Re: Cough...

"... especially those below director level."

When you say 'director level', do you actually mean being a registered director of a company, having legal responsibility for the actions of the company, etc? I would imagine that just about everybody working on any project is below director level, by my understanding of the word 'director'.

Re: This is news?

".. product placement on the likes of Hawaii Five-O."

Bing him Danno!

Re: "Foxconn-rebrander"?

I don't see anybody defending Context. who are described as 'abacus strokers'. Apple can look after themselves; you should stand up for the little guys.

Yes indeed!

... and that's what Google said to themselves as they completed the design and looked forward to releasing it.

Re: Archeologists in 500 years

The ancient egyptians worshipped cats as gods. Have we progressed much since then?

@Ian Davies Re: A rubber-keyed speccy?

The Nascom keyboard was very nice indeed, but I think it was the Nascom 2 that had a case. The Nascom 1 was a bare mother of a board where you had to do all the assembly and soldering yourself (while crossing your fingers and praying to every deity you could think of).

The really suspicious ones are the 'attractive' and free analgue clock widgets that want full internet access, ability to send and receive SMS, read phone state and some other stuff. Big WTF! on those.

The only 'Contacts' on my phone are the ones that the SIM card forces on me. I use Colornote to mantain lists of contacts and have widgets for family, friends, work, etc; which works great with Android's built in ability to recognise text that is a phone number or e-mail address, highlight it and action it with a single touch. That way, you get to decide upon and layout the contact information in a way that looks good and is useful to you. (This will work with Evernote and just about any text file app).

The only disadvatage is that I can't tell who is phoning me unless I recognise the number, but that doesn't bother me.

I have considered rooting my phone so I can use a fine grained permissions blocking app, but that's technically a bit too much of a step fopr me.

After a little thought .....

..... Just print the QR code with 'stretching' at the edges so that the data blocks look square when viewed centrally head on with a camera. This would mean that you'd need to stick them to the bike frame with a particular 'curve orientation' but people willing to pay $30 a year to get this protection should be willing to read the instructions carefully.

Re: Oh, god...

If it's any comfort to you; imagine how the people at Seedrs feel about it. Oh..... wait a minute.

Re: Uh, yeah. Right....

Do foreign intelligence services and international organised crime figures have much of a presence on Facebook?

@Euchrid Re: And the authors who .....

Thank you for that interesting contribution. I didn't know about Amanda Hocking and I wish her and others like her well.

My second point was confirmed when I searched the torrents for "Amanda Hocking"; her books are all over the place! (I did not download, I just had a look to assess the availability in preparation for my comment.)

Re: And the authors who produce the goods, where are they in all this??

" ... authors themselves have no distribution channels and publishers have that monopoly."

Not true. For ebooks, places like Baen Ebooks (www.baenebooks.com) and others have channels where authors can sell their books. There are also ebook publishing houses (on the internet of course) who will package your manuscript into an e-book (as a paid service) and have various charges depending on the publishing and sales model an author wants.

However, hardly anybody (in the grand scale of global numbers) knows about these outlets, which is no good for blockbuster bestselling authors (think J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, etc). Even for middling authors, unless their ebook has DRM, then a popular book will find its way onto the torrents in a very short time. People who are capable of looking into internet niches for ebooks can easily find the popular ones for free on the torrents; I know I did :)

For paper books, an author can go the 'roll your own route' via the so-called vanity publishers but the question has to be asked - why didn't J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown (etc) do this? Probably because it's too much hassle and they are happy with the deal the existing publishers gave them.

If authors who want more money want a better deal, they will have to spend lots of time not writing books, but chasing publishing and distribution opportunities. It seems they've decided not to bother.

Re: Forgot the obvious

Can you give any links for 'proper' antennae please Danny?

re. extension strip

I too have run a Homeplug from an extension strip with laptop and other devices plugged in, with no apparent problems (I had a short network cable and was too lazy to find a longer one). You could do some simple speed comparison tests if you had any worries about performance.

Re: Cartel behaviours

"Did I say allegedly often enough in there?"

Possibly.

Re: Subeds, please

There is a 'Send Corrections' button for that, on the same line as 'Post A Comment', and I nearly used it for that purpose.

However, in this case I've decided to interpret 'local reigns' as meaning 'power/influence in these regions'. That's just me; you do what you like of course.

Re: FTL?

@Unicornpiss: Essentially, yes. This is what the article is about. Actually, I'm not sure that "... effects passed to one entangled quantum particle will instantaneously affect its partner ...". It may not be as simple as 'push one atom to the left and the other atom moves to the left as well'.

@DryBones: It's not science fiction. It's science fact; was predicted by Einstein's theories and has been demonstrated in various laboratories for quite a few years.

@LOL123 Re: economics .....

"The problem is I think the typesetting and format conversion work, which is not ebook friendly..."

When an author has finished slaving away on his/her manuscript and dealt with all the spelling mistakes and grammatical errors and sentence structure, etc; it will (hopefully) be in the form of a Word document (or similar). If I was given that, I could knock out an e-book in a few minutes and send copies to thousands of people at zero marginal cost, (I'm on the intertubes).

So, I'm wondering why e-books should be so expensive. Do authors still submit manuscripts to publishers in the form of ink on parchment? Even if they do, how expensive is a copy-typist with document layout skills?

If you tilt your head 90 degrees to the right ............

.... it looks like Homer eating a doughnut and not realising that he's on fire.

(Maybe it's just me......)

Re:GPodder - And again, why?

I just tried GPodder. It's a little 2.68MB program..... that requires you to install 211MB of Python software environment before it can do anything.

Re: Human Body Mass

Or a Big Matter Accumulating Commentard.

Ok, show us how it should be done.

That was a very short article so it shouldn't take you long. Can you enlighten us (and the author) by rewriting it in the way you think it should be presented; as an educational service?

Re: I hope they have good lawyers

In theory, you can get to sarcastic/ironic by running full tilt at screaming batshit vitriolic and passing through it. In practice, few people manage to achieve this.

Re: :/

If you read the article properly, your analogy is not correct. It's like the BBC (etc) reporting that Nominet (or whoever is more appropriate) has called for web companies in the UK to self-censor.

"...every government does it, it's not even news worthy."

So, government decisions and 'guidlines' that affect many companies and lots of people should not be reported?

Re: Gladly.

I prefer pottage myself. It has much more minerals and vitamins as well as a more varied taste.

Re: MAF to ePUB

That is amazing; epub and mobi too. Thank you for the link, it's now on my Firefox toolbar!

Re: @Arctic Fox: When contemplating the latest generation of high-end smart phones......

While I agree with the main sentiment of your post; as long as a phone has WiFi then there will be cheap data transfer. (I wonder who'll be the first to get rid of it?)

Re: Temperature

A plasma is a very, very hot state of matter in which the thermal energy is so great that the electrons are knocked away from the nucleus and keep getting knocked away even if they manage to recombine due to electrostatic attraction.

If an electron gets ripped from a nitrogen or oxygen molecule in the air and then gets blown away in a gentle breeze by electrostatic repulsion from the electrode that caused this, then that is a different state of matter. A collection of ions is not a plasma, but a plasma is a (very hot) collection of ions.

I have felt the gentle breeze coming from an ion generator as it blew over my fingertip. I would not want to feel a stream of plasma blowing over my fingertip. Hence my trying to draw the distinction.

Re: Temperature

That is why I don't think that it's really a plasma, but is an ion beam. High voltage (and low power) ion generators have been in use for a while as air purifier/fresheners, the idea being that the ions induce chemical dissociation of nasty smelling substances in the air.

The same principle (in a directed ion beam) would damage bacteria enough to kill them.

Re: So, there's really only one important question isn't there?

It depends who controls the money (politicians) and how much good publicity they want (loads).