Re: Shurely not THE Adam Hart-Davis?

I once emailed him saying how much my family like watching the Local Heroes show he presented, and got a nice reply back from him, though I don't remember exactly what he said because that was about 14 years ago...

@TechnicalBen

I've seen some posts on slashdot from people claiming to be games developers and they're really pissed that they're not getting a cut of the sale of 2nd hand games, they somehow think they're more special than any other industry that generates products for the general public, who can then sell on those products if they feel they no longer want them (like cars etc.) without having to pay the original manufacturer a cut of that sale.

Re: Microsoft: "We're always listening to our customers"

Given the need for being onllne and the restriction on reselling your old games I'd say they're listening more to the developers who have been bitching like little girls over the 2nd hand games stores, than they have to the people who are actually buying the games at full price in the first place.

Re: "half-eaten fruit logo"

It does make you wonder why it's half-eaten, is it rotten or did the owner find a worm in it?

Re: Epic PR fail

Indeedy, they get free advertising from the walkthroughs being put online and viewable by potentially millions without them having to pay a single penny to anyone for hosting/bandwidth/taking the time to do the walkthroughs, but now they want to be paid for those free adverts for their products...

Re: Its kind of funny...

I used to wear glasses from the age of 5 but in my late 20s I got to the point where I was so fed up of having to deal with those things on a daily basis along looking through two windows at the world which didn't help with peripheral vision I gave up wearing them.

I don't know if I would handle wearing Google Glass after the novelty wears off, I don't even wear sunglasses, but ironically I do own 7 different sets of LCD video glasses... :)

Re: They bought a lot of smaller companies

This is what pisses me off about companies and thier data retention in relation to customer records and how they'll happily sell your info to other companies - you get situations like this where a company that you have never directly interacted with suddenly emails you out of the blue saying they got hacked and their customer records were copied and your info is in those records.

I am not a product, I am a human being FFS.

I also have a Chronos eZ430 sitting on a shelf gathering dust, I did wear it as a normal watch for a while as it has a nice asthetic look to it but it kept randomly resetting and I never learned to program it properly too, kinda feel I shoulda persisted with it as I wanted to use its wireless features.

Re: Reality

"Exactly how are they going to swsitch off my washing machine?

In order to do that, THEY will need to fit smart sockets in every part of the home"

Three little words for you to investigate: power line communication.

It would facilitate the ability for a power company to turn off appliances without needing to rewire the entire house or install special sockets. In fact the meter in my house was upgraded and they gave me this little monitoring box which uses power line communication to allow the monitoring of power consumption ANYWHERE in the house where there's an ordinary mains socket.

Re: Rationing, rebranded.

"I wonder how popular that'll be once people realise what their 'smart' meters are up to."

Sounds like the beginning of a Doctor Who plotline...

Re: Nudity-free Playboy?

Or Garfield without Garfield.

No wait, that actually works - http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/

Re: Range?

250m? Peanuts, I have some Texas Instruments RF transceivers that are solid at up to 1.7km and I managed to get talking to each other at 3.4km with the standard whip antenna, throw in some directional antennas and the signal becomes much stronger/reliable, change to an amplified RF transceiver and you're looking at 10s of kilometers.

Besides a decent UAV will have GPS capabilities so if it loses contact with the operator it goes into default 'fly-home' mode, or it goes on a pre-planned GPS navigated route meaning farmers would need some seriously powerful (and most likely illegal) GPS jamming equipment to electronically stop them.