It seems, to me, that electric vehicles are about making the rich feel better about themselves while saving them money.

What do you need for an electric vehicle? 1. the money to buy a new car, 2. your own home to install an electric charger and solar panels.

You renting? Can't afford a brand new car? Can't get solar panels installed or an electric charger? Don't even have a garage and need to park on the street 10 minutes' walk away? NO SAVINGS FOR YOU! NO GOVERNMENT INCENTIVES FOR YOU!

Green policies are all about giving free money to rich people who already have money. And the poor get nothing in return. Because it isn't really about the environment, is it.

I'm always astounded people plaster arable land with solar panels. Just because you may not be farming it right now doesn't mean that growing grass or trees aren't making their own contribution to the globe.

Absolutely the only places solar panels should be installed is on rooftops, concreted areas, and desert. Anywhere the sunlight does not have a useful purpose.

Anywhere anything biologically benefits from sunlight should not be covered in solar panels.

On the topic of beaming power from space - this is a colossally stupid idea. Why is their opposition to nuclear power? Because when something goes wrong it goes really, really wrong. Imagine a concentrated beam of power, Gigawatts of it, beamed to the wrong spot on earth from space - it would be a disaster - perhaps uncontrollable. And who is to say it wouldn't upset the Ionosphere or have other unintended effects.

Putting huge solar farms in the desert is the best idea, then using it to split water using hydrolysis into unlimited near-free shippable hydrogen exported to countries around the world.

Once again the fantasy of a space project clouds the minds to a more practical and environmentally friendly reality.

It is beginning to not even matter if we sandbox our browsers. Industry has moved on to apps where they can get you to execute whatever they want on your most personal device, the mobile phone, which has utterly terrible sandboxing (that contact list is literally shared by every single app).

I can't find a bank any more that requires you to use their app for anything other than the most basic services - such as even contacting customer services - which they refuse to provide on their website.

Industry is forcing you to use their app for a very good reason: they control you. The era of being able to protect ourselves against nefarious websites running dangerous code or sharing private data over shared cookies is over. Because companies are no longer providing useful websites when they can regain control and invade your privacy with apps to which you're stupid enough to give all the permissions they want.

Don't kid yourself. HMRC are lazy. Lazy. Even when you offer to pay your tax they still won't let you. Yes, that's right, a TAX OFFICE THAT REFUSES TO ACCEPT TAX.

Not the brightest bunnies in the world.

This is a non-story. Or pure fantasy. Or both.

F*** you as*h**e!

I've been trying to figure out how to disable autorun ever since Windows started forcing it upon us.

Dare you to reveal your true identity!

When I was a student I downloaded a copy of a popular music sequencing program.

Now I have a good full-time job I've bought the most expensive edition of this software and have been also purchasing upgrades over time.

Says you. And you're just one person. That makes the above statement your opinion. It is certainly not a matter of fact.

Totally agree. That and the fact that corporate firewalls still block everything except port 80 and 443. Which demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding about TCP/IP: the port number does not determine the application! There is absolutely no reason why one website couldn't support many different SSL hosts, all on different ports. Or many different websites.

The whole "certificate must be with a commercial provider" thing has been utterly ridiculous - I'm surprised that Google haven't created a free central certificate authority to be honest.

Microsoft Vista? $200. Microsoft 7? $300. Losing your hard-drive and being unable to recover because your licence is tied to a particular disk in a particular physical machine? Priceless!

Why do the apologists keep trotting this lame line out. You're a big company making massively huge profits. You can afford real software developers.

And sure, I'll work on a large website that's used by millions of people every day. Oh wait, I already do.

I keep coming across multi-page SQL stored procedures too. Horrific, buggy, impossible to maintain. Who are the ???holes that keep getting employment contracts to do this kind of evil? They really need a kick up the backside. And funny how most of them end up in the finance industry...

History will always be the prevailing reason why plain-text is superior.

Going forward one will always be able to look back and understand (well coded and documented) source code in plain text. Already, however, other formats are showing their age: trying to support old binary formats such as Wordstar, Word-Perfect, Microsoft Word, Corel Draw, and various other programs that lived and died a natural life-cycle. The format wars will also be difficult to support over a long time, already the IV50 video format appears to be lost in time, and various audio encodings may disappear.

We are fortunate that we can still read historical texts. Olde English is a little difficult to comprehend but far simpler than deciphering hieroglyphics. Surely we owe it to our successors to be able to read what we've written?

Arguably the simplicity of the English language is also one of the reasons it is the most dominant around the world: it was easy to code 26 characters into early computers. The poor Chinese were never going to win the early technology race by trying to cram 1,000s of characters into a small number of bits. Now that technology has caught up the Chinese have a chance to do something truly revolutionary (imagine if they wrote their own native operating system!).

Just look at the dominant languages in Google: not C++ or C. Not serious languages.

Facebook is an extremely poorly written web application - extremely poorly written. From a chat client that has barely worked to privacy settings that don't work; where different views reveal information that has been explicitly marked as "private".

If you've ever tried to configure a "Google Web Appliance" targeted for the enterprise you'll appreciate just what a dodgy crowd Google are, too.

All in all, Google and Facebook are great bedfellows.

Most computer science students take the subject because they finish high school and think "what career pays well?". On the other hand those with a passion for technology all their youth tend to end up as Electrical Engineers. Thus, with no historical appreciation for the kind of technologically disruptive and legally overbearing company they have been, you can understand why Computer Science students may be lulled into a false sense of self-worth and pride about working for Microsoft.

Indeed. Apple, of course, have this same advantage. They know their users are all willing to pay money, lots of money, often without regard to the actual value of the product/service they are receiving.

Anybody subscribing to The Times' new technically inferior website (to their old one) is clearly not-all-that-discerning when it comes to paying for things.

Maybe The Times do know what they are doing (or appear that way by accident).