We're all going to hell in a handcart

Give them leaky Osmiroid fountain pens and tell them to MTFU. You can't make ink pellets with an iPad.

Coincidentally, we took the kids there last week

The ring display was a bit "meh" (it's next to the secondhand bookshop and not exactly pride of place) but the curse seems to have worked on nearby Tadley, which has some of the most depressing housing outside the former USSR and a nuclear warhead factory.

My daughter bought a rubber dragon from the gift shop, which I suppose might have been Smaug.

It's the iPhone 5, stupid

Apple put a new phone on sale in Q4 2012. Samsung didn't.

But this analysis is about HBOS

The wider banking crisis occurred because 'merkin banks made lots of doubtful loans to trailer trash and then securitised these loans, selling them on to a succession of other gullible banks (including British ones) who didn't realise or care what they were buying - they just looked at the predicted cash flows. Predictably, the trailer trash defaulted and there was a massive loss of confidence in the whole system which caused the credit crunch and thus the recession (or is it a depression by now?).

So it's the same root cause, but through an amplification mechanism that is more akin to the casino banking which the OP dismisses.

This would almost work as a proposition for us. My wife mainly does short trips to and from work 3 miles away, I rarely drive to work (I cycle, to keep the flab at bay) and we have a petrol-powered estate car for longer trips. It's vanishingly rare that we need to independently take long journeys.

Battery cost is still high, though - add on the electricity cost and we'd only just be breaking even on "fuel" costs, I reckon. Lower servicing costs and a longer-lasting vehicle, though.

Main disadvantage is that the house would really need rewiring, as plugging in the Zoe and the tumble drier together would almost certainly fry the substandard radial connection to the garage.

Unsalted hashes

are easily broken en-masse with a rainbow attack, unless you used a really strong password that the creator of the rainbow table didn't include, like "j67-*^%fg".

This is a pretty epic fail, although I accept the judge's assertion that no harm can be proven in these specific cases (I'm assuming the users changed their passwords promptly so the stolen hashes can no longer be used).

Nooooo!

The only way to get the creamier taste of "milk first", and still brew the tea with boiling water, is to use a teapot.

Sorry, the research just shows what a bunch of philistines the sample was.

Sky - paying for adverts

I confess to being surprised when I subscribed to $ky and paid handsomely for the privilege of seeing even more adverts than on ITV. VH1 was unwatchable because they crammed all their adverts into peak hours (with none at late night) to get round the 10 mins per hour limit, meaning it was about 20-30% adverts if you just wanted some music videos.

Only the movie channels avoided adverts (at least during films) but they cost a shedload, the pricing structure being geared towards making you pay for the full monty rather than just selecting what you want (if you add either movies or sport, having everything costs very little more, and I definitely didn't want sport).

Eventually I unsubscribed because satellite TV turned out to be a prime example of Sturgeon's Law.

It's getting worse

The irony was that Microsoft's unofficial version of Java, once bundled with Windows, was generally OK. Then Sun sued Microsoft and the result is that we have to use the bloated, insecure, crapware-laden official version (anything that adds itself to the system tray and creates pop-up reminders is a fail in my eyes). I never install it when building a machine, and if a website requires it, I decide that I don't require that website.

The current irritation is that the latest release of Firefox prompts me to install an updated version of Java whenever I start it (on Windows, anyway - it's OK on Linux Mint). One day the wife or kids are going to do what FF asks and I'll have a crapware-infested system. Hopefully them being "limited users" will prevent this.

Not good enough

I want a ring like that of Ming The Merciless, that generates earthquakes, tidal waves and - er - hot hail on obscure planets in the SK system. Or just Dunstable, I'm easy.

Small problem with satellite

Freesat, as opposed to Freeview, has some channels missing (e.g. Dave). This is apparently because half of western Europe can receive Freesat but only the UK and a bit of Belgium can receive Freeview, hence there are international licensing and royalty issues at stake.

There was the odd thing on the "free to air" channels over Christmas that we couldn't see because we're on satellite (old Sky digiboxes, no subscription).

I've also seen Wile E. Coyote setting up a roadside IED to try and "take out" Road Runner. Do these 1950s cartoon makers and modern-day DVD pimps have no sense of decency towards our brave boys in Helmand province?

Hang on...

1. Not many people outside a few big cities can get 4G, so what's the point in buying the iPhone 5?

2. A 3% drop in share price is noise.

(I don't own anything by Apple but this seems to be a non story).

Facebook. It's free and always will be.

Apart from this bit. And this. And this.

Everyone said the iPad would fail

but it had an Apple logo on it, so it sold like hot cakes. Normal laws do not apply.

Or they could actually fit the Focus with something useful

Like a head-up speed display reflected in the windscreen. Why don't all cars have one? It's old tech.

Frankly, touch-screen stereos frighten me; they are totally distracting as you have to use your eyes. There was a good reason that Motorola car radios in the 1970s had push button memory, rather than having to turn the tuning knob and look at a scale.

Obligatory Kenny Everett joke

"Got a weak stomach, have we?"

"Whaddya mean, weak stomach? I'm chucking it as far as he is."

Well, I logged in to vote

I don't use Facebook but I have a basic profile just so people can see I'm not dead. Tried to vote against this but (as usual when it's busy) the site didn't display properly and came up in text-only format, there was no apparent link to the vote from the voting information page and I just gave up. I suspect a few million other people did the same.

Imagine a General Election where the location of the polling booths was not made public.

Pulchitrudinous

Salacious

Facetious

Quixotic

Puckish

That's me. I lied about one of them.

LEDs are fine

But you have to pay proper money for them. The 2700K Philips ones we have are all excellent; brighter than the quoted incandescent equivalent would suggest, good colour and spectrum, instant-on, no failures. Sainsbury's usually have them for £10 each.

The cheaper LEDs, like the MR16 ones we have in the bathroom, have bad spectrum (purples and greens are enhanced) and 2/10 failed in the first year.

CFLs almost universally suck; the much-recommended Megaman ones actually have the worst warmup time of almost three whole minutes. The best CFLs we have are the 20W GE spirals, which are about as good as a 60W incandescent. Provided you don't have to look at them.

Copyright extensions are so important

It would be a tragedy if Paul McCartney couldn't milk another 20 years' payment for an few afternoons' work he did in 1968. Judging from his excruciating performance at the Jubilee gig, he has no option but to rest on his laurels.

Nice strong HSPA+ signal here

giving 10kbps (yes, that's kbps) download speed. Too many smartphones trying to use the same mast.

Norfolk and chance of fast broadband

Where's the punning headline writer today?

They're finished

There's nothing left once the patents have gone. Printers are a profitless commodity market and movies are rapidly going digital too. Kodak's last hope was as a small niche player in the b/w film market (like Ilford; b/w was superseded in the mass market 60 years ago and never much affected by digital), but they've thrown that out too. Rarely has a company been so poorly managed as Kodak.

I have 10 years' worth of b/w film in the freezer, though.

"A" level business studies anecdote

In pre-internet days, oil behemoth Exxon famously paid a large sum of money (as in, enough to retire on) to the owners of the pre-existing Exxon Strip Club in Southampton, just because they wanted worldwide exclusivity on the name. Maybe the slightly seedy association is why they kept the old "Esso" brand for their UK petrol stations.

Pointless

Word jumped the shark after 2.0. Excel jumped the shark after 5.0, or 4.0 if you don't use pivot tables. 99% of users won't use any functionality that can be added after 20 years' development of a perfectly adequate office suite.

On the other hand, I suppose you get some new clipart to replace "Duck Smashing Computer".

Keep it just as it is

It keeps our BRITISH minds more agile than Johnny Foreigner's if we have to understand and use both systems. Personally I use whatever seems most appropriate; millimetres are more useful for small things than fractions of an inch (32nds anyone?) or thou, but inches work better than centimetres for medium-sized things. The metric system has nothing to rival the foot, although metres and yards are equally useful in a welly-wanging contest. Kilometres are too small and I dismiss them. People are weighed in stones and pounds, unless you're American and can't cope with base-14 units. Everything else can be grams, kilograms or metric tonnes; the latter is as near as dammit the same as a long ton anyway. Finally, fathoms are the most logical way to measure depth ever devised; most people can imagine how many men standing on each others' heads it would take to reach the surface.

I like the current mess better than either system on its own. Of course, if you're doing SCIENCE then you should probably stick to SI units, otherwise the distinction between lb and lbf is going to turn around and bite you, and energy calculations never work.

Synthetic grass playing surface

We have short shrift with astroturfers on our internet forum, ensuring that their product is roundly ridiculed before banning the offenders forever.

On Facebook, they pay the astroturfers to do it.