Hmm

The chances of the UK wining the heavily politicized mess that is Eurovision is nil - I think that's why we've taken to wheeling out some aging artiste

All very true, but..

It's a first go, and it's a proof of concept.

You could easily design most of the parts for a 3D printer, and use a metal pipe for the barrel.

In the future, the materials used by a 3D printer will be developed, and there are plastics and composites that would be able to be used for a short lived firearm.

Nonetheless though, everything you say is bang on - Harlan Ellison style zip guns and numerous other improvised firearms already exist, and are better than this, but nothing, particularly not the truth, will stop the hysteria that can be drummed up by the media for this sort of thing.

Best to just chuckle gently, and wait for the reports of folks losing bits of their anatomy

oh yeah..

If they're gambling on the Facebook phone reviving their fortunes, I've got some Enron and Northern Rock shares at a knockdown price they can have.

Bloody hell..

HTC were up there, just a couple of years ago. It shows how volatile the mobile market is - and possibly that the mobile market may end up like the Desktop market - one huge player, one less player, and a few niche players :( And that won't be good.

Does the company know anything about BootCamp?

"The company also points out that Windows installs on Macs aren't straightforward" Erm, yes they are. Bootcamp assistant, save out support software to usb, insert dvd, answer a couple of questions, re-insert usb stick, run installer, voila, Windows. More straightforward than on most machines - no desparately trying to find which revision of which GPU driver you need and so on.

"and that Windows-on-Mac experience suffers from ... the lack of a Windows button on the keyboard" Except that the Apple key works as a Windows key on all the Macs I've bootcamped, and I'm definitely into triple figures on those installs.

As other folk have pointed out, their methodology is questionable, but so apparently is their experience with bootcamp.

Copland again?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_%28operating_system%29

It does seem that unless Apple has someone suitably dictatorial at the helm, projects don't run to schedule.

All the best mate

And may Saturday arrive as fast as possible (I doubt I could make do with only 30 teabags, so fair play).

Eggs and chickpeas - eek.

I think I'd be living alone if I had that diet.

"Amazon had not returned a request for comment at the time of publication"

This seems to be becoming a habit

Salami.

Slice by slice the companies pare away our protections, safe in the knowledge that when they breach the law, the fines that are imposed are not, by the size of the revenues of the company profits, in any way punitive.

When it comes time to change, I'll see what there is..

Apps are cheap enough to be disposable, so flipping ecosystems isn't hard - it's not like the massive investments we used to make in a software for a platform - a new copy of Angry Birds (or whatever is the current flavour of the month) is a few pennies, and there are enough free apps for most folk on any platform (including my WinPhone, and my office mate's blackberry).

Whatver looks nice will get the sale.

Another vote for Skype

We use it all the time - I connect the host machine to a 72 plasma screen, maximise the video window, I use a boundary mic connected to an Edirol sound interface, and everyone says that they rapidly forget that one user is not there.

The remote users can normally just use their own kit from home.

Being on a University LAN with gigabit ethernet to all ports helps enormously - though we can get issues when the person on the other end has a limited connection.

Total cost, minimal - just using standard equipment, but it has saved our department many, many thousands.

Looking good...

My contract is up in 4 months, and I'm not going back to Winphone, so phones like this are definitely tempting - and by July they'll be affordable...just...

Oh gee whiz

For the colouration on the graph, you get a fail. If you're comparing the companies, keep them the same colour so we can easily see their relative performances on all scales.

Dear oh dear...

Bought a gopro for this very reason

Just got a Hero3, mainly for cycling and diving, but I will try and clip it on to my big kite at some point. I would go the weather balloon route, but I know that if I got a cylinder of helium, I'd just waste it all on Donald Duck impressions.

Can't wait

For the first crashes because folk overtake on blind corners because they haven't been told not to.

I can see the value of this, but I think it will need a little tweaking to be really useful

Ah - the passage of time

I knew - and loved - all the earlier games, but the later ones were a mystery. I think I discovered girls or something.

For me, Space Invaders - the first really huge game, Donkey Kong - the first platformer, Star Wars - incredible 3D, but I think BattleZone was first on the Vector 3D..., and Gauntlet - just damn good fun in the Union bar - I got the adaptor for my Atari ST so that we could play G2 4 up on the machine - but since you couldn't buy more healther, it wasn't as good.

All classics - and cheers for the memories (btw, no Lunar Lander? That was the first I played, in the mini Virgin Megastore in Nottingham...)

Ah, business as usual at Virgin

Trying to make not giving us what we pay for seem a positive thing rather than saying that we just can't provide what we sold...

Weight

I thought that they revised the weight up a tad...between 7 and 10 /thousand/ tonnes (at 17m diameter, that wouldn't be tricky)

Can that gunk be applied to laptops...

" Indeed most phone insurance policies specifically exclude water damage and phones are fitted with tell-tale sensors"

I think Macbook Pros have similar - we had one that had been issued returned to us with the oh so helpful comment "it just stopped working" - only 2 weeks old, so we returned it to Apple. About 20 minutes later we got a terse "it's been immersed in water - tough", and it was returned.

Hey-ho, I had one that had been drizzled with baby oil (I didn't ask) and one that had had what seemed like fish soup through out it's innards. Week old fish soup at that. Not a pleasant job, but I learned how to fix macbooks

Calm down, it's just a willy...

I think that it's not the first time Big Dave has caused a controversy - often required to don a loincloth of fig leaves - or copper.

Riddle me this...

I get a lot of junk calls on my home phone. Which is very odd, because I'm TPS registered, and I only give this to friends - I always use my work number when asked by any organisation, and I never, ever, ever get any junk calls at work.

How does my work block all junk - or are some numbers just excluded from the junkers?

Hic..

Lester's haggis pakora recipe worked wonders up here, for an alternative Burns' supper

Burns' Night tomorrow

So I'm grabbing your recipe for Haggis Pakora, adding Sag Aloo (tatties), and turnip dahl (neeps).

I'll let you know how well it goes down. And hopefully it stays there.

All the best,

I'm impressed

As has been pointed out that with Google, Facebook etc, we're the product, so the idea of taxing these companies for the work we do (i.e. increasing their data store and therefore the value of the companies) is very attractive.

No doubt the companies concerned though will pay for expensive lawyers to tie it up in the courts for ever and a day, and then weasel accountants to point out that the data is actually added in Ulan Bator therefore it doesn't count as work in France, and the companies will continue to export their profits and import losses.

Zut alors, or more likely, merde alors.

Bye bye...

Shopping malls and the like are probably not going to last much longer in my opinion - I've been wandering round Princes Street and the environs today looking for shirts - grandad shirts to be precise, out of fashion, but I like them. Not one to be found in Frasers, Debenhams, Marks+Spencer, Jenners, John Lewis (and the rest of the St James Center), Harvey Nicks - and a bunch of smaller boutiques. On the internet, a quick search and a positive plethora. The bricks and mortar shops cannot offer the range that the internet offers - okay, conversely, I can't try things on on the Internet, but DSR makes returning things far easier, and less embarassing, than physical retail outlets.

They'll need to come up with a new models, new services and new ideas to really tempt folk back, this is Canute and the tide.

Small Kudos

They're admitting overselling their capacity, unlike others who claim "unlimited" but put caps on your usage so the internet slows down to a crawl, just when you (and everyone else) wants to use it most :)

ISPs should stop playing the numbers game, set a "speed limit" which they can provide, and then work in background to improve infrastructure, and then, when it's ready for us greedy buggers (ISPspeak for folk who want what they pay for), upgrade the speed.

FFFFF.....

Ah bollocks, to hard to alliterate.

Slightly quicker than Adobe - and they patch bugs faster too :)

He was honest once

One of his books was entitled "It's not about the bike", which was a fair assessment of his cycling.