You're dead right, the Macbook Pro doesn't need a substantial overhaul. A few tweaks here and there perhaps, but it still looks fab.

It's rather like the ThinkPad, in my opinion. I've seen a lot of reviews lately complaining that the ThinkPad design looks antiquated and clunky, but there are loads of them at work (they're our standard laptop) and I still think they look fantastic, tough but not stupidly bulky, simple and capable. Again, tweaks only.

What is it with an industry where people demand a complete overhaul every few years even when some manufacturers are approaching an ideal design?

Insert obligatory horror at the misuse of the apostrophe at the bottom of the front page here.

I recall a recent incident on a tram in Nottingham where a young man who would have been described in the local newspaper as a 'youth' was playing dreadful music through the dreadful speaker on his mobile phone rather loudly on a crowded rush hour tram at around five pm. A woman asked him very politely if he could turn it down please as it was disturbing other people (we were all exchanging dark looks) and he started shouting and yelling about how nobody can tell him what to do, it's his city, why do they make mobile phones with speakers if it's not to listen to his tunes on, etc. etc.

He didn't seem to comprehend the argument that other people don't actually like listening to bad music through an even worse sound reproduction system. Is it just me, or is there a group of people about five to ten years younger than me growing up with absolutely no concept of decent sound reproduction?

I'm with Virgin Media, although only because they're the only fast internet I can get in my new place - at my old place I had Be and they're FANTASTIC, but they don't have LLU kit in my new exchange yet. Once my year is up, if they do, I will probably switch back because they're that cool. Even though BT will charge me £130 to connect the phone line to run it down, as this house has only ever had cable phone and the BT stuff was never connected.

So I'm watching this very carefully to see how it pans out. Generally so far I've been satisfied with Virgin Media's service (I'm on the 20 megabit XL package and I get 17 megabits downstream off peak - some congestion at peak times though), but if they start mucking about with net non-neutrality I shall be most upset. It will be interesting to see how they react to Mr Doctorow's letter, and whether this actually comes to anything. I hope Mr Branson is watching...

Well actually the camera was probably operated by a civilian member of the traffic safety partnership - the police have got too many forms to fill in to be sitting in a van operating cameras (they do it sometimes, but not very often).

But yes, it seems it was a manual camera. The angle, for one thing, is a lot lower than an automatic speed camera's usual mounting height would give.

#32: I believe the pint is now defined in millilitres, so it is actually a metric unit of measure... theoretically, anyway.

#30: Actually, wine glasses in British pubs are also of defined sizes and come stamped with the crown and a line and a number which tells you how many millilitres it is if you fill it to the line. This is also to ensure that pubs serve you what you think you're paying for (assuming you're not completely delusional, that is). Some restaurants do the same thing, but others have rather finer unstamped glasses - of course, classy restaurants tend to serve wine by the bottle, so the size of an individual glass becomes pretty irrelevant.

Simon Greenwood@11: you're absolutely right. I'm sure most of these people aren't talking about anything that couldn't wait for an hour or so for them to get home. It's a bit like drink drivers really - if they're stupid enough to treat their lives like that, that's their problem until they kill somebody else.

Screen protection, key locking/unlocking without bizarre combinations of button presses, and how it opens up to a nice shape to talk into.

Unfortunately, the manufacturers went away from clamshells. I really liked my Motorola one from a few years ago (well, I did until I started trying to deal with its appalling software...)

The major reason they banned handheld phones was because of the two hands thing, yes. Most cars are manual, so you need two hands to drive them effectively. You often don't have time to drop your phone and grab the stick and the wheel in time to avoid something, because accident-causing events tend to happen really really fast.

That's assuming people even would drop their phone - that's not an easy instinct to have if you've got a shiny new iPhone.

Some people have since argued that a hands-free conversation is nearly as bad, because your mind tends to go out somewhere else when the person you're talking to isn't in the car - but at least you have both hands, and I can't see that it can be as bad as that.

Worth noting that before there was specific legislation for this, the police had the power to prosecute for more general motoring offences of not being in proper control of the vehicle if they thought your phone use was distracting you too much. The government thought it was a better idea to make it an automatic fine though (with three penalty points these days), so now you don't even have to be driving badly - just being seen on the phone is enough. It's one of the few new offences they've introduced (and they've introduced loads) that I actually agree with. Most of the rest of them were quite adequately covered, but this sort of thing needs to be deal with before it gets dangerous, not after.

Hmm, that got a bit ranty there. I guess most near misses on my bike being with cars driven by drivers with a phone jammed in their ear has biased my opinion somewhat.

Needless to say, the introduction of that offence has been a boost to the Bluetooth headset manufacturers, and a lot of companies provided subsidies for employees who needed to drive for work to have a proper hands free kit fitted.

Yet more ammo for the 'we need to get off oil as soon as possible' debate. Running a huge chunk of the global economy on one resource is stupid in the extreme, yet governments don't seem to be doing much about it. They could invest a lot more than they are in alternative energy resource - as could the oil companies if they weren't so interested in profits. What if they halved the shareholder dividends and spent all that on renewables, hmm?

Sure oil companies are hugely vested in the oil industry, but they're incredibly rich so they could, if they seriously invested in it, become the giants of the future energy technologies.

BP like to make you think they're doing that, but I bet they could do more. A shame the stock markets demand profit profit growth growth above investment to ensure you've got an industry to be in next century.

If I was in an optimistic mood I might suggest that 'beautiful to use' means a phone with a user interface that actually works...

...however, I long ago lost faith that any mobile phone company can produce such an interface.

Rational pedantic quibbling: It's not the 'British coppers' who hand over the data, it's the stupid brainless horrible government who I still can't believe won their third term after all they'd done in the first two. It's highly unlikely that the police run any of those camera systems, which is one of the reasons they don't work as well as they should - the police sometimes have a horrendous job getting hold of the data they need for a criminal investigation.

Reaction to the actual story: Do we get access to American surveillance data? All we hear about these days is that we're giving them this and that and the other, but we never seem to get anything in return. Information is power, after all - are we handing over all the power to the Americans?

No offence to American Boing Boing readers who I'm sure are largely intelligent and enlightened, but that's scary.

I'm with the people who think it's some chemical thing. I've never done anything that bad to a keyboard, but my laptop's wrist-resting area to either side of the trackpad has had its top layer of paint eaten away by my hands, and the fine texturing originally present on most of the keys is now gone, they are smooth and shiny. Interestingly the letters are still completely intact, unlike my desktop's keyboard where about 25% are now invisible. I also wore the Logitech logo off my MX1000 in about a month and you don't want to see the mouse before that...

I don't think I type particularly hard, I learned to touch-type on a fairly light keyboard and I don't hit anywhere near as hard as my Mum (who learned on a manual typewriter in the sixties). Mum's keyboards, however, remain in pristine condition...

Well that depends how memory changes work. Clearly in the story the people on the forum remember alternate histories, but do the general populace? If they did, there's no way actually changing history would work, surely.

It seems to be a common conceit in time travel that only the people directly involved in actually travelling through time remember what things were like 'before' they changed it. Everyone else's memories adjust because they never got pulled out of the time stream.

Although in that story it's fairly clear that the time travellers themselves are subject to some of the less pleasant interpretations of the Grandfather paradox, so they're not entirely isolated from changes in history.

What about 'get a replacement under the terms of my handset insurance'?

For something like an iPhone, I'd say insurance cover's a must.

Astronomy is the obvious use. Bet you could take some nice pictures of the moon with that.

Hah. I was startled to see this, since GalCiv2 is really old.

I was also startled, because I bought a shrink-wrapped copy of GalCiv2 in a large-chain store, got it home, installed it and was told that my code was already in use. Presumably some key generator had produced it and somebody else had registered.

Only way Stardock offered help was by giving me a link to buy a new licence for forty-something dollars. No way.

I could still play the game, but I couldn't download the patch that made it not crash, so I couldn't play it very much.

So this is no wonder-solution. It breaks just like anything else can.

So... you didn't already have one?

Is it just the British who consider the electric kettle a near-essential piece of kitchen equipment only suitably substituted by the kind of kettle you can put on the cooker or the Aga you've always dreamed about?