Re: Good one...

Err, let me correct that last post having read the The Consumer Protection Regulations. The regulations preserve the spirit, more or less, of the original Act. Basically if the sender makes no effort to retrieve their property within 6 months, or 30 days after requested by the recipient, then the 'goods' become property of the recipient.

Re: Good one...

That section of the Act was rescinded by the The Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000

You can no longer treat them as a gift, they must be returned to the sender.

Re: anyone know

Curiousity has multiple cameras, the one used to take these shots is mounted on the end of an arm, you can see parts of it in the image at the bottom right, and is not any of the camera mounted on the raised structure seen in the image.

Re: Information

Sorry third paragraph - "The miscreant is offering '$100 for sellers willing to part with an active, verified Play account that is tied to a dedicated server'."

A 'verified' account 'tied to a dedicated server'.

Re: It's been a long time...

"I thought 'a la mode' meant 'with a blob of ice cream'....."

Because it was a trend to serve your apple pie with ice cream, the term was misunderstood in the US.

As stated before, 'a la mode' is French for 'in the fashion'.

Re: Information

It wasn't omitted, it's right there in the second paragraph.

Re: But%20at%20what%20price%3F

I remember when a 2TB drive cost £50 ... the prices haven't returned to normal since the floods even though the factories are back to full production. The competition commission absolutely should be looking into the prices and questioning why the Seagate/Samsung and WD/Hitachi mergers were allowed when that left just 3 huge companies to dominate the market which isn't in the interests of consumers or competition.

Re: A state of equilibrium will be reached...

Atonnis - How long did the actual ordering stage take though? That was the downfall of online grocery shopping for me, it took too long to page through and select everything I wanted, even using the search only gets you so far. Unless you're ordering the exact same things week in and week out, or you don't care about comparing the prices between brands it's a painfully slow process. In the real world I can go down a supermarket aisle, grabbing what I want, assessing offers in seconds and be at the till with a full trolley in no time at all. In fact as it turned out I could drive to the supermarket, make my purchases and return home in a little over half the time it was taking just to _place_ the order online, never mind the wait for delivery.

Quite often I would find I had lost my delivery slot because it had taken so long! Instead of getting delivery on the day I wanted, I would have to wait another 24 hours. I would end up going to the supermarket anyway to buy bread and milk, it was pretty ridiculous.

Re: So, Windows is...

I seem to recall (not very well) watching an interview with an IT tech working on board a UK Sub (pretty sure it was a sub not a warship). Anyway, the stand-out point for me was when he mentioned having to reboot it periodically ...

Now I freely admit that I don't really remember it terribly well, so if someone can find the vid on youtube or whatever to get the exact quote, please do.

Re: Energy price rises

Ah, but those 'fast growing' plantation forests are terrible for the environment. They are practically lifeless ecosystems where natural flora and fauna cannot survive and to supply enough wood to heat all the homes in the UK would mean the creation of such forests on a vast scale. Anyone who still use a wood burning stove or fireplace can tell you that they go through fuel at a staggering rate. Pine and other fast growing softwoods don't even make great fuel for fires, they burn quickly and kick out little heat in the process. There is a very good reason that coal and not wood became the major fuel for fires in the 19th century.

Never mind the fact that even if you tore up half the countryside tomorrow at the loss of arable land, grazing land and nature reserves to plant those trees it would be 30 years before we could start harvesting.

Re: Loosing money?

If you 'Cease to fucking keep' it then it's 'Not fucking fixed in place' ...

/me starts nailing all his cash to the furniture

Re: A 6-digit PIN gives 'emergency' cash to anyone who types it in

So you and four other people had a sense of humour failure then? I think you'll find that it was a joke

Re: Bloated app size

Exactly, the fact that it can't be moved to the SD card means I'm uninstalling it immediately.

Re: Really?

Orange clouds reflected in the roof? You mean the orange/red _dust_ on the blue roof?

As for the shadows, the light source is behind the embankment, the car is in indirect light, the objects in the foreground are in direct light.

What's with the wild conspiracy theories? Are Google fans even crazier than Apple fans?

Re: Excellent kit

<pre>"High end performance and feel, low end price. Couldn't ask for more, and it truly is "buttery smoth", much smother than iOS."</pre>

But no storage ... my phone (<£100 sim free) has more and that's not primarily a media consummation device. Hard to see what purpose it serves if there's not enough storage to watch videos on the plane/holiday and no way to easily switch/expand via an SD card.

Re: Why use "The Cloud"

Strangely enough the vast majority of this country is outside the range of a wireless network. Sure if you spend your entire life inside your home, office or café then the lack of an sd card slot isn't a problem.

For everyone else it cripples the device - e.g. there's no point taking it on holiday to that cottage in the Lake District because there's not enough storage for even two broadcast quality HD films (on the 8GB).

For a few pence extra they could have added micro SD and I'd have almost certainly purchased it, but without one there's just no chance.

Re: You know that all looks okay to me

<quote>"In my perfect world, everything would be using Bluetooth remotes like the PS3, as line of sight remote controls suck ass."</quote>

And bluetooth sucks serious battery.

Seriously, a proprietary wireless protocol such as those used for many wireless keywords would be a vast improvement over bluetooth for a simple remote. Those wireless keyboards can get months of additional usage from the same batteries as a BT keyboard. However simple IR is still the simplest and least battery draining solution for remote control.

Where is it stated that the articles were to be scrapped? That's right, nowhere. He stated it was his belief that they were to be 'dumped' but that doesn't make it true. In fact WEEE means these routers would not have ended up in a skip, they would have been sold to a recycling firm if they were to be disposed of. No electronic waste ends up in landfill any more.

If he had actually pulled them out of a skip you might have had a point, but they were in a storage room instead. The company could have decided to refurb them and sell them on instead.

If you're going to accuse the articles author of inventing quotes then you need to provide evidence. Until then we'll just assume you're the one making things up, ok? You are after all posting as 'anonymous' which doesn't give your version of events any credibility at all.

Re: Bullfights?

"If memory serves, there's a legitimate reason for this one - in some countries (can't remember where - maybe in asia? or south america?) "

Lagos, Nigeria (Africa) was one, maybe still is. Although it had the opposite effect. People went out and bought a second car, usually the cheapest old bangers they could find with the right number plates, car use didn't decrease and air pollution levels shot up.

Re: aaccording to FSF

@eulampios

That quote is from the following page: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/frand-is-a-fraud

It makes no mention of RAND at all. Whereas several other FSF pages define RAND (Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) as a contraction of FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Descriminatory). RAND === FRAND, RAND !== Royalty Free

What you're looking for is something more like FAIB (Free As In Beer)

Re: When?

UV stabilised Cat 6 is no more expensive than ordinary Cat 6. You can buy arbitrary length off ebay for a reasonable price and at the end of the day there's nothing wrong with wiring the whole house with UV stabilised cable to avoid joins.

It's what I did with my 1920s property with solid internal walls; from the front room(s) outside, up the wall and into the loft, across the loft and back outside down the rear wall to the rooms at the back of the house. All neatly tacked and no worse in appearance than the old coaxial aerial cabling that used to make the same runs. (Going over the house used less cable than going around the exterior)

Re: Learns How Much Enegery You Are Using

Smart meters don't break down the usage by device, they can't, like 'dumb' meters they only know how much power is flowing into the property before the consumer box and before it's split into various circuits for lighting, sockets and high power devices like ovens. You're confusing a smart meter with electricity metering devices like the kill-a-watt which sits between a device and the socket.

A smart meter is just a standard electricity meter that allows for real time readings to be taken automatically by the power company and when they want, to remotely turn off your power because the grid is overloaded or you haven't paid your bill. Those are in fact the only two reasons why power companies are pushing out smart meters, the nonsense about allowing people to better manage their usage is just the justification they are giving for the inconvenience and cost to the customer that these 'upgrades' are causing. They have government backing, especially here in the UK because of the projected shortfall in electricity production in the next few years which will necessitate rolling blackouts. They can't turn off every house in a neighbourhood without risking killing some poor bastard on a ventilator, smart meters allow them to exclude such homes and those of your local MP ...

As for the latter, yes, my dumb meter (30 years old) has always told me the daily usage, even the hourly usage by virtue of the figures displayed on the front. Note the figure at the start of the period you want to measure and subtract it from the figure at the end of the period - easy peasy.

Re: Starve the beast

Firstly there has to be a first hand market for a second hand market to exist. So the impact would be limited.

Secondly if many more people start buying second hand the prices will rise until they are almost indistinguishable from the prices of the 'new' product. Just look at ebay where second hand goods are bid to within pennies of the RRP and pretty often above what many retailers are asking for new.

I probably wouldn't have bought half the books (DVDs or Blu-ray) that I currently own were it not for the loophole. I can't really be the only person who remembers what the prices were like before Play appeared on the scene. Some people seem to think that prices won't rebound back to those levels now but as much as I'd like to believe that it's just not how the world works.

As for the poster who suggested that no-one buys the physical product any more and that streaming is a viable alternative ... WTF? I didn't go out and buy an expensive 1080p TV to watch crappy quality internet video with bitrates and picture quality that at times are barely better than VHS, let alone DVD or Blu-ray. Seriously ...

Mid-Day?

That's odd, when I go through _mid-morning_ they were all gone and they were just taking 'pre-orders', or what were actually just registrations of interest. I didn't receive any confirmation of the registration either

Re: If only it (LibreOffice) didn't have such a terrible name

Releases of Ubuntu, which is one of several distributions* based on the Linux kernel, it's not Linux which releases under those names.

* Others include Suse, Fedora/Red Hat, Debian, CentOS, Mandriva, Mint, et al

Actually, it uses the BBC rss feeds. The BBC data is derived from met office data though, so it's really no different. There's no API for location searches so that part still breaks each time the BBC web monkeys decide to redesign it once a year.

Presumably the hashes were unsalted or the salt was also taken. Either way the attackers can create a rainbow table to determine the clear text password. A few years ago it would have been deemed impractical because of the processing power required, but not these days. You can build such a table in just a few minutes via Amazon's Web Services cluster and it will only cost a few dollars.

"dump all the amazon spyPad software"

"You'll have all your google apps"

You dislike the thought of Amazon potentially spying on you but you'd welcome the master spies at Google to read your email, documents, know all your web browsing habits, your social circle and much more? What exactly makes Amazon scary but Google completely harmless?!

Smarrt meters aren't the same as Economy 7 meters

Here in the UK we've have what are called 'Economy 7' meters for decades (7 hours per night at reduced cost) =. They employ a simple RF switch to toggle between economy prices and normal rates. The smart metres they are rolling out now don't really offering anything beyond the functionality we already have.

Economy 7 is a joke anyway, most providers actually charge more for daytime usage if you accept an Eco7 plan, you are more likely to pay more overall. After all you can't move most of your usage - you won't be cooking or watching TV at 3 a.m. The washing machine/dishwasher is about all that can be scheduled to a late night slot - assuming that they don't make so much noise that it would prevent you sleeping. Even then you're limited to washing one load of clothes in the 'eco' period unless you want to get up early to start another, a family home would generally produce multiple machine loads a day.

Hang on a minute ...

Have you actually looked at Dixon's online store lately? It was a huge shock to me after years of ridiculing them and their over-inflated prices but as it stands today, Dixon's is the cheapest online store in the UK for a lot of hardware. Cheaper on some items than Ebuyer, Amazon, Scan, Dabs, CCL et al

For the first time in my life I've bought from Dixons, two items in as many weeks. The first, a Linksys router, was not only £5 cheaper than elsewhere I was able to use a voucher code giving an additional 10% discount. I chose the standard free delivery option and received it in two days. The order for the second, a Samsung 2TB Ecogreen was only placed last night.

I feel dirty praising Dixons, but right now I can't help but acknowledge that they are doing something right for once.

Computer games and board games etc

There were Spy vs Spy computer games in the 80s, 90s and recently one in 2005. I'm almost certain I remember a friend owning a board game too when I was a kid. Even if you've never heard of Mad Magazine or as in my case, never read a single issue, I would guess several generations have encountered the distinctive characters.

There have also been multiple references in modern TV series, in fact one popped up in an American Dad repeat just this week. At the CIA building, the men's toilets had the black spy on the door, the woman's toilets the white spy.

Hardware decoding

The difference between this release and those earlier 10.x betas is that this one includes hardware video decoding, at least for nvidia GPUs with the proprietary driver. That makes fullscreen and/or HD* flash video finally possible for 64bit browsers. For those who care about stuff like iPlayer (not me, I just record everything) this is a significant release.

Adobe added hardware decoding (VDPAU) to the 10.x line for 32bit months ago.

* HD that is if you think that it's all about pure resolution, not picture quality

@Fuzzy

Yeah, the bit about moving to Mountain View was a clear threat, extortion even. Definitely not sinister ...

Are we there yet?

Yes, to be fair there are two or three options which come very close. They mostly seem to fall at the price issue though. Take the Satmap Action 10, the hardware is almost perfect with a nice large clear screen and yet not too large to be carried in a pocket. It's fully waterproof and can achieve reasonable battery life especially with the optional Li-ion pack. I'd still love to see a device achieving 2-3x the runtime (12-18 hours at least), solar charging isn't a pancea. They provide 1:50000 and 1:25000 OS maps plus full UK/Europe road and street mapping. Their customer service is also excellent I've been told. The device cost is within reason although more competition would help drive down the costs like it has done for the car-based sat-nav devices.

Three things have so far stopped me rushing out to buy one.

1) The first is the price of the 1:25000 OS maps, the 1:50000 are reasonable but the 1:25000 are insane. Take the Peak District set, I have that area covered on paper maps, it's just three 1:25000 maps at an RRP of £8 (or £5.50 if you buy online) each. That's at most £24 which includes the costs of printing, paper and distribution which don't apply to digital maps. The Satmap 'Peak District' card costs £104.99. Yes it includes the 1:50000 maps as well, so let's be fair and include an extra two paper maps for a total of £40 ... there is still a vast difference £65 difference. It's certainly not cheaper and yet it should be given there is no printing involved.

2) The Action 10 is now 3 years old, in hardware terms it's at best described as middle-aged. I've been a first adopter before and paid the price, I'd rather wait for the second generation of hardware.

3) The Action 10 PC software is terrible and Windows only. You don't _need_ PC connectivity but it's still desirable. I'm a linux user so out in the cold. What's more, Satmap based the Action 10 on Windows CE and run a locked down platform, you can't use third party maps at all. As a regular contributor to OpenStreetMap that's irritating.

Agree

I'll keep using paper maps and a compass until I see a combined in-car and outdoor hiking device that uses 1:25000 OS mapping on a colour screen with an outstanding battery life.

Oh, and it shouldn't cost a fortune for the device and additional 1:25000 mapping files should cost a fraction of their paper versions. I've waited years already, so I can wait a few more but I'm not sure why it hasn't already been done.

And yet, does destroying a robot grant authorities a license to murder?

Even in the case of a submarine used for smuggling, does the destruction of a robotic craft involving no loss or threat to life justify killing all those on board the sub? I can't see that it does. So all ways around, there wouldn't seem to be any sense to the scenario described by Lewis where the sub-hunting robot remains permanently in place above the submarine and destruction of the robot would carry a death penalty.

More to the point, authorities normally wish to intercept smuggling operations to board and make arrests ASAP. When they do intercept them they usually aren't concerned about their frigates being torpedoed. I might imagine these craft being used to find smugglers subs, saving on manpower, but not following them around for months ... or even days.