Re: Actually one thing I could add

I was under the impression that Chernobyl was operated by a government rather than a profit seeking corporation.

Re: Excellent

From my brief testing of the Windows 8 RC in a Parallels virtual machine, I wasn't able to do very much, but I could do it quite a bit quicker than in Windows 7 in a Parallels VM on the same MacBook. If I could get the Windows 8 performance improvements with a Windows 7 interface, then I would move to it.

Re: we know that nuclear power is safe

If you only care about body-count, then nuclear scores pretty well. However Chernobyl and Fukushima have left large areas of land uninhabitable for the next 1000 years or so. How many people are starving to death every year who wouldn't be starving to death if that part of Ukraine and Belarus could be used as productive farmland to produce more food?

Re: The Usual Silliness

The tree-huggers would like us to go back to travelling on horse-back and on rowing boats. If two horses bump into each other, not much happens; so a lot safer than cars.

Or to be able to buy the cheapest stuff for their farm, and sell the stuff for the best price; or browse recruitment sites to find jobs, and contact potential employers to arrange interviews.

My only concern is that £133.33 per handset seems pretty expensive.

Re: Idea

I'm glad it works for you, but I certainly wouldn't want my parcels left with the neighbours. A local Paypoint shop would be much more convenient.

Re: Why on earth would you want to pay over the top rpice for an Apple television ?

The benefit of having an Apple TV would be that you don't have loads of boxes attached to your screen, you don't have loads of different remotes to control them, and you don't have to navigate lots of completely different, confusing interfaces to use them.

There are lots of people who would switch from Virgin to Sky or vice versa if only one of them offered the Apple TV. You shouldn't underestimate the potential for extra customers.

Re: Caveat emptor

The argument in favour of bitcoins appears to run as follows:

"Fiat currency is a massive ponzi scheme backed by inadequate collateral and weak ineffective regulation. The answer to this problem is to put your money in a massive ponzi scheme backed by absolutely zero collateral and no regulation whatsoever."

I know the bitcoin astroturfers will be furiously hitting the red arrow a few pixels away from this comment, but who in their right mind would trust even a single Zimbabwean Dollar to an outfit that has a domain registered with a proxy owner, no address on their website and is not registered with a Financial Services Authority or similar anywhere in the world?

Re: Fast charging

However, electric cars were around before diesel and later petrol cars were invented. People did charge their cars at home, and an 8 hour charge would get them a 20-30 mile range. A couple of litres of peanut oil, which isn't that flammable, would give them a similar range, and the car could potentially carry a lot more than that. That is why the internal combustion engine became a popular choice to power cars.

Re: @Tom 38

No, but everyone switches their kettle on when the closing credits for Eastenders appears, or at the ad break in the middle of Coronation Street.

Re: Twat alert

Well the stuff carved on rocks is pretty easy to read. However I have no idea how you plan to read a WordPerfect file stored on a 5.25" floppy, or even worse, one of the other competing formats that was around at the same time. At least with WordPerfect, if you can sort out the hardware problems, the current version of WordPerfect will read it. If it is one of the competing non-PC computers, then it would be even more difficult.

Re: Evil pirates of the high seas!

Leonardo Da Vinci died in 1519, so the copyright on the Mona Lisa has long since expired. You can buy copies of it in many places, try the National Gallery shop for example. In any case, some of the earliest copies of the Mona Lisa were done by Leonardo's apprentices with Leonardo himself showing them how to do it, and some of them are in better condition than the original in the Louvre.

Re: BBM for Android/iPhone/Windows/Linux?

There are enough people already on Blackberry Messenger for teenagers to specifically chose a Blackberry as their phone so they can keep in touch with their friends.

"Our homeopathic water will cure cancer allegedly"

Will get you into just as much trouble (a stern telling off from the Advertising Standards Authority) as if you missed off the word "allegedly". It is in breach of the Cancer Act and the Control of Misleading Advertisements Regulations.

Re: Ease congestion on the M25?

If you slow people down gradually when there is congestion ahead, they don't slam on the breaks when they see a wall of traffic ahead. That means you get a steady 40-50mph through the congested area rather than stop-start waves that continue for hours after the blockage is cleared. That is why the temporary speed limits work very well.

Re: Very strange behaviour indeed

$6,000,000 will get you an income of somewhere between $60,000 and $90,000 per year if you put it in secure investments. I don't know how many people that has to be split between, but if it is more than about 2, then it probably isn't enough to live a middle class lifestyle never mind not having to worry about money again.

Re: Very strange behaviour indeed

There is a big difference between selling a song to a company for them to play to their customers in the normal course of business, eg a radio station, a nightclub etc, and selling it to a company for use in advertising materials.

My sim-only contract is 300 minutes, unlimited* texts and unlimited* internet for £15.32 per month. When I looked at the extra cost to get a handset, it worked out over the term of the contract to be pretty much exactly the same amount extra as buying the handset. That means that provided I remembered to either get a new phone or switch to sim only on the exact month the contract expires, I get an interest free loan. Any delays in doing so are their profit.

Re: So "Metro" is taken...

Subway is a sandwich retailer

Re: There is NO BACKUP in the CLOUD, ONLY VAPOR

If that shelf is in the same building as the server it is backing up, then it doesn't protect against some of the hazards that could affect your data, such as fire, flood, physical theft and so on. A cloud backup, being off-site may provide better protection. It is a good idea to have both.

Re: Hardly a surprise

Problem is most Blackberries these days are used by 15 year old youngsters.

There are quite a few banks that text you a code to type in to the website when you make a payment.

Re: but what if...

Very unlikely given the nature of the problem.

If you look at the price of shares on the market, you get two prices, a lower price at which you can sell them, and a higher price at which you can buy them.

In this situation, if you start firing off hundreds of buy and sell orders every second, you are guaranteed to lose money, and that is what happened to them.

Re: Dear Microsoft

And Skype is the de-facto standard

Re: Tell you what....

Apple make pretty decent profits, but not 76% of turnover.

For starters, 20% of the £750 selling price goes to George Osborne in the form of VAT. Then there is the import duty, the costs of running your local Apple store, transportation, the costs of installing and setting up the equipment in the factories, the cost of wages the cost of designing and developing the iDevice, the cost of the software and so on. £180 may well get you a bundle of components at various factory gates around the world, but turning that into a fully functional iDevice waiting for you at your local Apple Store costs quite a bit of money.

Re: people babbling in tongues

I'm thinking along the lines of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqNLMuijRyU - from about 4'45". They claim to be evangelicals. Perhaps Pentecostals do it as well.

You mean "le monde ordinateur personnel"? Franglais is not very popular over there.

Re: people babbling in tongues

No. Evangelicals over there spend a lot of their time speaking actual genuine gibberish. They believe it is the holy spirit taking over their body. I sometimes wonder if it is a different kind of spirit.

Re: So: Windows Marina then.

I think Windows P45 would be better. For people in the US who don't get the reference, it could be renamed to Windows Pink Slip.

Re: A-GPS Not Using Wi-Fi? Huh?

You are most likely getting location information over wifi rather than a-gps. My iPod touch can only use wifi for location, as it has no GPS or cell connection. When it is connected to the internet via my tethered android, the location the iPod shows on for example Google Maps is pretty accurate and regularly updates itself if for example I am on a train.

Re: Interesting

I guess you will be able to build your own computer, but you will have to install a retail copy of Windows 8 on it.

Re: Good news

Durgledoggy is a convicted paedophile by the way.

[Actually, I have no idea whether he is nor not, that is just an example of something you shouldn't be allowed to say unless it is true]

Re: …RBS missold them insurance (interest rate swaps)

Manipulating LIBOR is part of the story, but not the whole story.

They manipulated the rate downwards so that they could make more money from the swaps they issued, but that is not what the mis-selling scandal is about. They sold swaps that were not appropriate for the customers, for example they sold a 15 year swap to insure against a 5 year loan, so the customer had a lot of expenditure after they thought the loan was paid off.

Hiring a British person at c£50k a year who actually knows how to operate this software isn't a "meaningful" cost in the overall scheme of things. That is probably all they need to do to sort this out.

None of the £125m would be related to their own fines. That is just them not making additional profit from fines.

Re: They should do it the Apple way...

Sorry, for the benefit of those outside the UK/Ireland, a cash and carry is a type of shop that sells things in bulk, primarily to shopkeepers.

Re: They should do it the Apple way...

From reports elsewhere, it appears it is a German cash & carry outfit that are complaining about it.

The French borrowed the name for their underground railway from the District and Metropolitan Railway in London, which was often shortened to the Met or Metro. It became more frequently known as "The Tube" some time after they added actual tube tunnels to the network. The Geordies call their underground network "The Tyne and Wear Metro"

As pointed out elsewhere there is also a 1980s car made by the British Leyland Group with that name.

Re: Premium rate numbers

0845 numbers have not been "local" numbers for some time now. There is a small kickback for them which is how the dial-up ISPs funded their service back in the day.

Re: Why does a fish need a pedicure?

A fish pedicure is where you put your feet in a fish tank for half an hour and let the fish nibble away at your feet.

I have no idea why anyone would want to do that, and saying as the fish pedicure place in my local shopping centre closed down after about a month, it would appear nobody else sees the attraction either.

Re: @Ken

Nothing changed from the release candidate some of us downloaded a while back ...

Re: And When I'm in Charge

Customers want to stay with Windows XP because it works, and continuing to use it costs nothing. Even if Microsoft gave away Windows 7 for free along with new computers to run it on, a lot of companies would stick with XP due to the costs of migration.

Re: In soviet Russia

Chatroulette is Russian, and that is an example of a place where the porn watches you.

Re: App store

If you write a game and sell it to Gamestation for them to put on their shelves, it is their responsibility to ensure that only people of the correct age buy it. I guess it is the same if you get Google or Apple to sell it for you.

Re: Luckily no Olympic rings visible

They have the Olympic rings visible on the side of the swimming pool (sorry "Aquatics Centre").

Re: Fail

Well MFI was a British company, and their tables couldn't withstand people looking at them never mind sneezing near them.

but they made sure he wasn't carrying any dangerous substances such as Evian mineral water, so the public were not at risk.