It will be like it used to be

@Anon 16

I now want to buy a whole raft of them.

@b166er

Is this irony? The EU parliament has balls? Since when? They don't have any power to go with those balls, all decisions are made by the European Council, an unelected body of 'elders' filled by appointment. The EU parliament is a charade to impart the belief that the EU is a democratic institution.

Besides which, 'class action' is an American invention, you do not get it in non-US common law countries. In the UK however, a consumer contract which wilfully throws away consumer rights like that would be considered unenforceable under the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations Act.

Christopher Hitchens grew up in Crapstone, Devon.

I don't understand your 'quotes'

BT was privatised, not 'privatised'. It was actually sold, for a pretty fair price (and in a large part, the shares were bought by ordinary people) and after that point, we can't really complain about them monetizing the assets we sold them.

OTOH if they did have a $50bn judgement (unlikely), there could easily be a special 'YouJustSuedGoogleAndWon" windfall tax.

Keep smoking the crack, Arthur Dent, I'll keep using my ORM.

I'm sure NI shareholders are loving this

Their Chairman was informed about illegal goings on at one of his companies, and didn't bother to either fully read the brief that his staff gave him or follow up directly with them on the illegality.

All of them do

Part of the brow beating on Sunday was that the eurozone states are going to sign up to have controlled budgets and deficits. What few mentioned is that _they already do_ under the original eurozone treaty.

The problem with that aspect of the treaty was that Germany and France both immediately broke the limits, and got no/inconsequential punishment. After that, neither France nor Germany had a leg to stand on when Italy, Greece et al all did the same.

Spotify does have some daft concepts in it though

Most frustrating (imo) is that it plays playlists rather than playqueues.

Making a playlist play should involve either replacing the playqueue with the songs on the playlist, or appending them to the end of the current playqueue.

When I add a song to the playqueue, I should be able to add it to play next or play last.

When editing the playqueue, I should be able to re-order the songs however I want.

When browsing music, if I double click a track, it should append it to the playqueue, not replace the current playqueue with whatever playlist context the song was found. This was the #1 noobie problem when I ran spotify under vnc and plugged it into an amp in the office - people trying to queue a track and accidentally changing the underlying playlist being played.

In the mobile client, I need a way to add songs to the playqueue. In fact, I need a way to view the playqueue on mobile at all.

Spotify also need to do something clever with all the metadata that they can collect. Their 'radio' is perhaps the most god awful way of listening to music - itunes genius actually is pretty good at generating playlists I will listen to.

In conjunction with this, they should change the 'star' system so that I can actually rate songs I like from 1-5. With this additional information, spotify would be able to make informed suggestions on songs/artists that I do not currently listen to, because they are ranked highly by people who rank highly the things that I rank highly.

Bear arms

I always thought the wording on that was a little funny. Surely the US could confiscate all the guns held by private citizens and replace them with ursine appendages?

It's hardly uncommon though is it? At my last place, we had windows that opened, but if you did dare open one, and the head of HR saw you, you would get summoned to her 'roasting room' (glass walled sound proof cubicle for 'interviews', although it felt more like a place you can silently ream someone out whilst everyone else stares) for re-education.

At the new place, there are no windows, just panes of glass, so at least the temptation has gone.

The best thing about a donut shape like this is that there are no corner offices, and most people will have some daylight coming into their space. That's a good thing. I wish I worked in a donut.

Seeing how Google don't currently pay any corporation tax in the UK, that would be a bloody good thing (for the UK).

Any other multinationals who want to declare their global profit in the UK and take advantage of our generously low corporation tax would be more than welcome.

A typical bandwidth deal is to bill for speeds up to a certain point, and usage above that point is charged at the 90-something percentile. Even if they rate limited it at less than 1Gb/s, it would surely cost less than shipping SANs around the world.

Plus, if this is to offload your data somewhere cheap, I don't see what sort of cost saving you will get if it then costs a fortune to access it.

In my mind we can restart Mars' core by bombarding it with asteroids taken from the main belt, handily located close (ish) to Mars. This will increase the mass of Mars, bringing g closer to that of Earth, hopefully restart the core and push it closer towards the Sun, increasing the surface temperature.

Gradually start introducing icy asteroids, or chunks stripped from icy moons in order to introduce water and water vapour into the atmosphere. Extract a few billion tons of CO₂ from Venus, and dump that in the atmosphere.

Some of us haven't given up our dreams of terra-forming Mars*

* Having said that, the entire mass of the main belt is less than 6% of Earth's mass, so it may not be enough. Back to the drawing board, Pinky…

Thatcher's de-regulation of the banking sector was fine. It was when Mssrs Brown and Blair effectively told the FSA to take a break that we had a problem. What this has to do with climate change is beyond me though..

This report does cancel out more significant events and try to make sense of the noise underneath. I'm not convinced by their methods.

If you think a court would ever be asked to pass judgement on someone for possession of copyright infringing materials, then you are hopelessly naive.

The state is only interested if it is criminal infringement, ie mass producing dodgy dvds and the MPAA only have a case where they can prove that you facilitated copyright infringement by _uploading_ content.

Mere possession is not punishable, and by downloading content you are not creating a copy of a protected work, the person sending it to you at the other end is.

Think someone has seen too many "Piracy is theft" adverts.

But Nick, that's your choice isn't it? You could quite easily live elsewhere in Devon, and live within walking distance of amenities. For you, the negatives of living in an isolated area are outweighed by the positives.

I also smirked at some comments about people moaning about paying £100/month in fuel to get to work. I pay £128/month to get jammed into a sweaty metal box with a hundred other people in order to get to work, you lucky bastards :)

It won't work out of country without a proxy, which is kind of stupid as your Sky subscription clearly denotes your 'region', so it is just nonsense applying geographical IP restrictions on top of that.

I guess that changed then. Original Sky HD boxes used dual LNB feeds for each channel, as this used DVB-S and MPEG2 encoding at the time, which required both feeds at once for some channels (I have photos).

They also seem to have re-done the boxes in the 6 months since I last looked - no SD boxes, everyone gets a Sky+ HD box, and you no longer have to pay for Sky+, only for HD - presumably you would get FTA HD without paying extra.

You still require at least two LNB for the PVR boxes to work correctly - I'm guessing you've never tried, because they only sort of work with one LNB, once it tries to download Sky Anytime programming overnight, the box will likely freeze. I've also seen it refuse to start a scheduled recording when you're not watching anything.

Clearly your definition of 'works' is different to mine.

£20/month is the cheapest stock Sky sub

There is no additional charge for watching sky go.

My flat only has the 1 satellite feed, and the landlord is not keen on upgrading the entire block, so I can't get/use Sky+ (2 feeds required) or SkyHD (4 feeds), so there was no way I would take a 'proper' sky equipment+12 month sub, so I used to subscribe to Sky Player.

Sky Player was also free to use (in addition to your sub), you could use it on up to 5 computers and 1 Xbox and you could watch sport or movie channels on it. You could also access the sports channels on your iDevice, for an additional £6/month. The quality on maximum was almost HD, and looked really nice blew up to 42".

Then came Sky Go, which 'unifies' all this. You no longer have to pay £6/month per device, but instead you are now limited to 2 devices in total. Yep, 2 devices, across laptop, home pc, phone, tablet and console. Pick 2. Want more? Tough shit, pick 2.

This riled me a bit, but I still didn't cancel. I still want to watch cricket (I know, I know..). Tuned in bright and early for an India vs England ODI, and fuck me, 'This content is not available to be streamed' - Sky hadn't even bought the streaming rights to the damn content, despite advertising it to me in never ending "Check out what's on Sky Go!" spam emails.

At that point, I cancelled. Fuck them.

The problem is that your typical Apple store will have masses of people in it, and every blue-shirt will already be talking to a customer. If someone is already talking to the person you want to talk to, it's considered rude to interrupt them.

This system allows them to provide a way for someone who can't find a drone to talk to a simple way of requesting assistance, which makes them feel empowered, and less likely to wander out the store taking their £1500 with them. Probably won't help them get a blue shirt to talk to any quicker though.

Friend of mine has a San Fran, because he is skint. He was constantly complaining of crashing, apps not launching, yada yada. He upgraded to the latest Orange supplied version of Android, still crashed doing simple things like Angry Birds.

He was finally convinced to put a 'stock' version of the latest OS on there, which wiped his contacts (he knew, so they were backed up), and now can finally play Angry Birds.

Clearly this 'just works' works differently depending on the handset and the network that have played with it..

BTW, if my 11 yr old son couldn't use any sort of smartphone intuitively, I'd worry and think about extra tutoring. If I was a breeder.