Originally Posted by koocha
It's true. The earth has these periods of warming up and cooling down. It's a fact.
[links to quackery removed for length and sanity]
And i'd appreciate not being called an idiot
I'm sure you would appreciate not being called an idiot, but having not listed
http://realclimate.org, stating you support such overwhelmingly discredited beliefs, and worst of all -
derailing a thread, you might well be asking for it
As for the Dragon's Den, we must remember that what they air on TV is a highly edited version of what I imagine must be talks that can last for an hour or more. The BBC did no favours to the dragons when they chose the "RS232" mention to broadcast, simply because it sounded all techy.
I went and looked at veryPC's product range. To be honest, none of it really excites me, their prices are mediocre, and their own hacks must be very impressive in order to justify using them in my opinion. I am also very dubious still about the practicalities of marketing Atom based PCs in the place of the mainstream processors, given the power differential (Nano, however, might be a different case entirely).
In the Hexus article, they state that they don't want to invest in patents. Assuming they could, to not do so would allow competitors to start up and compete directly against them. And if they can't, competitors are bound to try now.
But perhaps the truth of why they did not chose to invest is not just because of the ease of competition, but that of returns on investment. The IT sector has strong competition, low cost of entry, and because of which, profit margins that simply don't sound sexy. We have seen several systems builders collapse over the last year, making it clear that this is not a simple and safe market to be involved in.