The judge who granted the injunction did appear to suggest Imogen Thomas had attempted blackmail with the details of the story - which is part of the reason an injunction was granted.

> If by the time you get to university you don't have more than a basic (no pun intended) proficiency in programming then you're likely headed for a non-techie role.

I don't agree with this. Not everyone is from an environment where they will have been exposed to much of this stuff - certainly, before I went to university, I couldn't do any programming. I didn't know many people from any professional background really, just knew I quite enjoyed messing about with computers and figured I'd do computer science. My parents both work in the public sector, the school careers service was very heavy on public sector jobs (IIRC airline pilot was the only non public sector job which appeared on my list, and I'm colourblind which rules that one out...) In the end I've been a techie for 10 years now and am still mostly avoiding moving into management.

University is the first time people are really making their own choices on a large scale. Any assumptions made on a person before that are unlikely to be valid.

Tesco sell CFLs for 10p a piece (16 cents). That's the UK, but it's rare things are cheaper over here ...

My previous house (built 1885) had a couple of light fittings that got through a ridiculous amount of bulbs. Based on the wiring colours, it must have been about 50 years since the wiring was put in. CFLs lasted about 2 months, but incandescents only lasted 1-2 weeks. My current house had most of the rewiring done in the 90s, and I've only had to replace 1 CFL in over 3 years.

I'm guessing you're also American. Because I think in the UK and the rest of Europe (and seemingly the world) people do still like Nokia.

Naming a current product might be an issue, because they do have lots but without big launches. But if I needed a phone I'd find plenty of current models in the shop. What are they particularly good at? They're very compact (iPhone is just too big for my liking, and most smartphones are equal size to bigger), excellent battery life (mine lasts about a week between charges), work beautifully as a phone, I've never had a dropped call (for that matter I'm not sure I even heard about dropped calls until smartphones came around...), very good value for money, well built, designed with thought about how it will be used as a phone ...

The best smartphone I've seen yet is the HTC Desire, but second is an N900 which I like enormously. The iPhone 4 gets third place for me. The Nokia OS isn't the prettiest, but it is definitely one of the most usable.

It isn't black and white - but the shade of grey has been getting darker since the Oracle takeover. I'd say they've taken a pragmatic view that Java had a lot going for it, despite not being 100% open. It seemed to me the shine had been coming off Java for a while before the Oracle takeover anyway - there are plenty of gems in there, but getting useful stuff done still seems a bit cumbersome.

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.