But why would we say that? Most people won't, and that's the point. For better or worse, most people outside of work are primarily content consumers not content creators, and tablets are better content consumption devices for many people's needs than a desktop PC.

All of which might be a reasonable strategy, except that the typical uses for a Windows desktop PC are totally different to the typical uses for a tablet or similar mobile device. One is for power and content creation, the other is for easy content consumption. They just happen to overlap in that both can involve a web browser some of the time.

If MS sticks to its guns and tries to force Metro on everyone, I think it really will be the end of them, at least in their current monolithic form. I don't think they can afford another Vista or another poor assault on the mobile space, and Windows 8 has the potential to be both at the same time.

And how, exactly, is this different to the situation with Linux? There is no guarantee that someone will report a vulnerability to the maintainers of, say, a Linux distro, any more than that someone will report one to Microsoft. And what Linux distribution or major infrastrucuture project still runs an open access security mailing list today, with guaranteed full and immediate disclosure of all reported vulnerabilities?

Ultimately, unless you personally are directly involved with the security and maintenance of every major Linux project you use, you're still trusting other people to be honest in their disclosure and prompt with fixing security issues.

Yes, because obviously the people who are responsible for systems processing a quadrillion dollars of financial transactions just throw a quick Debian CD in the drive to set it up. I don't suppose they're taking any extra steps to audit or secure their systems beyond what a typical home user running Windows for Facebook and gaming would do. Hell, you could probably just walk right into their data centre and remove a hard drive while no-one's looking, and then take it home to look through the files in your own time.

Leaving aside whether or not any of those things are necessarily true in 2012, about 99.37% of the Linux user base is also experienced enough not to fall for typical malware scams, but I don't suppose that makes any difference.

Well, given that servers are typically administered by either professional sysadmins at the office or keen geeks at home, and both of those groups are going to have a decent idea about security and not fall for typical malware scams: yes, I think desktops are far better targets for malware.

Well, I don't really believe that you could become part of a botnet and not trigger some sort of mobile data cap or at least see major alarm bells at your next monthly bill. Nor do I really believe that you download the same volume of sensitive company information to your phone that you probably have on your usual laptop/workstation. But even if those things are all true, you must realise that you are an outlier. The very fact that you understand what we're talking about already tells me that you know more about how to secure that device than the kind of person most malware is aimed at.

In other words, you're still not an appealing target for malware writers. They want the kind of person who will execute the attached file claiming to be a security update from their bank or who will give honest answers when "Bob from Corporate IT" calls and asks for their user name and password so he can remotely update their personal anti-virus firewall shield. How many of those people are running Windows on a desktop PC, and how many are accessing their corporate intranet via properly encrypted and authenticated VPN from an Android phone with a remote kill switch in case of theft?

Do a lot of on-line banking on your Android phone, do you? Or have a nice, high bandwidth connection you could saturate to support a DDoS attack on someone who didn't pay their protection money? Or store any juicy company data that could be handy for not-quite-insider trading?

There have been security vulnerabilities found in just about every major piece of networking/server software on Linux. There is no doubt about this, because most of those packages are open source, and the fixes are a matter of public record. If there was money in writing Linux malware, there have been plenty of weaknesses to exploit, just like on Windows (or any other major platform).

But serious malware today isn't written by script kiddies any more. It's essentially organised crime, and it follows the money. If you think that wouldn't lead it right to Linux if that became the dominant desktop OS, or that being primarily open source makes the Linux ecosystem magically immune to the kinds of security bugs that make it into code written by highly skilled and experienced professionals working for the best funded software companies in the world, then I've got a few friends in Nigeria who would like your help with some financial transactions.

Is that even true any more? You can certainly cherry pick market indices and year ranges where they outperform any mainstream interest-bearing savings account, but if you hit any of the black swan periods you're going to suffer badly. Short of some sort of dubious bubble, which isn't inconceivable, it could be a decade or more before anyone who had invested before the recent crash gets back to the same level they would have been at without that crash. That's assuming that the markets do pick up some time in the near future, they sustain an above average growth rate until they've made up any remaining shortfall from the down years, and nothing else happens to cut everything in half again. I live in Europe, so I'm not convinced at all that we're out of the woods yet.

All of that is considering investing in a general market tracker of some sort. Obviously you can potentially do much better if you invest in the right stocks individually, but plenty of professionals who do that still don't beat throwing a dart at the FT listings page. It's a fool's game for small investors who aren't willing to spend a great deal of time learning about both the mechanics of financial markets and the specific investments they're considering making.

If you want to keep your money worth the same amount in real terms over the long run, are you better off just buying gold these days?

Sure, which is why a lot of the pundits were predicting before the markets opened this morning that at the end of day one the shares would close at roughly double the opening price. Quite a few people are eating their words with a side order of humble pie tonight.

I suspect Facebook is in significant trouble now. Today should have been a spectacular confidence booster that set the tone for future offerings and investment. In reality, it's been a damp squib, and that's going to make a lot of people think twice about investing.

You can never tell with these things, because what happens over the next few weeks will be based far more on market sentiment than any fundamentals, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the stock price trickle away over the next few weeks with very few winners. Even Zuckerberg's position won't be safe if that happens, because he's responsible to investors now, and they won't be happy if that's the direction things go in.

Advertising is still only worth anything if the people seeing the ads actually buy stuff.

Just this week, GM pulled out of Facebook advertising, representing a loss of millions of dollars to Facebook. Here's the money quote, in every sense, from that link:

It turns out that focussed advertising is much more valuable when it's related to something that someone is searching for or reading about right now, and people who use Facebook a lot are (shock!) not doing it because they enjoy the ads. IIRC, there was another survey reported this week, in which about half of the Facebook users questioned said they would never click a Facebook ad.

Exactly. And Facebook aren't doing very well on that score.

What's more, the growth in their user base so far has been based on social pressure and reaching a critical mass of users who bring their friends along with them through networking effects. There simply aren't enough people in the world for them to carry on doing that at the same rate.

Surprising, I know, but I'm in the "Are you kidding?!" camp on this one.

It sounds like we agree on a lot here. I think the basic problem is that the Olympics is assumed to be a long term benefit that justifies the costs (financial and otherwise) and risks inherent in being the host nation. However, the Olympic legacy for past hosts has been, at best, hit and miss, and it's not clear at all that any benefits we might achieve in the long run would have been lost had we told them to shove it when they started buying laws and so on. There is a reality distortion field somewhere around the Locog offices, and the political classes have closed ranks to hide it.

FWIW, while complete Scottish independence is a controversial subject, the Scots tend to be rather protective of the powers they have already reclaimed for themselves, and their legal system in particular really is somewhat insulated from the machinations at Westminster. They do a lot of things better than we do down here in England right now, even if there is some debate about how long they could continue to do so if they were fully independent and the financial picture changed. That's a complicated question, which goes into things like ownership of natural resources that can be collected around the UK, but in any case it's a somewhere-in-the-future issue.