political will

.. is not just not there.

I dont want to sound like a bleeding heart hippy but security eats into profits for alot of companies and "the man" is only after profit.

Using more rational phraseology, the current smart meters in the UK is a good example. They are as secure as a paper bag, and would have proceeded with "its good for you" push from government.... but now it seems "national security" may be at risk, it gets a little more of the security attention it deserves.

While there is a divide in what is considered worth protecting, security will continue to be an issue.

out of proportion?

1 in 20 people clicked on an ad, which is 5%.

Isn't that higher than industry average CTRs?

Also London, like most of Europe and the US has plenty of new fresh alternatives to FB with their own slant so they are perhaps at a different stage in their FB usage. Where i live in Asia, Facebook usage is growing with the increase in smart phones and still being a long way from saturating the "computer at home" market.

Also Yahoo are huge here with most people having a ymail.com address and using yahoo messenger for IM.

I read El Reg and often think its a bit out of touch with Asia and only thinks of it as Samsung HQ and Foxconn suicides.

If London disappeared from the internet, it would likely have very little impact on the IT industry, except reduce the number of fluffy design houses where people dont brush their hair in the morning.

how much when he dies

There seems to be race to gather as much money as possible before people die.

I am a capitalist, but i do wonder what the point of having so many billions really is... to be the richest guy in the graveyard...

He has very big boats, an island, now a very exclusive strip. While it may not be his personal aim, but like the poster said above, if all these rich guys just buy everything, then there will be nothing left for the rest of us. Maybe they can eradicate the property market totally, if there is nothing that is not owned "as an investment" then there is nothing that can be bought.

It is all starting to look like a William Gibson novel, where the world is owned by the big corporations and they are so big, no one can touch them.

torrenting porn is not a good idea

Its quite likely to have a nasty itchy something in there that your computer wont thank you for, just like a cheap or popular lady of negotiable virtue.

Isn't there enough free porn out there... i dont torrent it, i dont pay for it... i just google it.

subscription vs flat fee

I do not like subscriptions as you always end up paying more.

A 1 year vs 1 year comparison may be ok, but do you always upgrade, every year on day 365?

The reason i do not like subscriptions is that there soon becomes many of them. So with office 365, photoshop etc and various others, soon a typical user could be paying hundreds of dollars per month on software.

It is far easier to manage with a straight one time purchase.

I started using photoshop at 5.5 since i am web developer. Not really being a creative, i only have sporadic use for it and GIMP is from the 80s with an interface to match.

I had no real reason to upgrade from PS 6.. but i still got one of the creative suites. For some reason i could never get my version to work in anything but spanish (which is not the language on my computer). Still i have stuck with it and will continue to while i can.

Next time though, i wont be buying into the subscription model as adobe stuff was silly price anyway.

We make mobile apps and i'll be damned if i am paying them 1000s of dollars so i can make my software product that sells for 99c.

Software has been devalued by Apple and its time for the bigger players to realise that.

Adobe are simply cutting off the people who have anything but a serious professional, almost full time, use for their software (like design people). The rest of us will just not use it anymore.... another will rise.

downloads of free and paid do not relate.

Example.

I put an app in the app store last week at the princely sum of free. It got over 1000s downloads in a week.

I upped the price to 99c (it is a utility app and does have actual use and function)... the downloads dropped to under 10.

People just dont want to pay for stuff. If it is free they will give it a try.

It sounds like this thing was just rubbish, 3000 people downloaded it for free and found it restricted, if it was that good they would have bought it.... they didn't.

all the consumer laws and rubbish contracts

The UK is pretty bad these days... you can buy unlimited yet limited broadband, fixed price phone contracts where the prices are not fixed, low prices "forever" from Asda where forever is just 6 months.

The reason i left was that day to day life is filled with constant price rises on every little thing and while everyone knows its happening there is seemingly no way to stop it.

Vodafone, sky etc probably don't miss me with my average bills (albeit paid on time) since there is still a steady stream of people ready to shift between the monopolies in hope of a better service, only to be disappointed in a couple of months time.

simply wording

This ruling is about nothing more than using the right words.

No Restrictions - when there are restrictions (obvious to you or not) is simply wrong.

We have "unlimited" used alot in the UK in relation to broadband and in the last 10+ years no-one in power has accepted that this is not right.

Asda (owned by Walmart) were taken to court a little while ago for saying "low prices forever", when their pricing policy actually meant prices went up every 6 months.

It is simple lying. Do not use words that have very clear meaning that is not applicable, why is this so hard for people to get their head around.

If its not blue with green spots, dont say it is blue with green spots.

our data

We accept willingly in our society that people do harm to us and our brothers in the next street, village and town, yet any of these fines go into the coffers of the state to be pissed away on some fuel for a jet in Iraq or for a bacon sandwich at a government meeting.

Data breach court cases should be like a class action suit in the US where every single person who's data was breached MUST be compensated individually and perhaps in person by the CEO of the company.

The shear cost in administering this (and it should be fairly feasible) would be a deterrent.

Isn't this a storm in a teacup?

How many times do you hear the message from a utility company "we may record calls for training purposes".

How many people have asked or cared what they do with these calls.

It may sound like "nothing to hide, nothing to fear", which i dont agree with, but just what is it you are saying to Siri that worries you so much?

Unrelated but, perhaps if people had to stand behind what they say on technology the same way they do in real life, people would not be such trolls and idiots online?

actual theft of a tangible item...

You'd have a better case if it was just copyright "theft" then the cops would be right in there !!!

I am not saying "if you have nothing to hide"....

But, problems with the quality of convictions / policemen / the law aside, information is good.

Police having all this information might mean they waste less of your time. It might also highlight errors in records more effectively and may even spur another app with information about police.

We may live in a growing police state, but we are generally policed by consent.

with so many

does the end of a domain matter anymore?

insula

The uk always focuses on itself and forgets the many people who come to england to visit, do trade and say nice things when they go home.

But when it comes to wifi, if you are not a UK resident then all the pay walls to wifi you get at airports, stations and coffee shops just makes me yearn to go back to where i now live and the term free as in wifi means I don't ever have to put a credit card in.... just like it does in the english dictionary.

wood for the tress

I have never understood why it is legitimate to pass on any fees to the consumer.

If the stores have collectively bent over to the credit card companies, then why do we have to suffer this also.

If the credit card companies cannot make an effective business model from the interest and service charges, that they have to get a fee from merchants also, then they are more rubbish the record/movie companies.

If i have milk to sell, i do not charge tesco a fee to sell it for me.

The whole banking system is pretty rigged to keep new efficient competition out, while the banks figure out how they can give us a little at a time and work out new ways to plug the gaps on their P & L.

520, 720 & 920

So how many OS versions are covered in this little group?

Android is fragmented due to popularity and time, Windows is fragmented because its been poorly managed on the hardware side.

Yeah i have an OLPC laptop

from the buy 2, get 1 promo they did. Lovely machine, running sugar linux. At the time with its almost water proof casing (including totally waterproof keyboard) and dual wifi to create grid networks, it is still ahead of whats commercially available out there. Retail seems to think the only computers people want are shiny silver ones that break from just looking at them.

google + finished product before release = never

"there is still some way to go" ... no sh*t sherlock.

Google make some really unfinished products and push them onto users without any thought.

"Its a beta so dont blame us" ... how about airbus or boeing say that ?

Sadly too many muppets flock to anything google make simply to be the first to say they have it.

This has meant i no longer use google products for commercial uses since i cannot trust them not to push an "update" that is totally ill-thought through and makes the service worse.

When i did a trial for a paid google product the support i requested effectively told me to "search google for the answer" ... at least it was a realistic trial of what the paid experience might be like.

Google make another patronising video for an unfinished product, yawn

facebook is blocked here

Rather feebly, so it depends which provider you are on and whether the cafe's wifi owner has a VPN.

This very slack blocking is rather effective as no-one really tried to get around it, they just wait and go somewhere else... end result is an intermittent (at best) facebook connection..

It is rather disappointing that while many on here no doubt built the early web having to remember file sizes and load times, modern developers (particularly in the US) seem to assume an always on connection, which is not even possible with 4G .. yet fail to code to graceful failure.

Recently my samsung phone stopped making calls. The android parts are fine, but no calls. So since i expected this day, when the first iphone came along ("how long before they dont make calls anymore hehe").

I have gone back to a nokia 120 and its tablets all the way now... phones screens are too small anyway, hence the raft fo monster screen 'phones'.

Bring on the FB phone, i doubt it will be that significant a player for a long time, i know as a developer I wont be rushing to get any of the following:

FB Phone

Firefox Phone

Ubunto Phone.

Or code for them unless the client pays ALL the costs.

I am happy to bash US but wait a second...

despite both nations being easy to accuse of protectionism, its not like the Chinese government haven't made every non-chinese firm bend over backwards to work there and shown very little regard for protecting the trade of those firms over local companies that 'acquire' foreign technology.

USA is totally being protectionist in this matter, but China do need to at least start to pretend that they play nice with non-chinese business. Sometimes a little protectionism is better than a totally free market that will put many US readers into jobless poverty as everything is made in China.

no surprise

There was a very good reason i relocated my software development company in Vietnam.

The level of ability here has been known for some time, it just that now it is effectively been spidered by a google drone so the rest of world might actually notice.

There was a comment above about the late of funding for ICT in the US.... in Vietnam, everyone pays for their education. Parents literally work themselves ragged to get enough to put their kids through school. Education is rightly seen as the biggest opportunity here and schools are open from about 5am to 10pm with different shifts of kids to make the most use of the buildings. There are voluntary extra lessons at weekends and you see the schools filled on both Saturday and Sunday.

Maybe the kids are worked hard, but isn't that a good ethic to give them... work hard and things pay off long term.

Kids in the US and Europe could be at this level but there is still a large amount of people mostly 35 plus who relish in their lack of technology and society has worked hard to label anything tech geeky and uncool.

Bring your own Blackberry to work?

What craziness is this... isn't the reason you have a blackberry either ;-

1) You are a south london scalywag teenager who doesn't want to pay for SMS

2) You have been given it by your office when what you really wanted was an iPhone.

Ta

An old girlfriend of mine, who was pretty senior in a US company always signed her emails "Ta"... which is simply a form of saying goodbye (the longer version being "Tarrah").

Many of her US colleagues didn't understand it for a long time, assuming it was a longer form of her name or something...

There are loads of things like this and if you get into localised sayings, it gets much more fun.

My favourite term (from my home of Yorkshire) was describing something as particularly speedy by saying it

"went like shit off a stick"...

Google are strange

They have succeeded through technological innovation only and user experience is off their radar.

Look at Analytics, they dropped the summary view (where you can easily see a summary of all the sites you are tracking in one page) to be replaced by a situation where you can only see data by clicking into a site that is tracked.... what did they do with the space they saved? They put the google blog in there because clearly i want to read what some engineer is blogging about rather than the business data i am used to.

Anyone who squeaks about it being free needs to recall the other often quoted phrase on there about if you don't pay for the product, you are the product.

Google do search and advertising well. Android is not bad... the other web stuff from google is mediocre at best and only succeeds due to the massive push behind it from a huge force in controlling internet traffic.

quiant

It is quaint how politicians still delude themselves that they have any control whatsoever.

The India guy saying that they will deal with it in their next bill or sessions or whatever....

Ok buddy, you get around to it when you're free and by then we will have moved to the next provider...

Its right up there with the (mainly british) view that if you make something illegal it magically stops over night.

Opportunity to attack apple

Many people who read this web site have tendencies towards open source and although a little distorted sometimes, overall a sense of fairness - hence stories like this being popular.

I think it is very interesting to view Apple with their almost anti-opensouce approach and from a tech and a business point of view how Apple are managing with so much self censorship of other technologies.

Sure we can all manage without flash, but now we can't have adblock (because it runs a local proxy) ... oh and here goes firefox ... I already gave up trying to watch movies and tv shows on my ipad because I dont have the time or disk space to re-encode everything for iTunes.

Apple are just the grumpy rich kid in the playground who only lets you play with his power rangers if you promise not to like smelly steve balmer....

You do not own it ...

So, if they never sell the product to anyone and no-one owns it, then by their own logic i cannot actually steal it even if i download a hacked copy and merrily use it without paying a bean?

I may be using it without licence but the phrase "piracy is theft" yet again gets questioned on basic grammer!!

More importantly, theft and copyright are criminal and civil respectively, aren't they?

I am sure this would not stand up in any court though.