A couple of years ago film-maker David Bond realized that his children, then aged five and three, were attached to screens to the point where he was able to say "chocolate" into his three-year-old son's ear without getting a response.

Some even point to the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a Californian maker of solar panels which had received lots of federal money, as proof that renewable energy is a wasteful pinko pipe-dream.

After it was released, a bug in the floating-point math unit was discovered, requiring every operating-system maker to write special code to accommodate the problem.