So which phone manufacturer is making a profit from mining our data then? Considering that Android connects to Google's services (encrypted of course.), not Samsung or HTC or Huauwei.

Breakdowns of iPhone "R&D" costs and the internal hardware always show an enormous profit margin for them, 69% in the case of the iPhone 6.

That doesn't dilute the value of Tim Cook's arguments though.

You can't effectively market the absence of a negative claim from the anti-GM hystericals "Absolutely doesn't cause cancer!" is not the sort of thing that will cause harmless salmon to fly off the shelves.

"Muslim" isn't a race.

If by "suddenly drop" you mean "give six months to a year notice and a way to export all of your information to migrate to another service" - then yes, they often do that when retiring products they don't want to continue.

http://www.project-syndicate.o...

Population is widely expected to peak at around 8 - 10 billion and stabilise somewhere in the next 10 - 20 years, and probably decline a little afterwards. Scary visions of a planet bursting at the seams with people are just hyperbole at this point.

I'm not sure why a luddite would also want an email account!

But in seriousness, at least in the UK, you can have SMS sent to a landline number no problem. Some magic along the way results in a phone call and a robot reading out the text message. Our banks even use an automated outbound voice messaging platform to do the same thing as the SMS for people who don't have a mobile.

I expect they'll offer this if demand is high enough.

Facebook is a platform, it just happens not to be a hardware one.

You can convince a sceptic, the word you're looking for is "denier"

It's trivial to block HTML5 tags that show multimedia content and works pretty much the same way you'd block Flash wholesale--just drop all and tags (or whatever they are) using the same mechanism

Not sure about the rest of the world, but in the UK you can call yourself whatever you like quite legally--as long as you're not doing it with the intent to commit fraud or break the law.

So what is your real name when these are the circumstances?

Seems more like Person of Interest realm, and that show feels a lot more like something that could exist today than flukey telepaths being born. (Great show by the way, starts of slow but gets going!)

We've had those rules for longer than the EU has existed, our state-owned monopoly on the tubes was privatised in 1985...

Whitelisted internet mode, this is fucking trivial. Switch it on when your child is on the internet.

I discovered a while ago that most crossings in the UK have a little metal nubbin underneath the button...When it's safe to walk the metal thingy whirs around, and it stays still when it's not safe!

Genius.

Not sure how much vegetables cost in the USA, but everywhere I've been they're pretty fucking cheap. I'd question why someone is deemed capable of having a child in the first place if they can't spend a few pounds a week on some vegetables that may or may not be eaten...