Not your standard response

Not wishing to point out the obvious misapprehension about duty free (whoops, just did!), but having a "binary: "pass", and you're happily aboard ..." just passes the burden (or perk, depending on how vindictive you think the plastic piggies on security desks are) of taking away your cheap bottle of local brandy from the "underpaid, over-hassled, grumpy airport-security drone" to an "underpaid, over-hassled, grumpy programmer drone" instead.

Asking too much

So, the author wants good low-light performance, high quality sound, high definition and (implicitly) to spend less than £100. Sorry chummy: choose one.

Now, I'm no expert (shocker!) but the tiny little sensors in webcams simply don't have the sensitivity to provide noise-free images - especially at higher frame rates and in ordinary, domestic light levels. Go outside into the daylight and you might just stand a chance, but in a dimly lit room - no way.

Sound quality? That has GOT to come from an external microphone. There are no alternatives. Whether it's pinned onto your clothes or hand held, the omnidirectional little electret jobbie stuck onto a webcam several feet away from your gob cannot help picking up all the other sounds and echoes in the room.

HD - hmmmm. Fail. Just how much bandwidth do you think you have? While it may be possible for the average web user to pull down real-time video at a reasonable 1.5MByte/sec over their high-end connection, pushing stuff UP the wire is a whole different game - divide that speed by ten and you're getting close. Try getting HD video up a 150KByte/sec connection and the amount of compression you will have to apply negates any benefits from a HD webcam. I suppose if you keep stock-still, so there's very little difference from one frame to the next, you might just stand a chance, but then you may as well put a cardboard cutout in front of the camera.

So no. While there are some webcams that actually can provide decent quality video in a not too mangled form across a USB 2.0 link, under ideal conditions, they need careful nurturing and the right conditions to achieve this. Simply plunking one on a PC, firing up Skype in a bedroom with a single CFL illuminating the top of your head and saying "Hello Mum" won't do it. All the limitations of price kick in: whether that's the build cost of a £100 webcam (compared to the £5000 "pro" cameras), the cheapness of the built in microphone, the lack of decent lighting or the bottlenecks of sending highly compressed packets half way round the world. You're wasting your time and money - might as well stick with a £5 device off eBay.

One last thing - for god's sake smile! If you're sending video to people, at least look happy to see them.

I *really* hope he wins

Companies need to realise they're messing with people's lives when they employ them. It's long past time that they fixed their casual attitude towards staff (such as calling them "resources", for example) and start acting as they would with any other business partner that they entered into a contractual arrangement with.

We're always being told to tell the truth on CVs - that lies will be found out (riiiight) and we could get sacked for misrepresenting ourselves or our qualifications. However, when was the last time that the "exciting position with huge potential for advancement" turned out to be anything more than the same old sh... in a different building?

I hope they pay the royalties

According to the source of all thing dubious (yup, wikipedia) "Happy Birthday to You" is still under copyright until 2030 in america (the free world can use it gratis after 2016). Considering how much MS bang on about piracy it would be terrible if they got dinged for not shelling out on the use they got from someone else's proprietary material. So terrible in fact, it would make me laugh for a long, long time.

And no, I'm not sending anyone any money for naming the song title.

Some are, some aren't

Power users are just like ordinary users. Some know what they're doing - others don't have a clue. The biggest difference is that they all take a disproportionate amount of support resources to stop them moaning like little babies when they run into difficulties.

Of our "power users", some genuinely have the ability to save the world - or at least earn the company enough to justify the huge bonuses the directors get. Others are basically just drama queens (of either gender) and create more noise and uncertainty than anything else. The hard part is being able to distinguish the one from the other.

Of course, the really valuable employees are the invisible ones. The ones who quietly get on with their jobs: competently, on time, solving their own problems as they go and doing what they said they would. However their lack of "star quality" usually gets mistaken for idleness and as a consequence, they're the ones who get axed at the first signs of economic trouble.

In a cupboard, next to the waffle maker

Loads of people buy stuff, play with it for a short time, discover it doesn't make their lives better and then forget about it. It happens to almost every kitchen appliance, most of your DVDs, a large proportion of peoples' clothes (some of which are *never* worn - not even once) and one-third of the food we buy. All this tells us is that we are susceptible to advertising, buy stuff impulsively, don't feel the need to return or sell-on things we don't want or are optimistic enough to think "one day I'll sit down and read that book".

There's no reason why Apple's products should be any different from other stuff we buy from shopping channels or after seeing a shiny, sparkly advertisement that promises all sorts of things we know aren't true (but wish they were) or buy 'cos "that person off the telly has one". Goods are made to be sold, not to be used, and once money has changed hands and the warranty has expired, why should Apple or anyone else care how much use their stuff gets put to. By then, they've moved on to the next minor alteration to their thingy - now marketed as revolutionary, new, life-changing and even better value - just like the old one was.

The guy who built a boat in his basement

Hope you've checked that you can get this out of the assembly room once it's all finished

A passing phase?

We've all heard of early adopters, but they're only a small proportion of the whole - and not even the earliest group to latch onto a fad. Maybe what we're seeing is that the innovators (the first group) and the E/A's have done the social networking thing, discovered it's emptiness and moved on. Leaving the field clear for the majority of people to start toying with the technology. However, if the original theory is correct, they too will find that social networking is no substitute for real-world friends and acquaintances and in time, abandon it too.

This doesn't mean that social networking is for old people, or that older people actually like it. Just that they didn't jump in, feet-first as soon as the nascent technology appeared: preferring to bide their time before trying it out. Although for the upper end of the age range, it definitely has advantages for the housebound or immobile: to use this sort of thing to keep their social lives going.

Maybe not water ...

> drop his phone in a glass of water making it impossible to read

but there are many, many corrosive liquids readily available to even non-master criminals that will do the trick.

Sounds like war mongering to me

If you don't want your infrastructure to be attacked get it the hell off our internet. If you don't know how, I'm sure there are plenty of people in other countries who have the skills to help you out.

This guy doesn't really seem to understand that while cyber attacks _can_ be state sponsored as I'm sure the USofA has first hand experience of doing, themselves, the nature of the internet means that one person with a guessed password can wreak just as much havoc. In that case "doctrines" seeking to lash out at countries that america currently doesn't like just won't work - they might find themselves having to bomb the crap out of their own people, in their own country.

As it stands at present, most so-called defences against internet-bourne attacks are little more than a signpost saying "Stop, fine for hacking this computer $1million - if we can find you" whereas the people (yes: people, not countries) who control the DDoS botnets and intrusion probing systems are the equivalent of a division of armour who don't even notice the sign as they roll right into your datacentre - which just happens to have the internet equivalent of a bright neon, flashing bullseye - with the letters ".gov" in the middle - displayed prominently on the roof.

It's no good bleating on about all the badness that "for-ners" represent on the internet and rattling on about "counter-attacks". The military have to realise that they are no longer relevant in preventing cyber attacks and that their 1960's style deterrence is ridiculed by the people (yes, them again) who have even the slightest clue about 21st century networked computing. The only real defence is to do to their infrastructure what they did to their nuclear bunkers and harden them against attack - not with reinforced concrete, but with decent software that has been designed implemented and tested to withstand intrusions and DoS's and with physical separation from the people who might target them.

Not much worthwhile stuff for a lot of people

Unless your english is good, there really isn't a whole lot of (legal, non-errr, "visual") stuff out there for a significant proportion of the european population. Sure, there's content in french, spanish, german and italian - but how about if your only language is greek - say, or czech or norwegian? Would you really want to pay the high price of internet access that is common in other european countries (€30-40/month - give or take, on top of a landline rental) just to access the content put out by the 10 or 20 million people who speak your native tongue - most of whom won't be on the internet for exactly the reasons you aren't?

Until you've had to deal with the likes of Telefonica OTE to get a basic phone line installed outside of a large town (hint: it's easier to move house to one with a phone) you don't really understand the barriers to getting access, compared to the small benefits and high costs of having it.

To willing to believe bad news

Tell someone that everything's fine and they'll ignore you. Tell them there might be a possible threat (note: 3 levels of uncertainty) and you have their attention. You don't even have to mention that the "might" is a one-in-a-million eventuality, the "possible" is almost infinitely improbable and the "threat" is so non-specific; in degree, importance and eventuality that it becomes meaningless.

Until someone is able to quantify some potential badness - attributing a real, numerical chance to it AND to describe the extent of the effects said badness would have (if it did come to pass), there's no information available to base a response on. So when a low-level manager starts running around, waving their arms in the air claiming that "there's a potential security lapse that would let allow someone to steal our data", without solid facts about what data, what could they do with it, how many times has this happened (to other organisations) and how many attempts have been made to steal ours - all you have some unfocussed paranoia. Sadly, these days that seems to be all you need to trigger all sorts of draconian limitationss, huge inconvenience and massive costs simply because an impressionable individual watched too much TV the night before.

Back to the case in point. While it *does* seem like some nuaghty people somewhere did create a worm targeted specifically at an Iranian institution that they didn't particularly like - and that it's perfectly possible for some other bad people to do the same, again. The fix is simple: KEEP YOUR INFRASTRUCTURE OFF THE INTERNET. The facilities have fences, security guards and locks on the doors, the control systems can go one better and isolate themselves completely. There are almost no circumstances where workers, doing their jobs in such plants need any sort of internet access - or to plug in thumb-drives, CDs or any other media. Prevent them from doing this and the threat (if it was ever really there int he first place) just goes away. In the small number of cases where it is needed, use the same level of security and scrutiny that is used for anything else entering or leaving the establishment.

Once you have sewn things up, tight. Sit back, breathe deeply, hire a team of penetration experts to keep your security up to scratch and focus on the things that could actually go wrong, rather than the hysteria from unqualified commentators who thing Die Hard, or The Matrix is real-life.

Mark Twain quote:

"There is something fascinating about science. You get such a wholesale returns of conjecture from such a small investment of fact. "

And since no-one actually _knows_ what the effect of the Sun or CO2 is, this one will run and run.

lack of competition

> There is no reason why Government should not be as efficient as any good business

That's the biggest difference between a "good business" and a government: the business has to continually improve its efficiency, stay competitive, innovate and provide better service - or its customers will go elsewhere. Governments don't have to worry about such trivial things, they can just raise our taxes when they need more cash. Neither do the civil servants have any incentive. They're too scared of being found at fault to consider any approach except CYA - irrespective of the cost, efficiency, inconvenience or time taken.

While it would be hard to provide competition without having a second government (oh god, not two) - maybe a red one a nd a blue one, we could at least incentivise the one we have with a customer feedback system: Unemployment goes up: civil servants and politicians pay goes down. Too much police corruption? Add an extra year to all forces retirement age. Children not being taught properly? teachers lose a week or two off their summer holidays. ... and so on. I'm sure a few imaginative incentives could be found for all the waste-makers, maybe even enough to recoup some of the money they're costing us.

Free, but not free

Same supermodel, new frock.

Basically this version of Ubuntu has fresh new versions of everything but little in the way of new features. None of the Ubuntu marketing is aimed at telling existing users what benefits (i.e. things they'll now be able to do, that they couldn't do before - or things that are now easier /faster /better than in previous versions) they will gain from this release.

On that basis, while it won't cost us freeloaders anything to download the new stuff, it will cost a great deal in terms of the time needed to either upgrade or backup, wipe, install the O/S then reinstall all our apps. The cost of that last step: getting all the applications that aren't included in the base release, but are needed to move an Ubuntu box from a simplistic games and worm-processing environment to something akin to useful - is the killer.

Even if everything happens as it should there's a good afternoon's work involved. Sadly, experience (from the last time I did this) has shown me that things don't go as they should and that there will be some code that simply won't port, other stuff which has decided to eschew the path of backwards compatibility and yet more applications who's authors have abandoned the fruit of their keyboards and will NEVER work with 10.10. Put all this together and a more realistic estimate is a couple of days of head scratching - so say goodbye to a weekend.

Even at minimum wage rates, that's £100's worth of my time that this "free" version of Ubuntu would cost me. What I get for that is all the latest versions of my existing applications, but precious little in the way of new functionality. A high price to pay for no tangible benefit, and a very high price in terms of lost free time.

The basic problem is that Ubunut, and all the major players, are still fixated on getting people to "try Ubuntu", in the same way you cajole a small child to "try a piece of cabbage - mmmm, lovely: yum, yumt". You know they'll hate it, they know they'll hate it, but you feel (somehow) that it will be good for them, It's about time they gave up on this ploy - it obviously doesn't work. Those people who like cabbage, sorry: Linux are already using it. Those who don't, aren't. How about rewarding the loyal (or is it just cheap?) fan base and improving the migration process and actual BENEFITS, instead of focusing on the trite and superficial: such as the colour scheme and the installation process?

Take2 asprin

and if it hasn't come back in a couple of days make another appointment

The spanish could've told them that

> sunlight readings taken from 2004 to 2007 ... emitted more in the key visible-light

Just pop over to your local Andalucian weather station[1], where they record the amound of daily incident sunlight in and you'll see that early in the decade (there's data from 2001/2) the numbers were about 30MJ/m²/day. Ver the same datos for 2009 and you'll see numbers up around 32MJ/m²

[1] http://www.juntadeandalucia.es/agriculturaypesca/ifapa/ria/servlet/FrontController?action=Init

I don't care how many D it is

all I want is something good to watch.

While we can all marvel at the technology and lack of flicker or glare or grain or blur, none of that turn a badly written programme into something worth watching. It doesn't make a one-dimensional plot into a multi-layered, subtle drama and it won't impart fluency into a wooden actor.

I'd be willing to give up all the technology of the past 40 years (right back tot he early days of colour, on honkin' great boxy tellies) for engaging programmes that entertained and hold my attention. While today and tomorrows tech might be wonders of oriental design and production I find that the amount of stuff I actually want to watch is steadily decreasing - as the number of channels, number of hours, number of "+1"s, cable, satellite, HD and all the other gubbins increases.

On the bright side ...

every trade has a winner and a loser.

The person selling a stock thinks the price will go down while the person buying thinks it will go up. They can't both be right. So while this guy lost his bank some €billions all that means is that some other people made all that money.

OK, so there's an element of "We didn't really _mean_ to make all those transactions, so pleeeeeeeeeze can we have our monkey back?" to all of this but for what turned out to be a real financial loss for one trader turned out to be a good day at the office for someone else - maybe they should bung a few Euros in the hat to pay his fine?

Tea tray

The most popular method in use at Pete 2 towers to stop a nasty case of slow roasted nuts is a cushion on the lap and a tray on the cushion. Forget all these hi-tech coolers and chemicals an' stuff. It also has the beneficial side effect of raising the lappy to a more comfortable height and being able to adjust the angle of the keyboard by fluffing or compressing the front or back of the cushion.

Fired in anger?

Leaving aside training, publicity, exercises and mistakes I wonder just how many of these weapons will actually be fired at a target during hostilities. Following on from that, given the cost of the programme what will be the "Pounds per shepherds hut destroyed[1]" effectiveness be?

[1] considering the quality of the intel used to target the device.

Business policy by popular vote

Let's take this a bit further. As well as turning their investment strategy into a game show, they could also have a website where customers can register a view on how much their staff should get paid. It could even be a "please stay on the line to vote" feature of calling their help-desk - once their victims have recited their personal details for the tenth time, been kept on hold for half an hour and cut off thrree times, they could be asked how much "My name is Steven" should be remunerated for the "help" he/she/it provided.

Lucky for us

Any recipients (un)fortunate enough to have received and translated the messages from planet Bebo will have concluded from them that we pose no threat whatsoever. Though they may puzzle how such an obviously retarded species ever got the technology to create fire, let alone beam messages across the void.

Oh yes, one small point - you missed out a word:

>tidally locked - with one face constantly turned to its primary, like Mercury

should read "_unlike_ Mercury". it's been known since the 60's that this wasn;t the case.

Marked as a road?

While driving through France and Spain, I'm constantly amazed at what my Satnav software has marked as a road. This is not about stupid people following instructions blindly (though there is often a lot of that, as well). No, this is about why things that are so obviously footpaths, goat trails, muddy tracks and farmer's shortcuts are even included in the cartography as being potential routes, at all. I've not driven in Switzerland but have had my fair share of daft instructions from a multitude (Oh, alright: three) different GPSs in various cars urging me to take turnings which have been barely discernible as places where you'd herd sheep, let alone want to take motorised transport.

So while we may laugh at people who do whatever the voice from the little box tells them to, there is also a large portion of blame due to whoever programmed these non-roads into the databases in the first place.

wrong boomers?

> Westerners in the 40-59 age bracket (as the Boomers now are)

I've always understood the "baby boom" was post WW2 when all the military went home and ..... boom!. That makes the boomers born from 1945 to (say)1955. In that case they'd be 55-65, not 40-59 That fits in with being hippy age group in the 60's (aged 15-25)

Also, while the boomers are generalised into ex-hippie, red-braces, greed-is-good types, most people of that era weren't hippies, didn't do drugs. they didn't own a red Porsche in the 80's nor did they wave their wad while drinking champagne.

Although it makes a nice story - complete with a small peppering of schadenfreude for the spiteful to get off on, I don't buy the basic premise, let alone the faulty maths or the generalisations.

False positives

If you've done nothing wrong, what have you got to hide? Goes the question asked over and over again by the "I'm happy and like the idea of being scrutinised every minute of the day, it makes me feel safe" brigade. Well, the simple answer is that no matter how innocent. blameless and generally bound for sainthood you might be - or think you are, there's some scrote out there who looks just like you.

If the mugshot of that person shows every blocked pore, every chipped tooth and nasal hair, then a reasonably observant person can, when presented with your phizzog in person and a high resolution print of said photo, tell that you're not the same people. However if the pixel-limited, poorly lit, motion-blurred and partially shadowed glimpse of someone doing something bad correlates on someones computer with the glum, washed out passport photo [ BTW: smile on your PP photo and it'll be rejected - they like their travelers to look oppressed and down-trodden] you submitted some years ago then it's chokey for you, sonny Jim. At least until a real person gets to review the "evidence" after some days of inconvenience and scurrilous rumours amongst the neighbours, when your front door was smashed down at 5:00 a.m. by the anti-<whatever> task force.

It is pretty obvious that you can't make data out of nothing (except in some cheezy cop shows, when you can zoom in on a mobile phone pic. practically down to the quantum level). Most people's eyes are 60 + a bit mm from pupil to pupil. If you have 80 or 90px between eyeballs, you get sub-millimetre resolution. Drop that down to 12px and your resolution (even using sub-pixel interpolation) is going to match maybe one in every ten people just based on their eyes. Add in all the other facial recognition points and you'll find everyone in the UK matches maybe a few hundred or a couple of thousand other, non-burka wearing, individuals - even under the best conditions. You're effectively taking part in an involuntary identity parade every time you're subjected to this sort of facial recognition technology. I just hope you can account for your movements at all times - you might just need to, one day.

Change is the enemy of automation

So you've got a bunch of screen-based processes and procedures you have to carry out: Whether it's adding new users, updating the helpdesk status of support requests or reporting the consumption of storage space across the enterprise. All fine and dandy, then some numpty in another part of the organisation goes and changes something.

They might do a software upgrade to the storage manager, or patch the helpdesk software or change the default width of the user's address field. Whatever it is, no matter how far ahead they published the change notice or how innocuous it seemed at the time, things like this break automated processes. You can't test for them before deploying your automated scripts as the nature of the change is unknowable (even down to correcting a spilling mistake that you were screen-scraping for, or creating a new one that you now miss). Hence you now have to spend the time you saved automating something to fix the automation script to account for the new environment.

The end result is that as long as people make software changes, we will always be playing catchup with our automation suites. So all that happens is sysadmins go from spending boring days doing repetitive tasks to boring days debugging faulty automation scripts.

Ho hum.

More app suggestions:

The Earth is round

The Earth orbits the Sun

There is only so much oil

The Moon is not made of Cheese

Fire is hot

There are many other countries

Dear minister,

It has come to my attention that this country faces serious threats from as yet undisclosed sources of an unknown nature. It is my considered opinion that the treasury should allocate funds sufficient for us to identify all unknown threats and thence to develop countermeasures against them.

Given the nature of the problem, it will not be possible to say when all the unknown threats have been uncovered, therefore it will be necessary for this project to be open-ended. Further, until the nature of these threats is known, the cost of countermeasures will also, be unknowable. I would therefore suggest that we waste no time in starting to look into these potentially disastrous possibilities and set up a series of committees to monitor progress. We should also invite tenders for research into the nature of future developments and provide finance accordingly.

Given your position at the centre of this initiative, you will be ideally placed to direct the companies carrying out this never-ending research and subsequent development when your present term as minister for imaginary, scary hokum comes to an end. This will be a job for life, or until the next government comes to its senses and I therefore popose we dub this PROJECT GRAVYTRAIN.

Yours sincerely

Humphrey.

The folly of hot backups

> and this corruption was replicated in the hot backup.

Uh, well, duh! yeah. These things only protect against hardware faults. Against buggy software or human error (or malice) they are useless, since whatever gets done to the production instance is automatically done to your copy (maybe if they'd used the word "copy" in their systems architecture, rather than "backup" the apparentness of the shortcoming would have been spotted).

it does sound like a strange choice of resilience - given that the system which failed was already clustered and presumably the EMC storage was RAIDed to hell and back. So any single hardware failure could already be detected and hopefully mitigated in the server cluster or the SAN. Sounds a lot like "management by glossy brochure" rather than a professionally designed _and_ _tested_ failover system.

bluffs of our time

Classic fishing expedition stuff. So far as the tax authorities goes they don't have to use the tech, they just have to make people *think* they're using it. Since no-one on the end of a phone call from the tax man (or woman) can possibly know what they've got wired up to their phone, the conversation can be as simple as:

"Sorry Mr. Pete 2, but our Voice Risk Analyser says you're not being entirely truthful there"

"Ok, you've got me. I *did* forget to include the £1.04p interest from my curent account in last year's tax return"

Which, when it comes down to it is exactly the same technique that the TV Detector vans have been using for decades.

Buy Apple

get screwed

Isn't that just one of the benefits of urban living?

Let's face it there aren't that many (except possibly the emergency services arriving while there's still something to put out, or a pulse that can be revived). The thing that makes the countryside so desirable is the LACK of other people. Where your next-door neighbour isn't forced to earwig your phone conversations and you can't hear their digestive problems every time their toilet flushes. The difference between high density living and low density living means that services are always going to be cheaper to provide for those living cheek-by-jowl than they are for those where the only sound is a goat farting, half a mile away.

Depending on who made what choices, is it reasonable for townies to have to subsidise country folk for the high cost of providing them with fast internet connectivity? If they made a conscious decision to move to the country to "get away from it all". Those who live in rural areas are already used to the lack of things such as public transport, nearby banks and shops. They accept that prices will be higher and choice lower when all you have is a village shop - compared with an ASDA just down the road. Basically: yer makes yer bed .....

All the world's a stage

and all the men and women merely players:

And at this event, you were a player too. The reason the local leaders give speeches at things like this has nothing to do with the event. it's all about tomorrow's newspaper headlines. In that respect, what he says isn't for your consumption, either.

So far as the disorganisation and in-fighting goes, that's all just part of the fun, too. NO committee effort that I've ever seen has been set up for the benefit of the cause it's supposed to serve - it's there for the players (yes, them again) to score points off each other and try for the position of "top dog". It also helps them gain recognition within the companies or administrations they work in where they can increase their own status by collecting more committee memberships than their colleagues. After all, once you get past a certain level recognition counts for more than a pay-rise anyway.

Who writes this stuff?

> virtualisation is a stepping stone to the cloud

(that splashing sound was someone stepping off the stepping stone, falling through the cloud and ending up in the river).

it gets even better:

> unless an organisation changes its behaviour across the board, then things will be done in the same vein as they have always been done

What all this verbiage boils down to is that some IT operations are using virtualisation. Some of those use it to host lots of old servers on fewer, larger boxes and some use it to provide flexibility when they need extra capacity.

Have I missed anything?

Interpretation of the law, but not tested

What we seem to have here is a clever guy, being asked by the cops what he, or she (the gender of the QC not being revealed - or relevant) thinks the law might mean. They then take this as gospel and decide on that basis not to pursue anything which their chap thinks might not count.

So effectively this QC has decided what the law will be. I guess we'll never be given the chance to discover what an actual court - with real defendants, a jury an' stuff - would make of this, since the police don't seem to be inclined to present a case for their consideration.

This narrow interpretation, narrow to the point of almost making the law impossible to break, does relieve the fuzz of a lot of work. It's difficult to tell whether that's due to their avoidance of anything to do with 'pooters (such as not investigating identify theft) or simply that the law was poorly constructed.

Did they invent the bugs, too?

Funny thing happened to my browser recently (FF, Ubuntu). I could only get 10 entries listed for a search - I have explicitly set it to give me 50 at a time.

Open up settings and, yes, the search settings had been reset back to the default of 10. Fixed that, saved my settings, went back to search - still only getting 10 entries. Switched off "instant" which had appeared unannounced next to the search button, went back to my settings (which had also reset itself back to 10 entries). Set that back, again, to 50, saved it (again) and this time it stuck.

As a test, I switched instant back on - whammo, only 10 entries returned and my setting of 50 had been set back to the default.

So Google, maybe when this facility is out of beta, and working properly, I'll give it another try. But until that time: instant search? nein danke.

Oh well, there goes all my bandwidth

> guaranteed quality of service.

So while all my neighbours are getting their guaranteed X MBit/s on the BT owned copper from the exchange to our collective local distribution box, the rest of us who just want to send the odd email will be left fighting for scraps from whatever's left over in the contention ratio.

"Crazed"?

Hardly crazed - more like taking the next logical step.

Computers tell us lies all the time. Whether it's "20 spaces free" at the local multi-storey or "you don't owe us any tax" to take a contemporary example. So when you put wheels on a computer and call it a robot, there's really no difference.

As it is, most people are incredible easy to deceive (if that makes sense) and are willing to believe pretty much anything they read, hear or see on a computer screen - provided they want to believe it. So maybe what we really need is a magic mirror that lies fluently when asked "does my arse look big?"

After all it's not the computer / robot that's deceiving us, it's our own willingness to accept the lies we are told.