I don't know why you've selected the G1 - it was one of the better supported phones. It got all the upgrades for the first year, from 1.0 to 1.6.

Pick something like LG GW620/Eve/InTouch Max/KH5200. Released in 2010, in dozens of countries, running android 1.5, it was never updated and was fully abandoned by manufacturer and carriers in under 6 months. There are hundreds of thousands of them out there on 18 or 24 month contracts which won't expire until 2012.

It is fully capable of running android 2.2, and fortunately for some, there is an open source project which provides that. But most of the people who bought it will be spending another year or so with a needlessly obsolete and insecure phone.

Windows is a high value target, which was once crippled by it's backwards compatability with DOS and low skilled userbase. Microsoft, whatever their flaws, have some properly clever people and serious vested interest in addressing this problem, and they've finally put out a release that is fairly secure out of the box and somewhat usable - while still providing fairly timely security patches for a 10 year old release. Which is why the most serious threats are now coming from widely deployed software from less responsible companies (Adobe).

Android is the exact opposite. Very few smartphone manufacturers care enough to issue regular updates for their phones, especially once you get outside of the US market. Even on the US market, most smartphones have had exactly one update: from 1.5/1.6 to 2.0/2.1 usually. No monthly security updates, and nothing at all for obsolete phones over 12 months old. You'd better hope that nobody else has the time to look at your phone that your carrier has forgotten about.

You're doing it wrong. GIMP is not for people who can barely use Photoshop. Picasa and Paint.NET are excellent tools for you, me and 99.9% of the other people who own a digital camera.

In the UK we have NHS Direct which is both 24-7 telephone and online screening and advice, run by the national healthcare system. From personal experience, it's very good.

This already exists in Google Maps. Just plan your route, click the Send To button at the top left, and select GPS. There are half a dozen supported manufacturers.

they don't want to negotiate with mobile networks in every country. international kindles still have AT&T sim cards, the extra £s are to cover the roaming charges.

US kindles pay a surcharge to download abroad

and then you get so-called slashdotphiles, who think they can hear artifacts in the lossy story compression.

let's see how you fare in a double blind test

I thought we were drumming up support for another try....

Us parents live in terror of cases like the recent one where two children were taken by Social Services, on the basis that one had been violently shaken. Some years later, the state was forced to confirm that the child was in fact suffering from a rare illness and had never been shaken... but the real parents are still unable to even see their children, since the Social Services (SS?) decided the children were now too settled with their foster parents.

I'd settle for 24 hours surveillance if it meant the state not taking my children over a stupid "guilty-until-proven-innocent" screw up.

A friend of mine was working in a chain hardware store, inside a large shopping mall, when they discovered someone had stolen a 10 foot ladder on a busy Saturday lunchtime. It's really just about having the balls for it.

The same company's R&D effort produced the VW 1l

Young people mostly don't use Twitter - it's just older people desperately trying to be cool. A perfect market for this book.

Generally fair? Every thing costs different in different places. Even the really big stuff, rent, food, council tax, etc. It all varies by where you live.

It costs me £3.5k/year to get a train two stops to work (in London). How about the next time I visit Scotland (or the Isle of Wight, just 50 miles away) a similar journey would be more than 50 times cheaper.

Petrol costs vary by up to 50% depending where you buy it (800% if you discount the tax).

A pint of beer costs 4 times as much in some places.

You try getting a parcel delivered to the Outer Hebrides.

Broadband is exactly the same. No reason you should pay the same amount to be put on the end of a 10 mile wire to the guy who's got dozens of cables running down his street anyway.

It's closer to the other way around; ARM is the mostly widely used 32 bit architecture, and accounts for more than 75% of all 32 bit processors sold.

Really, the entire world has been forced onto the ARM monoculture (except perhaps for a few x86s at the high end).

If you owned goggle.com, this would be a good way to drive some free traffic