10% of Apple then would be less than 10% of Apple now due to dilution from later funding rounds.

They are investigating this. Apple and a few of the publishers had their offices raided as part of the investigation.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/06/apple_ebooks_anti_trust_book_publishers/

No, and they can't claim back VAT on any purchases they make.

They can play the trick of placing the server you download from in Luxembourg, where the VAT rate is 15%.

VAT on licence fees is 20%. VAT is 20% on everything that isn't listed as being chargeable at a lower rate. E-books with only pictures are not listed as being in the 5%, 0%, exempt or outside the scope categories for VAT, therefore it is chargeable at 20%.

Mobile operators are required by law to filter access to "adult"[1] websites unless the account holder proves they are over 18 years old and request the filtering to be removed. Vodafone & 3 presumably use Bluecoat to help them comply with this law.

[1] If O2 is anything to go by, adult sites seem to include websites in the personal beauty sector and clothes retailers which I really can't understand why children shouldn't be allowed to see them.

You can make your own ROM based on Android, and you have to do this as a ROM made for a Samsung Galaxy S will not work on an HTC phone or even another Samsung model. It is specific to a particular hardware model.

There are builds of wine specifically for ie. It runs ie6 as well as anything else does. I haven't tried it for a while, so I don't know how well later versions of ie run.

Everyone else forgot or ignored the Itanic as well.

I have a phone with a data plan, and I can use it as a personal wifi hotspot that lets my laptop, iPod touch and iPad connect when I am away from home. I also have a couple of battery powered chargers that deal with the large amount of power the wifi hotspot sucks out of the phone.

The only reason I went for the 3G kindle is because it doesn't have any ongoing costs to use the 3G network.

Well yes, they do have a satnav app for Windows Mobile (the old version) and iPhone, though nothing for the new Windows Phone or Android. I got Tom Tom for my Windows Mobile many years ago. Now that I've switched to Android, I mostly use the free Google Navigation app, though I do have Co-Pilot which I use some times. The advantages of Co-Pilot are the revenue camera database, and the fact that it works off-line so works if I start my journey in an area with no signal, or if I don't want to incur data roaming charges.

The rules are different for products delivered electronically vs products delivered by courier.

If you buy a fondleslab from apple.com and you pay 20% UK VAT. If you then go to the iTunes store to buy some things to put on it, you pay 15% Luxembourg VAT.

It is a Mac drive, and Macs don't have USB3.

There is an app for that (tm)

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/kindle/id302584613?mt=8

I suppose if you are in a hotel, your travel adapter will be used to charge your phone / fondleslab / laptop / camera batteries / shaver and not having to charge your e-book reader as well would be a bonus.

The browser is OK, but when the the refresh rate of the e-ink screen is measured in seconds rather than miliseconds, displaying web pages, especially anything with javascript that has multiple refreshes per page-load takes a very long time. It terms of compatibility, it seems that any website that works on the iPad will work on the Kindle, but it will be much slower. Obviously you can forget about getting videos to work.

If I didn't know much about nmap, then on seeing it attempt to install a dodgy toolbar program, I would immediately cancel the whole installation and look for an alternative source of security software elsewhere. I just don't trust software that comes with things like that, however optional they might be.

They send you threatograms because your address is on the postcode database. They work on the assumption that everyone who doesn't watch TV is a liar.

People who don't understand the meaning of words

The technical definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth. We had lots of quarters of negative growth a few years back, totalling something like -8%. Since then we have had positive growth of somewhere in the region of 0.1% to 0.2% per quarter. That means that the economy is basically the same now as it was back in 2009 and things are no longer getting worse. According to the technical definition, we are out of recession. Being "out of recession" does mean we are back where we were before the recession started. If there is a double dip recession, that means things will get even worse than they are at the moment.

Or maybe not

I'm sure you can use Office 365 on your slab at the moment, or if you can't, it won't take a lot of work to get it working. Certainly, I can get onto my office web apps for sharepoint without any problems other than finding a network signal of some sort.

However, the iPad version of office won't do everything the desktop version can, for the simple reason that the iPad is not a desktop replacement. It will do the sorts of things you can do on Office for Windows Mobile & Windows Phone, except with the benefit of a larger screen you will be able to actually do stuff most of the time rather than continually scrolling everywhere and revealing and hiding toolbars.

You will worry about the battery in about 2 years time when it is knackered, and it being removable means the difference between getting a £10 replacement battery and getting a £500 replacement phone.

Not a problem

You obtain books from elsewhere and provided they aren't DRM restricted, you simply connect the kindle to your computer as a USB drive and copy them over to the documents folder.

It is half an hour of turning pages. when you earn just reading a page, an e-ink screen, unlike an LCD screen, doesn't Use any power.

When I'm on the road, which I am at the moment, I browse on my fonldleslab via a VPN connection so that O2 doesn't compress images so much that they a barely recognisable. I don't notice any drop in speed, it seems fast enough without compression.

This is tethering over wifi from my Android phone, I don't know if they compress on the iPad data tariff so much.

That just gives you a list of nearby phone numbers, it doesn't actually book the cab.

That works for coupons you hand out for free, not when you actually pay Groupon to buy the coupon.

and you don't even have to look very far from Reading for another recent example.

2 miles away to be exact http://www.getreading.co.uk/news/s/2103359_table_for_1236_please

This one was a pub restaurant where it was physically impossible to meet demand because they simply didn't have enough tables.

The "most common" spams are probably the ones that are most likely to be caught by spam filters, and given that it is a spam filtering outfit that prepared the stats, it is probably the ones most often caught by them. If you actually use them to filter your spam, it is probably the spam you are least likely to receive.

There were teachers like that when you were at school. Its just that through teenage eyes she looks like an old woman. TBH, through my 34 year old eyes she's nothing special.

Terminatyion fee explained

If you are an O2 customer, and you call someone on a Vodafone line, O2 has to pay Vodafone some money to connect the call. This payment is called a termination fee.

I guess it is a cultural thing, I think that having a funeral less than about 2 weeks after the death shows indecent haste and a desire to get rid of the dead person as soon as possible.

Re: Web Apps

If you want your Google Talk messages to appear in the notification screen as they arrive so you can use it as a free SMS replacement, the web app isn't much use.

Indeed. Are they still the largest email provider, slightly ahead of Hotmail?

They took it off the previous shareholders for nothing; then Northern Rock issued £1.4bn of new shares which were purchased by the government, and that money went into Northern Rock to pay off debts.

An Engineer can sign a passport application

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/TravelAndTransport/Passports/Applicationinformation/DG_174151

Who you can ask to be your countersignatory

These are examples of the type of person that would be suitable:

- engineer (with professional qualifications)

Maybe more obvious than you think

Isambard Brunel would have probably got the prize for the Great Western Railway if it had been around in his day. That was an engineering project which was pretty groundbreaking at the time. I guess it will become more obvious once a few prizes are given out, and that is a good thing because it will demonstrate what good engineering can do.

Maybe maybe not

Clinics can only measure the infection rates of people who visit them. They could have more patients visiting due to a greater awareness of the symptoms rather than an outright increase in infections.

Western Digital is the jobs and livelihood of 37,000 families in Thailand + all the people they buy things from, so if those people want to have food on the table, I guess getting WD's factories up and running again is quite important. Obviously pulling people out of the floodwaters is more important, but I think we are mostly past that stage now.

They are called the electorate.