Rather than the previous comment about sticky stuff in keyboards, this is now the funniest observation and answer on the entire interwebs.

Photo-voltaic solar is a deader end than dead dinosaur oil. While everybody runs around calling silicon the most abundant material on earth, they're forgetting that the chemicals which turn silicon from an almost perfect insulator into a photovoltaic semiconductor are some of the rarest and the solar indistries are heavily dependent on the aluminium and oil industries for these elements.

How about Peak Oil coming by 2015? That's going to put the brakes on the number of cores in our computers. Won't matter what we call it. When the energy runs out, there'll be no food, let alone new computers.

I find it hilarious that Macroslop would care either way. If Windows 7 is as good as they claim, comparisons to Mac OS won't provide any advantage, but they will not cause any disadvantage, either. The clampdown on Mac OS comparisons is a bit ginger, at best. At worst, it shows a marketing department terrified of the alternative OS. Something they should have no need to be. Yes, I'm a Mac OS X user.

I would have thought Google were perfectly placed to provide a means for unsigned artists to sell there stuff directly, but instead they're going with label artists. Everybody wants their cut of the slave trade music industry, nobody really wants to get behind actual music.

What right? The right vested in them by the Parliament of Australia, bound in the act which establishes the CSIRO to develop science and technology for the benefit of the Australian people. CSIRO's annual budget isn't all that big, most of its research is funded by patent licences and royalties. Australian taxpayers benefit by being a source of science an technology on a world scale, by having brain-rich universities and by attracting world-class minds to our research centres.

Call it "free, unlimited energy" and use it to power an electric car. Really, the media are THAT stupid.

Meh. It is what it is. I think the article is a little tongue in cheek when it claims the double slash has "infuriated" web surfers. There may have been a little confusion amongst windows users early on, but these days people just accept it and most browsers don't require the protocol and double slash for standard hypertext locations, anyway. Get over it, Tim, we forgive you.

"If it was up to the **AAs, we would be copying sheet music for our spinets with sharpened quill pens."

PIRATE!!!!!

Morse is not such a silly thing. Teach the history of tech in simple hands on ways, build a morse buzzer, then a cystal radio, connect 2 telephones with a battery, then improve the signal with a bridge to isolate the battery, program a Z80, look at the basics of how computers move data, look at how the cellular network works. (A great explanation of the last item can be founds at tidbits.com.) Look at what grows from all this simple tech, have fun brainstorming the possibilities of the future. Most of all, make fun and inclusive. Teach it this way, and you're teaching them to "plug, play, break and fix" which is they way we techies get savvy. Those who are afraid to have to do a reboot, never learn how far they can push a tech toy.

Really, until governments the world over rediscover that the term "licence" actually means "a privilege", not "a right", and starts issuing licences accordingly (ie making them harder to get and harder to keep), then stupid people will continue to want to use the mobile in the car by any means.
 
In a car, you're hurtling down the highway inside a box that weighs between 1000kg an 2000 kg, with barely the illusion of control. Driving is a dangerous activity that should only be allowed for people who appreciate and understand that.

This sort of thing continues to push the line that safety is not the driver's responsibility. In many parts of the world the death tolls are pretty much the same percentage as back in the fifties. People drove these old beasts more cautiously, it was harder to get a licence and it was harder to afford a car.

Now, thanks to the safer cars make safer roads mentality to infests every corner of the world, motorists have become more selfish and irresponsible. Cars are sold as racing machines, police blame victims in crashes (cyclist or pedestrian, for example) and the roads have become like something out of a prequel to Mad Max/Road Warrior.

Safer cars is only one quarter of the equation. The other 75% has to be put into making licences harder to get and keep, and making cars harder to own.

Oh great, now the blackhats will just start using "ant" tech to create their botnets. One will find a big cache of bank data, start shouting, "hey guys, here's a goldmine!" and they'll go nom nom nom all over our computer networks. Sheesh, just require admin password for the installation and first run of ALL executable code.

I can't help feeling people will hate these as much as Segways for the same reason - they make you look like a tosser. I mean, what's with the bent knees, legs spread posture? Please! This won't switch me from my bicycle yet.

We never have had control over our information. That was the lesson of the Doomsday Book, and it is the lesson taught by gossip undermining reputation. Information doesn't simply want to be free, it's a fighter for its freedom!