Using just a laptop with a built in motion detector and a series of steel poles to rig it to your body you can do exactly the same thing but in higher resolution. From a simple netbook to a 21" monster its all possible and creates a higher resolution virtual reality experience. Going higher resolution why not drive it from a 30" cinema display, sure dragging the cables around is a bore but its virtual reality with exercise built in.

Oh hang on you wanted actual tactile touch, object interaction and other genuine immersive elements that signify the difference from a pair of goggles and a true virtual reality experience.

Nope we don't do that.

This is the virtual reality equivalent of carving little pictures into asprin and claiming they are Ectasy tablets.

Lets break down your "mentalism". I'm not going to argue global warming as I'm sure you think its an evil hoax, so lets just do basic science and economics

1) Compulsory replacement of lightbulbs with more expensive technology "for the environment" (no it's not just because there's a huge profit to be made selling new technology at 20x the price, honest it's not). Never mind that LED technology has much more potential.

Lots of parts of the US, California for instance, and parts of Europe (UK) have or will have issues with electricity supply. Light bulbs are quite a part of that consumption this makes electricity a scare resource (excluding its environmental impact) by having things like energy standards against TVs, cookers and indeed lightbulbs you ensure that this scarce resource isn't wasted. So yes LED technology might be better but the point is that the old technology was certainly worse. Thus by making people use energy efficient devices (including lightbulbs) you actually stop things like rolling brown outs etc.

2) Creation of flimsy plastic bags that fucking fall apart so that you need twice as many to carry the same groceries followed by the removal of plastic bags with studier but still flawed and breakable "green" "enviro" bags which are now sold at large profit instead of being given away. Lets nickel and dime our customers to death in the name of the environment - but we couldn't possibly stop filling their mailboxes with dead tree junk mail. Fucking hypocrites!

Now again putting away the dead dolphins and concentrating on the costs of landfill and the belief that you don't want to live in a socialist country this switch again makes sense. What you are given a choice between is a poor product for free (socialism) or paying a market price for something that lasts longer and has more value (capitalism). So its not enviromental nutters its just plain old capitalism at work.

3) Solar hot water systems that cost more environmentally and financially to produce, install, run maintain than their conventional counterparts, often require that they be supplemented/boosted by a conventional heater (so net negative gain in terms of production). Honest it's not about selling shit people don't need!
Now the Solar hot water systems I know about (for instance the ones that I've seen down here in Australia) are definately nothing like this and are for large parts of the year totally self sustaining. Some of them are pretty damn technically simple (black pipes on the roof) with very little cost of production. If you aren't forced to use these however what is your problem? Its capitalism at work again, the latest Ferrari is a ruddy expensive car, has rubbish amounts of space and sits only two people, why on earth would people pay over the odds when they could just get a truck? The majority of solar water systems sold in the right markets (i.e. hot countries) and geothermal systems in the right countries (e.g. Iceland) are much cheaper to run than conventional systems, sure some people put the system in the wrong place (e.g. a solar system in Ireland) but those things happen all the time. Still I could generously give you that some environmental people are a bit silly (David Cameron and his windmill springs to mind).

4) Water conservation and rationing. What a fucking joke. It's got nothing to do with environmental impact of building more dams and desalination plants and everything to do with the dollars it takes to do so. Water is not scarce on this planet. It recycles well if you don't abuse it badly with extremely noxious chemicals. The system is build to deal with the shit and piss of every creature on the planet. Anything short of sewage and noxious chemicals often can be reused if we weren't so skitish about grey water. Water as a scarce resource, and kids no longer being able to play in their back yards with a hose has nothing to do with environment and everything to do with politicians lining their pockets with taxes that should be spent on infrastructure.
Now here is where you move firmly into a mental category of your own. Australia is a massive problem with water shortages due to a long term drought. In the US the problem is that water hasn't been treated as a scarce resource and has therefore been treated as free money (SOCIALISM) by farmers in particular who have done ridiculous things like rice farming in areas that really don't get the rainfall to justify it. Building more dams and pipes doesn't help if the water is in the wrong place and if people (farmers) keep deliberately wasting water as it has no price attached to it. If water was priced fairly as a market commodity (capitalism) then it would mean that kids would be much more likely to play with the hose in the garden but that they'd have to pay the right market price for that water. With farmers being subsidised by the state (SOCIALISM) to waste water and grow stupid crops water has become an even more scarce resource than it would already be. FRESH water is a scarce resource in many parts of the planet, California is one of those places, Nevada, Arizona, Texas are others, Australia is a country with a water problem and Africa is covered with them. Throwing money at "build another damn" isn't about fixing the problem, the problem is one of consumption and the creation of a socialist agricultural system that relies on government subsidies to grow things people don't want (more corn syrup kids) and to waste water while they do it.

Only one of the things you talk about could arguably be an "enviromentalist" element, the others have very strong economic reasons for attacking the problem in the way that environmentalist people talk about. I'll use another "environmentalist" argument.

Many moons ago some "environmentalists" went to hotels and pointed out that they were using loads of detergent and water to clean towels and sheets that might not need it. Their suggestion was to put little paper cards into the hotel rooms that say "if you don't want the towels washed then hang them up" and "we change the sheets after each guest or every 3 days, if you want it changed more often just let us know". This piece of dreadful environmental insanity saved the hotels lots of money and helped protect the environment.

This is what most smart environmentalists do, hence cap & trade or a carbon tax, hence water pricing. Its about using a capitalist system to create a true market price for a commodity rather than a price which excludes the overall costs. Things like water are today the equivalent of being sold a car and never having to pay for petrol and wondering why you are running out of oil.

I've never understood this. You do realize, don't you, that without feminism, you wouldn't be a female programmer today? You'd either be a housewife, or a secretary looking for a husband so you can become a housewife.

Buzzzt! Thanks for playing, the correct answer is in fact

The first programmer (as opposed to hardware engineer) was Ada Lovelace (aka Augsta Ada Byron) who was a patron of Charles Babbage. This in an era WELL before feminism.

Grace Hopper, the creator of the term "bug", was one of the very earliest computer programmers and was leader of a team that was split 50/50 between men and women.

Its only SINCE the rise of feminism that IT has become more less of an aspirational profession as women have been able to take on roles in broader society and away from the historic meritocracies of science and engineering. It could be, and has been, argued that as women became more empowered and moved into the broader business roles that this impacted science and engineering which began to be seen as "male" roles rather than meritocratic. This is partly because in places like the US and UK the gold ribbon roles are things like business management, accountacy, law, banking et al and therefore aspirational women go for roles in those areas. In countries where science and engineering are still held with high regard (France for instance) the number of women seems (from having worked there) to be significantly higher.

There were female coders out there aplenty in the early days of computing, its only since it became mass market that the percentages have dropped way down.

It's also an official language of international diplomacy

French was the official language of diplomacy until about the middle of the 19th Century when the British Empire refused to use it. At that point in time, and re-enforced by the rise of the US, the official language of diplomacy around the world (the lingua franca "french language") has been English. English is the lingua franca of diplomacy.

English is also the official language of global air-traffic control with only one exception (hello France again).

I speak French, I love France. But as a global language? Yes you need it in France but even in ex-French colonies you'll find that more people want to speak English to you than want to speak French.

Working at a pan-european organisation (two official languages English and French) summed up the dominance of English. When a Frenchman, Italian or German had an argument they had it in ENGLISH even if they all spoke French. One day I sat in a meeting where someone, French, proposed that it should be held in French. The Spanish, Dutch, Italian and German contingent made clear that this wasn't an option. The Brits in the room didn't even have to say anything.

French is a beautiful language when spoken by beautiful French women.

You sir deserve the green geek badge.

Brilliant, especially the complaint that the utility company couldn't give you the answer on the meter connection. You can imagine the conversation

"He wants to do what?"
"Err connect to the meter to get daily statistics"
"Errr why?"
"Don't know, he already has a website monitoring the solar panel"
"Err why?"
"Don't know and to be honest he scared me somewhat in actually being interested in this stuff"

The sad part is that as this is rolled out more widely you just know that people will start banging down this sort of stuff and stopping you doing your own monitoring and forcing you to buy the "latest" MS Energy Meter 2012 application which "helpfully" outputs to Excel.

But again that is a brilliant bit of geekdom.

Okay so in the wild speculation list its not that far out to say 'MMO' but its not crazy enough. I mean you could actually see some marketing exec think it was a good idea. The other ideas on the list were

* iPhone app - sod a new platform just port the old one and sell another million copies
* Use the FIFA 10 engine - [Foot|Soccer]balls become grenades and you add some more scenery. Tanks are just "heavy" player right?
* Use the Sims engine "you can be any genocidal maniac or army general you want"

The end result however was to just keep tweaking the current engine as unlike FPS or other games people aren't as interested in the graphics but in the game play.

its that running an online gambling site is illegal,

No it isn't. What is "illegal" is allowing America citizens to gamble on-line. Online gambling is completely legal in most countries and indeed the WTO found that the US laws regarding online gambling (i.e. attacking companies hosted and managed abroad) were in fact illegal. Its pretty amazing how the "land of the free" tries to dictate what people in other countries should do when if the tables were reversed (there are several US hosted sites that do things that are illegal in the EU for instance) the "freedom of speech" line is rolled out (how that applies to online pharmacies I'm not sure though).

Now what I'd say is that if you want to work in the Valley or in the financial industry on the East coast then working for a top online gambling site or other gambling company is going to be a positive thing for your career. If however you want to work in the middle of the US on SAP systems then its not going to help.

But please lets not role out that "online gambling is illegal" its as illegal in the UK as selling beer to an 18 year old.

Straight from the big blue school of "please buy our cloud". Some pretty significant differences using Amazon as an example

1) Self-provisioning - ever tried to get an LPAR commissioned on a a mainframe yourself?
2) Multi-domain failover - want an EU and a US instance? Want to manage failover between them? Yup you can
3) Speed of expansion - The number of LPARs and MIPS isn't fixed you don't have to fight to the death for another 1 hour slice
4) Separation of Storage and compute - You've got you on-compute disk and your off compute disk (S3) and you can scale them independently and without requiring IT support
5) Low lock-in. Yup the AMI is an Amazon thing but Linux and Windows aren't. You don't get locked into a single vendor like with big blue

I could go on. I speak as someone who has had to work in Mainframe environments and while there are similarities there are massive differences. Its like the difference between Green Screen and VDI, yup they are both "remote terminals" served from a central infrastructure but the operational differences are huge.

Now the question is whether a website that backs up your data (which is all Danger/Sidekick was) counts as a cloud. Of course it isn't, its just a website that does backups like we've had for years. What sort of redundancy was built in ? (answer: nothing) what sort of distribution and federation was built in? (answer: nothing)

The problem is that like lots of things people are just slapping a "cloud" sticker on a website just because it allows lots of people to do something. Danger/Sidekick/Microsoft had a WEBSITE which had a big old SINGLE disk with NO backups. People could sync their data with this SINGLE disk. The disk failed, it all failed.

Danger/Sidekick was as much of a cloud as a single Mainframe connected to a single SAN. Only in marketing world would it count.

One of the benefits of the current system is that the journalist verifies the source. Think Deep Throat and Watergate. The journalist then aims to protect their source but the validity of that source is bound up in how much you trust the journalist.

In this new approach the problem is that Wikileaks are unlikely to verify the validity of the source and the journalist will not know who they are. This makes it more open to subversion and political manipulation as the original source now feels protected even if what they are saying is completely and utterly wrong.

This might be a good step but a very important check and balance has just been removed.

Your name isn't accepted until your product is accepted to the App Store. This way Apple have to approve both the name and the application so if you create an application that just prints out "hello world" but call it "GPS navigation" then it gets bounced because the name is wrong.

Sure this means people will bleat and complain about Apple rejecting names sometimes but it would remove the problem of squatting.

The industrial revolution started in Coalbrookdale in the early 18th century before America gained independence. Now its certainly true that New York is probably in the top 5 most famous cities in the world, 3rd I'd say behind London and Paris, umm but maybe behind Bejing as well, but it is certainly possible to know a huge amount about the industrial revolution and know nothing about New York.

Then again there are people from New York city who think its the state capital.

Hang on a second, are you seriously expecting Slashdots mainly american audience to read something by the socalist NHS? Quite clearly the reason for the NHS denying this study is that they WANT people to get ill to continue their socialist principles.

Next time you hear people decry the "socialist" NHS think on this report and ask how in the US medical system is focusing on prevention.

Just because a cost has already occurred (dvd printing or automating your warehouse) doesn't mean the company should not pass it to its customers

You would have a point if this were not a FREE upgrade. You have already in this case purchased a copy of the software and within this they have factored in the printing costs and the automation costs. The upgrade should not include these costs as you would then be paying for them twice within a single purchase.

Now I get the bit that as someone else rips you off for a similar amount then its standard practice, but not hefty?

People out there sell games for $5 and that is to get something new. $9.99 or $17 is a rip-off as there is clear margin in the work.

1) The DVD printing is already done
2) These guys should have an automated warehouse for shipping
3) That means the only element is shipping cost

Remember that Media costs et al should be excluded as this is a "free" upgrade so its just the processing costs that you are paying for. This means shipping ONLY as everything else SHOULD be automated in a modern supply chain that is shipping a standard size product.

So how much would it really cost to ship these items $2? $3? That gives a profit of $7 per shipment for Apple and $14 for the manufacturer who is shipping on the Microsoft stuff.

That is a hefty amount as it represents an additional set of margin for the supplier.

My Suunto HRM uploads to an app which can then export it as a series of XML files, which is nice.

On the iPhone I use TrailGuru which enables me to upload the tracks and then export them as KML. A little bit of XML/XSLT/XPath later and I've got a mashup of the two which give me all the information I need on HRM again position/speed etc.

Is this really a big geek challenge? Pretty much everyone I know these days uses systems that upload to sites which enable the data to be exported in XML formats.