through a brick wall.

Sorry was a fake so we took the liberty of breaking it. No you can't have a refund, we didn't make it or profit from it...

Length cubed divided by length? I'm sticking to square millimetres! 0.04mm2 for my car thanks.

Salmond should rightly have been savaged by the media for repeated seemingly untrue claims he has made and the allegations of bullying, but he has certainly not been by the BBC, they've been fawning over him in half the interviews I've seen. Every claim he has made about EU membership and currency has been rebutted by everyone else involved. He even implied the Queen supported Scottish independence, which is a low thing to do to someone who isn't really able to come out and express her true opinions on the matter.

Plus the study you cited shows 18-24 voted against independence, along with all those 55+. It was only really the 16-17 and 25-34 groups who voted strongly in favour of independence.

*One* person beheaded. It's still one too many, but the fact is that two people armed with assault rifles and a desire to kill innocent people would almost certainly have managed to do an awful lot more damage, even if passers by were similarly armed.

Also, given that the US murder rate including Chicago and DC is pretty much 4 times the UK rate, but without them is less? Well thank you for informing me, I'm heading to America next year, but there's absolutely no fucking chance I'm visiting cities with those sorts of murder rates - I hadn't realised those US crime dramas were non-fiction!

It won't take long until you can get hard disc and DVD enclosures that matches the finish and cross-section of this case and is designed to simply stack under the main case. It would be very cool to have a thunderbolt port in the bottom of the case for that, and with daisy chaining, and another port in the bottom of the add-on enclosure, you could just keep making your tower taller. But even if you're running cables at the back, it wouldn't be the end of the world.

But generally I agree that expandability has been compromised for design and as a result it looks like a great piece of kit for consumers, but maybe not so much for pros. I quite like the trashcan design though - if they'd build one with Core i7 internals, everyday RAM and standard GPUs I would definitely be very interested.

You were just getting your units mixed up when aiming that joke. Head height is about 2 yards, not 2 metres.

Actually I'm also only used to mpg, but I'm trying to get into using l/100km.

The problem is no one has any intuition for comparing MPG values. If you do 10000 miles a year, and switch from a car that does 40mpg to one that does 60mpg, how much will you save? The calculation isn't one you can do in your head easily.

But a switch from 7.1 l/100km to 4.7 l/100km? I can work out pretty quickly it will save around 400 litres / £550 a year.

Neither have I, and I don't bother with any precautions when working on PCs. But I have also assembled an AIX server which would have been just about into six figures in US dollars, and thought for that one I'd spend five minutes to go and find the anti-static equipment!

People with kids are less happy? I find that hard to believe - definitely citation needed. My kids make me far happier than anything else in my life and most parents I know feel the same.

I've had a couple of fraudulent transactions over the years but not been held liable for any of them. Once, my card had been used in Russia, and the other time a company had just randomly taken £10 from my account. Both times the bank certainly gave me my money back within a day. I don't know anyone who has ever had money taken by use of a chip and pin card, so I can't say for certain how they treat those transactions if disputed.

My brother had some problems with Paypal completely emptying his account to the overdraft limit. I got involved because he did have trouble getting his money back there, and even though his banking password (which was at the time also his paypal password) was blatantly unsuitable for use in such a setting, he did eventually get all his money back.

Strange, but it is not really a problem in the UK. Most payments like these from bank accounts go through the direct debit system, where you authorise the withdrawals from your account only through the direct debit system. When you've cancelled a direct debit at the bank, the seller will no longer be allowed to take money from your account, and from what I hear, it is fairly quick to reverse payments also. If you've cancelled payments unfairly of course, the seller may chase you for payment, but they have to use routes such as collections agencies or the courts rather than just debiting your account automatically.

I'm more than a bit surprised the same system doesn't exist in the US, but then banking is one of the few industries in the UK where we do get generally top class service.

Up to about 150dpi, I'd prefer just using the resolution for more 'space'. Certainly on a 30" monitor, I think 4K resolution would look fine without the DPI scaling. I'm writing this reply from a Vaio P-series with an 8" 1600x768 screen, and again I don't use DPI scaling on this one either, however I'm also about half the distance from the screen than I would be on my desktop monitor.

Most new programs seem to scale reasonably well. But windows strong point was always backwards compatibility. A lot of old stuff does still work in Vista / 7 but doesn't really deal with scaling properly. I think if people started buying higher res screens, application developers would fix the remaining problems.

That's what gets me down. It's nearly 6 years now since I bought my 2560x1600 30" monitor and nothing has moved, except the price for what I already have has gone up about 40%.

I'm pretty sure Apple has comprehensively shown people are willing to pay a premium for a decent screen, I just don't understand why this one area has stood still for a whole decade. I'd happily pay £1000 for a 4K monitor (well happily except for begrudging the fact such a thing hasn't been available for years already!)