@I'm curious...

If they are a monopoly then the rules are a little tighter.

If say you were the only company providing bus and train services in most of the country and decided that you would sell tickets to gays then it might be regarded more seriously than if the village shop stopped selling readers-husbands.

The big question ...

What colour will it be?

At $25?

Since quartering the price doubles the sales they should be reducing the price of the next stock to $25 - I think they may have found a new business model here (*).

* - although possibly one entitled:- who can go bust fastest

Space food?

So whats the difference to just buying regular M&Ms and putting them in a $20 costco vac bag sealer?

Other than these probably cost $1000/bag by the time Nasa is done with them.

@Piracy

According to the 'creative geniuses' in the industry

It's illegal to copy a CD you own to your MP3 player, it's illegal to import a DVD from another country, it's illegal to play a DVD from another region. It's illegal to read a ebook out-loud to your child.

I just ignore the whole business - haven't bought any new music in 10years, it does mean I have missed out on Justin Beiber and Lady Gaga though

Strangely effective

There must be something pretty attractive about this homosexuality business.

Schools attempt to promote 'community' leads to riots, years of say no to drugs in every lesson produces a cabinet that has more (ex-)drug users than a Grateful Dead concert, promoting healthy eating and exercise has lead to chicken nuggets and kids that can barely carry an LCD TV out of Dixons.

And yet all schools would have to do is mention that Alan Turing was guy and the entire youth of Britain would be turned in Julian Clary overnight.

Flagging sites in search

So instead of having to search for torrent/rar/mp3 etc you just have to select "show me only sites that I can download pirate content for free" as an official feature ?

This form of government crackdown could catch on.

Night clubs where you can buy drugs will be forced to announce it (and prices) on their advertising.

Pubs caught allowing underage drinking will be forced to include it on their pub signs

@not really

You only have to worry when they are full of German immigrants writing books on economics - that can lead to trouble

@Atheist Utopia

Stalin opposed religion, Stalin was bad

Therefore opposing religion is bad

Therefore religion is good

Therefore we should all worship the flying spaghetti monster. Isn't logic wonderful ?

And securely made

in china.

As is the keyboard that you are typing the super-secret unlike code on

@Two Factor Authentication

" in that uses one-time passwords transmitted over mobile or land-line phones."

So to log in to Gmail from Iran (or China or the UK) you get a secure encrypted https session and this is secured by an in-the-clear text message sent over the Iranian state cell phone network by the Iranian state owned cell phone company to your handset ?

@Offcom - slamming the stable door since 1990

I don't think they studied maths.

We are running out of numbers - so we will prefix all numbers with an extra '1'

Oh dear that didn't help, lets try prefxing all the new numbers with a 2

...... and so on .....

@Huh?

It's the old "if you owe the bank $1000, you are in trouble - if you owe the bank $Bn, the bank is in trouble"

If you owe enough tax it's worth negotiating !

@I don't see what the problem is

>I hope the whole scheme is reasonably regulated.

I think the point is that the government just removed "the red tape" - ie any requirement to show that you are providing training.

So they have just announced to industry that you can hire 16-19 year olds for 2.50/hour and if you can't afford 2.50/hour they will pay it for you - just sign upto the scheme.

Now obviously it will mostly be companies like Rolls Royce, ARM and merchant banks who will be queuing up to offer real training to these kids - there is no way it will be used by lots of cleaning, french fry frying, and shelf stacking companies to replace their current workers with cheaper labour.

After all we are a modern skill based economy ruled by a far sighted and business friendly government.

Developers Developers Developers

MSFT is too late to get all the cool kids on windows tablets - even Balmer's kids aren't clamoring for a Win8 phone to play minesweeper.

So most of these devices, like all win-ce are going to be used commercially and industrially. That's one place they can beat Apple and Android.

Try getting an expensive or restricted commercial app on appstore. Even if you are happy about giving Apple a 40% cut, or finding that only customers in the US could download it, having no way to attach an XYZ brand bar code reader or portable printer, then having your FDA approved medical note taking app rejected because there is no way to follow a patient on twitter or some other Apple style mandate.

Android is even better, if you don't mind coding for 57 different varieties and having an appstore that guarantees your app is pirated onto the chinese app store as soon as it's uploaded.

3D telly - marketing meets stupidity

Most of the 3D TVs are active shutter glasses. If you are already making 120hz set then it's already capable of 3D, just needs a firmware mod on the assembly line. Then you just have to get the punters to shell out for some glasses - which you can charge more for than the TV and finally make some margin.

Trouble is that longer term, conning people into paying 200quid for a 30quid pair of shutter glasses that need to be pointed straight at the set, need recharging every time you come to use them and are impossible to wear if you already have specs is going to put people off.

Possibilities

If they made these things battery powered and had the option of an on-screen keyboard there might be quite a market for these with people that wanted an expensive way of pretending to do work on the move.

Web 2.0 effect

It used to be that the job of the regulator was to say how wonderfully spotlessly ethically pure the oil and defence companies were - it's nice to see that they are keeping up with new trends

@Sweet weeping jesus

Yes most of them will just be used as cleaners until they get old enough for minimum wage - when they will be fired and replaced.

But outside the big city a lot of them will end up in construction of farming and with no HSE inspections required there will be accidents.

Doesn't matter what you are paying them, put a bunch of 16year olds together and give them a some tools to play with and they are going to have accidents.

Typical enterprise job ads

Wanted - new graduate with experience in $A$ package that only runs on Mega$$$ server that you could never have used unless you already worked for us.

Not interested in people with years of experience (too expensive) or people who only have experience of Windows or Linux (not enterprisey enough)

Try new improved....

For when you need to prove that you didn't know something that everyone knows you knew - nothing white-washes whiter than new improved Hutton.

wipeout

Specifically the bit at the begining with the manic laughter

@wtf

>They agreed the price when they bought it,

They agreed a price for a product that would have a warranty, apps, content and ongoing support.

Suppose you bought a sky dish and next day sky announced they weren't doing satelite TV anymore do you think you might have a reasonable case for getting a refund?

@VMS

VMS is still around, it even runs on itaniums now!

There is a lot of mission critical stuff still running on VMS, especially in space. You don't decide to port the ground support for a space probe to Windows when a billion $ worth of hardware is half way to Jupiter.

@Similar fate for pocket calculators

Pocket calculators are still popular, it's nice having real buttons to press rather than waiting for the virtual keyboard to pop up then watching it to make sure that it registered your button press.

My HP is still close on my desk even though I have Droid48 on my tablet - and a copy of octave on my PC

US General Services Administration

Is a real pain doing business in the US

If you sell to a government body you have to prove you haven't sold to anyone else for less - so no discounts to schools, universities etc.

But every government sale costs you 2-10x as much as a regular sale, there is a mountain of paperwork to do, a big list of approvals to get and it takes forever to get paid.

Then you have 10x as many support calls because their systems are so badly configured or locked down that they can never install anything, then they turnover staff and admins so often you start again in 6months with the new batch trying to use it.

The you have a set of users who are 'government employee grade' IQ

That's why the government ends up employing so many consultancies - because nobody will deal directly with them anymore

@ Wacky old world

You are confusing reality with HP.com

You are the worlds most respected maker of test and measurement products. So you rename that bit to something that sounds like a skin cream and flog it off.

You are the famous name in pocket calculators so you stop making them.

You buy up every other minicomputer maker but still have them compete internally. So you have competing offices selling HPs with NT, HPUX, VMS, NonStop, Tru64 but not Linux which is all anyone wants.

You are the worlds largest maker of PCs so you decide to get out of the PC+server business. But then make a bunch of contradictory announcements that you might or might not.

You signal your launch into being a services consultancy by suing the maker of the most popular DB for not supporting the PCs you are abandoning to become a services consultancy.

I think somebody has been drinking the inkjet ink

Or just add Honest Achmed

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647959

screen size

Early android (<1.6?) coded for a single screen res, now there are sizers which will stretch the screen out for higher res but it doesn't always look pretty.

Then apps that are designed for a1024*800 10in tablet aren't going to be great on a 340 pixel 3in phone so you are recommended to write different versions for each product

Or just go to slatedroid

A WM8650 based tablet, Android 2.2 , genuine market + flash, webcam and 800x480 resistive is $75 delivered from HK

Yes it's going to suffer running advanced fluid dynamics simulations but it plays angry birds, does youtube and reads ebooks and PDFs for the price of a night out

Just step outside

US forces announced they have not invaded Pakistan, it's simply that an entire armoured division had to step outside of Afghanistan to blow-off

Doh!

A system where rioters choose to send their location and confession directly to the police automatically and the government were thinking of banning it?

It could lead to a whole new cockney rhyming slang though.,

Originally that was supposed to defeat police spies from hearing what you were planning - now if you text "I'm going to rob currys" you get 6months, so now you will have to text if you text "I'm planning a shrubery at a branch of Ruby"

By the same arguement

Anybody who says that the government must fight terrorism - but didn't then personally fly to Afghanistan and shoot up a wedding party is wrong

@Waste of public money

Like these air accident investigations, why bother dragging up aircraft from the bottom of the ocean - the people are dead.

I mean it's not like you can learn any lessons for how to do things in the future from what happened in the past.

Not a problem really

You have to use IE for most microsoft sites, so you keep IE around just for msdn, updates etc - so all they will track is their own site logs

Use opera for everythign else

@25 mins

They have to carry the weight of two US cops and have AC

Prices

Over here the HP is reduced to $399 on Best Buy's website for the base 16Gb wifi

They are charging $519 for the 16Gb wifi iPad2

But you can buy a refurb 16Gb wifi Ipad1 from the apple store for $350

Resigned so no further investigation

M'lud I would like to make the point that my client Mr Nosher Harris retired immediately after pulling the Brixton bank job and so no further investigation is warranted.

@LT does not equal "lite"

For those of us old enough to remember FORTRAN LT means less than

Interesting

Autocad - 20 years ago it was the only choice - the alternatives were paper or a mainframe.

Now use the free clones or proper parametric cad - pity that the free ProDesktop dissapeared.

We looked at moving one of our survey apps to the iPhone when it came out. It used to run on a 1500quid ruggedised WinCE machine but all the customers had iPhones.

Apple didn't seem interested in anything but iFart apps. You couldn't sell to corporates without going through their store and they took 40%. Great for a 99p iFart - but annoying on a 2grand survey package. And there was then no date for when the store would be available outside the US.

And the approval process was all about how it looked. They didn't care about what our users expected of a field survey package - if it didn't use the Apple one-true-style correctly it would be rejected.

@One other thing

Would you rather hire lawyers, file registrations and defend your own software's rights in 27 separate countries? Or would you like a common set of trademark standards?

@Timeline

Day 1: Sony DRM'ed version

Day -3650: All the books have been available as scans from about 8hours after they hit the bookshop

Alan Moore still at large?

Good job he incited violent civil disorder in a book not online.

On the other hand he didn't do it in a proper book, just a comic, so we should probably round him up - just in case.

Motorola 'invented' cell phones

>But have a look where Motorola patents' strengths are: radio engineering and design.

Who is to say there isn't a patent saying something like "making a telephone without wires"?

that with a few continuation filings could still be valid.

But more importantly it's a good-ol American company from Illinois, that will look good to a judge in Easty Texas - which is all that matters in business today.

@So

>Are universities now accepting students on a 'first come first served' basis rather than based on results and interviews??

In clearing - yes.

Having your results a week earlier than everyone else - if you are shopping for a backup course - is about as useful as having the lottery results a week earlier.

@What IP did Google get

It doesn't matter. Since you only find out the worth of a particular patent in court - at the end of a $10M battle the actual patents and wording are pretty irrelevant.

Just having 27gazzilion patents from one of the inventors of cell phones to threaten people with is enough.

@Obviously upset the chimps

>sit a 19706 exam and see how little they know.

A little unfair since the science papers will cover details of warp drive and the history papers will be all about the zarqon invasion of 16792

Heads or ....

Might be a bit of problem at the Niue FA cup