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.

Particularly as their (Penguin Books) HQ is about a mile away down the road in Westminster...

How much is a fortune?

For £750 you can get a 30" 2560 x 1600 panel.

For £460 you can get a 27" 2560 x 1440 panel.

All prices plus VAT, usual etailers. Decent CRTs used to cost way more than that, I remember paying £300 for an übercheap 19" 1600x1200 CRT probably 12 years ago.

In China, either the character for or the pronunciation of (I forget which) the number '4' is closely similar to that for 'death'. This means that in very tall buildings, there is no 4,14,24,34, and one up from floor 39 is floor 50.

The downvotes are probably because matter and anti matter are well known to annihilate each other. Look at the particle interaction charts..

If they repel each other, how would annihilation work?

I always thought Tim Curry would make a good actor. Still waiting.

Naïve and clueless

Why don't you get back to protesting that 'Capitalism is Crisis', without ever explaining how we go from here to your utopia. Without patents, we wouldn't even be having this discussion, as computers probably wouldn't exist (not in this form).

Face it, human technological evolution relies on one of two things:

1) The desire to kill other people

2) The desire to profit from other people

von Neumann was thinking of both when he patented how to make a nuclear bomb.

If all patents were FRAND

Why would I spend eleventy billion dollars working out how to do cold fusion, if I am then forced to license it to EDF for peanuts?

FRAND patents have a requirement to license to anyone. Non FRAND patents can be licensed as the patent holder sees fit.

Apple are saying that Samsung are suing them over FRAND patents which Samsung either refuse to discuss licensing, or patents that Apple feel are already licensed, as they are related to hardware produced by a licensee who has already paid a per chip license.

Apple's patent claims against Samsung are supposedly non FRAND patents that Apple would not be forced to license.

FRAND pools come about when implementing a particular standard requires patents from multiple patent holders. To prevent a Mexican standoff between manufacturers who would not be able to produce anything without the other's patents, the patents are pooled, and a set price for licensing the patents is decided upon.

I would have thought that if the patents Apple allegedly infringe are part of a FRAND pool, then this would have stopped Samsung's action a long time ago. Since it hasn't, it probably isn't the whole story, and we'll have to wait to see what the courts say.

Re: Just how many…

I've got 5 so far. One by my bed, one by my hifi, one by my computer, one in the hallway and one that I keep for travelling.

Could use one for the kitchen, but I think I'd prefer some sort of wall mount.

As I understand it, it is your choice whether to upload photos to the BBC. Doing so implicitly accepts their terms, which specifically allow them to do this.

A company doing something that you have expressly assigned rights for them to do is unlikely to be considered illegal.