I am really struggling with this tablet phenomenon or fad. I do have one but I still do understand them. Sure they are good as a (bulky) personal media player and web surfer. Yup, they can work well enough as big PDA.

They are fairly useless at document creation meaning they are really only a consumption device and that's what puts them in the ranks of flying boat cars. How so you fill the gap between the smartphone and the desktop? I don't think it is the tablet.

Indeed you are right that VAT is a consumer tax. Transactions between companies are not VAT-rated (unless they themselves are the consumers). However...

Due to a loophole, Amazon pay VAT for books sold in the UK to the Luxembourg Government (at 3%). I am no VAT expert and it is a stupidly complicated tax but it may well be that Amazon is forced to pay UK VAT on ebooks it buys from UK publishers because they are the end of the chain and seen as the consumer for UK tax purposes. In fact Amazon UK is classed simply as a distributor. The real business is in Luxembourg

Amazon now class themselves as just a distributor in the UK with their main business located in Luxembourg. On UK sales of £3.3 billion last year they paid precisely no UK tax. Amazon in Luxembourg employ 134 people, who must work very hard indeed compared to the 2300 box pushers in the UK. Amazon also get a Federal tax credit in the US because they pay (ahem) tax abroad. This means they pay less than the standard rate (35%) companies would normally pay.

And indeed the Nokia 7710 had a touch screen and multi-tasking back in 2004.

If companies are allowed to combine lots of technologies together to produce new patents then, effectively innovation in the West is finished. Future developments and sales will be done by countries who don't give a flying fig about Apple or Google or IBM etc patents!

News International shut down a paper because it was caught hacking voicemails. These guys are pretty much hacking everything.

How many people have access services via mobile with their work accounts? More than a few I would guess.

I am sure you will, but not like you do now! I consider myself a gamer but now at 48, I play games in a different way. I no longer wish to spend hours and days and weeks on the same game. This change happened about 2 years ago.

Now, I need a quick football match, a spin round the block, blow the head off some dude, just as much as I ever did... but now only for short periods of time and not every day.

It is called growing up and not growing old. I can still out play the kids at football (real with a real ball) and out run them over a distance.

As you get older you learn there is more to life than any single thing and you have to regulate your activities accordingly

You, my friend, are welcome to visit my lawn any time you like. One of the things I don't do are lawns!

GM - Bust!
Coca Cola - prefer Pepsi
McDonalds - We got em in town. Not a Yank in sight! Most seem to come from Central Europe. Probably true of many staff in American franchises too.
Microsoft - You got me on this one. You can proudly to have sole bragging rights!
Anheuser Busch - From the famed Bavarian state in the US?
Fox News - Owned by that well know American philanthropist from... Adelaide. Having forced him to become a US citizen, could you do the rest of us a favour by keeping him there? Just when we thought we had got rid of him, he pops up just to irritate us. Thanks for your help.

I remember when I was small, I used to hear of these "commies". AFAIK, Margaret Thatcher sorted them all out in the 1980s, with a bit of help from some actor chap-or-other - I am a little vague on the details - something to do with minors and dents or dentists or somesuch.

Nowadays they are all fine upstanding people who, having seen the error of their ways, reformed themselves and bought most of our stuff. Apparently they got a good deal because all the things were second hand and a bit old-fashioned and worn out. Anyway we don't call them "commies" any more. We call them "sir".

Apple TV! That is the reason for the failure. It should have been called iTV.... or is that taken?

ermm.. on tape? At CES? C90s are back?

When I pointed out the lack of year zero 10 years ago, I got called a pedant and worse. You get marked up as informative. How times have changed!

You assume that the relationship bound by the treaty is an equal one. I'd argue that it is not. We have to prove probable cause. You do not.

I never mentioned his mental health, you did. However the Commons Home Affairs Committee - a senior committee of UK politicians from all parties - said that the extradition should be halted because of his "precarious state of mental health. They also said that there was a "serious lack of equality" in the way the extradition treaty deals with UK citizens compared with US citizens. - Source BBC

I am not saying that what he did was right. However, I am saying that the processes being used against him are fundamentally wrong and the potential sentence is severely out of proportion with the offence he committed.

In addition Aspergers sufferers are commonly obsessives combined with a high degree of social naivety, which means they are unable to assess the consequences of their actions. In short there was no criminal intent and I don't think anyone is arguing differently. In this case the weight of law being used is out of proportion to the offence and the punishment threatened is extreme and unreasonable and therefore cruel.

...because has he been in the US hacking UK computers, he would not be extradited to the UK to stand trial.

The extradition treated between the UK and the US is very one-sided and ill-conceived. It has caused a fair degree of anger, in some circles this side of the pond.

This case has brought the issue to the fore and has made a wide range of people, who normally wouldn't care, feel very uncomfortable. The issue of reciprocity needs to be addressed but unfortunately for McKinnon it will be too late! When he gets to court in the US there will be massive coverage on our news channels and the levels of anger will be heightened. The UK government knows this but they also know they won't be in power when this phase is reached.

During the news coverage McKinnon has come across as a bewildered and lost individual. Your average Brit will not like seeing such as person being hounded in a foreign environment, on the 6pm news. This is an issue that the US government should never pushed forward with, but asked local legislative processes to deal with it!

It is more than profit matters. Profit is an obligation and everything else is secondary. That is why you have legislation and monitoring bodies to limit the excesses caused by the prime obligation.

I think you'll find that "..forcing you to buy their hardware.." should read:
"..forcing you to install Ubuntu on your existing hardware and never experiencing the delights of owing Apple products.."

It just your turn for now. The "only country in the world" event passes to China very soon.

Nope! The solution is to wait. Readers will appear quite rapidly because they are not the difficult to make. Stores will get their act together quite quickly because they have already taken a hammering from Amazon.

Besides the Kindle is not the finished article. It also has a too stupid a name to be taken seriously. It's not exactly a Hoover nor an iPod.

"Right dear. Just off for a bit of a Kindle." or "The Kindle generation." - I don't think.
That said the Nook is far worse. If you told someone in the UK that you had a Nookie Reader, you'd get some very funny looks!