I've just got to 30 and would still very much like to live forever. My wife doesn't want to live forever, and doesn't even seem particularly keen on living any longer than a 'natural' lifespan. The reason being that the people you know would all die - even if you can cure aging, you would likely see friends and relatives die as a result of accidents.

You don't get to make new relatives. Even if you go on making new friends, it would be odd to live in a world where your parents, children, brothers and sisters had died.

Yet oddly, in the UK at least, there is a tax on actually buying shares, so my long-term investment account has various charges for stamp duty as my money goes in there. The tax is only applied to buying actual shares. It isn't applied when messing around with futures and complex derivatives etc that have caused the problems.

I think this needs to be exactly the opposite way around. I don't think there should be a tax for dealing in shares, but instead a tax on dealing with various futures products. Not too severe a tax but enough to dissuade this sort of high speed speculation.

Nah... they we're clearly made from Meccano. But even Meccano doesn't come with human parts so I can't shed any light on that.

I can't disagree too much with this. In fact, Something Special is a sign language programme, really aimed at older kids with special needs, but ideal for toddlers also. My daughter does learn the signs from it and use them.

I will say though, our local children's centre has free sign-language groups, and she picks up more signs at that class than from TV.

Another mod up for this; an 18-month old has no need to be using a computer! My 22 month old likes building with plastic bricks - I help her out suggesting and starting a structure e.g. a house for her duck teddy and she carries on working out where stuff fits. Being a girl she also likes throwing tea parties for the teddies and changing and feeding a doll.

She also likes the bright screens of laptops and TVs, but when she does watch TV like Peppa Pig and Something Special (not sure if you get those in USA), she just kind of glazes over and clearly isn't really thinking anywhere near as much as she does at other times. A PC is a bit more interactive, but I think she would just watch the moving lights, rather than learning. We let her watch a bit of TV, partly because we've also got a newborn needing attention, which is very difficult to deal with particularly while I'm at work. But ideally we'd keep her occupied with other toys the whole day.

> The first person to think of trimming a sharp rock for better performance was a genuine innovator.

If only they'd patented it!

Perhaps not the most creative use, but it seems every single item I connect to my PC needs a different cable - mostly USB, but there are so many versions to choose from these days. Plus other stuff like headphones, a portable hard disc, spare batteries for cordless mouse etc. Generally I'd got a pile of bits and pieces centred around a desktop with 7 empty 5.25" bays.

I've got a few of these: http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/caseaccessories/kama-cabinet-abk - they're just little storage drawers, but they're helpful for organising all the bits that go with the PC.

> in case a nuclear bomb goes off

Or even more far-fetched, someone brings in a fan heater from home, forgets to switch it off one evening, some paper blows into the elements and sets on fire, and it burns down the building.

Keeping an off-site backup is not a ridiculous idea in itself. Could the business survive if the office burned down and all servers and data was lost? Maybe if employees are allowed to take data home, most stuff could be pieced back together, but even then it would be a substantial amount of work. But as with TFA, it's not something to spend a massive amount of money on. Where I work, all projects should have a daily backup to a central server (just simple batch script / shell script / version control system), and that has an off-site backup, which as far as I'm aware just means one of the admins swaps the hotswap bays and takes the discs home on a weekly basis. Total cost is about 5 minutes a week to swap the discs; the hotswap hardware itself, and a few extra discs is well under £1000. Everything else is no different from what we'd need to do for regular backups anyway.

Even for my own data, e.g. holiday photos, every so often I make sure to put it all on a removable hard disc and copy it onto my work PC. I'd certainly consider it worthy of a disaster recovery solution, given that it's so very easy to do.

External graphics cards? These have been tried before for laptops, but electricity only moves down copper traces at a very limited speed. This sort of connection could decrease the latency as well as bandwidth. Potentially other external components could be done the same way - e.g. additional memory in a laptop base station. The bandwidth is enough to support it, and the latency should be good too.

I think the problem people have with RAMBUS is specifically that they sat in on the JEDEC working groups to watch the development of new standards, and then when everyone had decided on the design and invested huge amounts of money, they piped up that they had a patent on it. This was completely against the principles of the JEDEC working groups - where the meetings are specifically aimed at ensuring they are developing an open standard free from their member's patents which might otherwise block the technology - not necessarily 100% unpatented, but where they know what the patent licensing agreements are. Generally all the members agree to cross-licence the patents between themselves - this is the 'cost' of joining the JEDEC standards group.

The RAMBUS technology (and to a leser extent, it's implementation) is actually rather good, so they aren't a classic patent troll, but their submarine patent on DDR technology makes them clearly some form of patent troll.

The most worrying thing is that I wouldn't put it past the government to pass a law repealing the third law of thermodynamics!

I was quite impressed with the Monster Raving Loony party's campaign this year. Introduction of a 99p coin to save on change was genius, but this definitely tops it.

> That said, I wouldn't employ half of the people on my undergraduate degree course to change a lightbulb, unless someone else was supervising them.

I would definitely agree with that, but it's nothing new. I finished uni 7 years ago, and I knew people (even some awarded a first) who quite simply couldn't write a computer program. I work at a dedicated software house, but most people we employ have come in from the other sciences, particularly physics, and maths backgrounds. I understand why: my brother went to the same university 2 years behind me, doing Physics and Molecular Chemistry. He had to take an 'introduction' to C-coding course worth 5 units - it covered approximately 3 full modules (30 units) of my own course.

As I say, my own experience of uni is now a bit out of date, but I get the impression that generally, the CS courses on offer in the UK are not up to par with the proper sciences or maths. And the grades are awarded way too easily, even to people who fundamentally don't understand the subject matter.

Which things and how? I can't find any answers and I'm really interested in what went wrong here. I had a bit of an investigation online - I even found a useful article and discussion here which appears to have a number of knowledgeable people:

http://www.drillingahead.com/forum/topics/transocean-deepwater-horizon-1

But still nothing really clearcut. A lot of interesting titbits on the BOP, and how that might have failed. It's worth a read if you're interested.

Why is everyone so fixated on BP's management and failings, when they were just leasing a rig owned and operated by Transocean? Yes, the fact they were getting the profits from the rig means they have a duty to pay the costs of the disaster, and they are doing so with very little complaint. But sending BP's management to prison? It seems like Transocean were the offshore drilling experts, and hadn't made any complaints that BP were asking them to act recklessly in any aspects of the rig operation. I think BP should continue paying for the clearup, but I don't see any evidence that they were criminally negligent.

> If they halved the price, they could possibly quadruple the number of subscribers

I don't believe that at all. The market is miniscule because it's a niche product. As others have said, for most purposes a standard mobile network will suffice. For fixed but remote installations, its easier to put up a dish and use that. Typically for stuff like cruise ships, they just stick a cell tower on the boat. So Iridium is only ever going to be used by small groups of people wandering about in the wilderness. I don't think reducing the price would cause more people to want to do that.