It's obviously a typo

It should be "London ricotta should loose all benefits" and is a useful suggestion by the cheesemakers that soft crumbly cheese will free the natural enzymes within your body if you live in the stuffy big city.

But if they succedded

They could become the Dell of the cell phone world ;-)

@Samsung is starting to get a clue

>This is what the Japanese did untill the 70's, copy western tech and produce a lower priced and usualy crappy imitation

You do know that Samsung design and build most of the iPad?

Apple license the ARM core from the UK, have the Koreans design and manufacture all the chips, copy a free BSD operating system and then Foxcon assemble it cheaply in China.

The packaging and clever marketing is all Apple have - that's why they need to defend it.

Solution to the debt crisis

Abolish the USAF.

Do we really think 1000 bomber raids of B52s heading to Moscow/Beijing are likely?

The only target we need a stealth fighter for is to escort the above.

The only point of stealth is to make it hard for other fighters to detect you, do we think korean war era dogfights over the skies of Iran are likely ?

It turns out that stealth isn't really all that stealthy - even Serbia managed to shoot them down with old Russian radar, so I'm assuming Moscow shouldn't have too many problems. China already has the blueprints so ought be able to find a way

So replace the airforce with a bunch of cruise missiles, a few drones and some Awacs converted from old 737 and you save a few $100Bn

Not sueing over the workings

Apple are sueing over a 'trademark and design' patent - which is allowed in europe.

You can patent the vague shape of a device which a person would associate with you - so a coke bottle shape is obviously coca-cola and apparently a slab shaped tablet with a screen on the front is so obviously Apple that it must be infringing!

Now if only IBM had the sense to file a design patent on having the keyboard in front of the screen - they would have been able to block all subsequent PCs

Brings a whole new meaning to

Do you want to supersize that?

Ban trousers

Closely following coverage of the riots I have noticed that the majority of these young miscreants are wearing trousers, and along with the infamous hoody, it seems that trousers have been a necessary component of every major riot and disturbance since the french revolution - with the exceptions of a few uppity scots and that unfortunate fracas at the transvestite ball.

I call for the immediate banning of trousers in public and commend this idea to the house

General D Mail-Reader (retd)

@And here was me thinking...

The data is completely secure from eavesdropping - it just requires that RIM hand it over to the authorities - something that they would never do for the regimes in India, Dubai etc.

But of course standard procedure in free countries like the UK, USA, Canada

Script

If this is Hershey chocolate then the correct script is:

s/sawdust/chocolate/g

Eco-nasa

Nasa PR droid on the radio this morning emphasising how it used renewable energy in the form of solar panels and so was eco-friendly unlike RTG powered probes before.

Omitted to mention how much dead-dinosaur a 350ton Atlas rocket uses to get it up there

Better hope Excel isn't involved

We have a sheet with the people we are going to execute and the next sheet has the name, address, email of 100,000 people who support it - what could possibly go wrong ?

"failed to reach a target"

Theres the answer - no government project is ever cancelled for being a failure, it would set a dangerous precedent!

Good job computers are infallible

Couldn't read the date so inserted default of todays date.

Couldn't read the name on the DNA profile so default entered the suspect

Couldn't read the coordinates of the target so default entered the current position

......

legality

>They make prison cells for people who can't live within the laws of society

Break into computer systems, bribe police and intimidate terrorist victims and their family - get knighthood

Throw pie at criminal that does this - go to jail.

@Charlie Gilmour

>But you fail to mention that the flag was on a war memorial, which makes his actions all the more reprehensible.

A memorial built to all the people who died in WWI so we could live in a free country and protest all we want. Rather than live in an authoritarian state, ruled by a few well connected Junkers, presided over by a German monarchy and with a militarized police.

@Why o' why

He may be incompetent but he is a 'jolly good chap', right tie, right school, right clubs, right friends - more acceptable than some johnny foreigner trying to sell you security

@Hmm

You forget - to the USA, the cost of invading your country counts as aid to your country.

A solution and a market opportunity

A pair of little plastic replica president's heads

Either Bush or Obama depending on your politics.

A police officer is going to have a hard time claiming that a president's head is obscene

@steven roper

So you can guarantee that there is no web-browser, filemanager, email client or simply crappily written internal app - on any platform - that doesn't look at a URL string and guess what mime-type to use based on the extension?

Android or iPad

If you want something basic to browse in bed, read ebooks and play the occasional Angry birds then a $75 chinese Android tablet does that perfectly.

If you want easy access to itunes and have pretty colours and look cool in starbucks an iPad is $350

If you need to type an Acer netbook is $200

Why exactly would you pay $500 for a Samsung/HP tablet instead?

@Samsung

>surely other arms of the company get even more favorable treatment than a competitor

Allegedly not - Apple pay less to Samsung for the Samsung manufactured ARM cpu in the iPad than Samsung pay for the identical chip in their tablet.

Alternate business plan

1, Raise seed capital for underground lair, giant TV screen, nehru jacket

2, Threaten to crash satelite into nation's capital unless they give him "1 Million Dollars"

3, Profit

The pitch

The problem:

A huge and expensive navy designed to re-fight WWII against the Japanese fleet

The enemy is people who live in caves in a land locked country

The most dangerous threat to the navy is a car bomb planted outside a bar next to a naval base

The only maritime threat to the country is guys running drugs and guns into Florida in boats that can be sunk by a flare pistol

The solution is a $Bn laser ray gun project

Banks don't want customers with no money

Apart from the problems of them closing all the branches people can get to, and the problems of dealing with small amounts of money (you get 19.98 care allowance and the cash machine will let you take out multiples of 20 with a 2.50 charge)

The banks don't want customers who aren't going to buy mortgages, pensions, credit cards, insurance and all the profitable lines.

There used to be a national savings bank at the post office - but these days the idea of a government owned bank is ridiculous

@So how does this work now

Same way as if you hire a wedding photographer, they keep the copyright on the pictures they take of you.

It's the difference between saying to an artist, "design some scary helmet" and saying to an employee "make the mold curve exactly this way at this point and put an eye hole this shape at that point"

It's particularly disengenous of Peter Jackson to chime in. They were very careful to do all the designs for their creatures and costumes at a design house they own - so they (Weta) rather than New Line (the film producers) would own the designs

Added 300,000 jobs to the workforce

So all those admins you need to baby-sit exchange.

Needing two people to do an office job because they spend half their time rebooting windows.

All those people writing add-in utils to get around Windows deficiencies

Those are all part of a benevolent MSFT plan for full employment?

Reset a Password

That has already been covered in the US. There is a distinct difference in being forced to give a password - which is generally NOT allowed, it being regarded as self-incrimination, and demanding access to the data.

The ACLU made the reasonable point, and the court accepted it, that a password of "I WILL KILL AGAIN" might be incriminating!

@The thing I never got.

Time. You can share the set of one time pads once a year by stage coach, or by meeting in person, then send urgent messages encrypted by them at any time over the telegraph

What is Canada going to do now?

In the book for the becoming a Canadian test - it lists the country's scientific endevours (on half a page) as; the canadarm (now retired), Alexendar Graham Bell (briefly lived in Canada before inventing the telephone), the snowmobile and RIM.

Looks like it's going to get cut back a bit now.

idiot

You don't steal from US passengers, you steal from departing foreigners.

Since the US will only investigate crimes reported there, unless the visitor is prepared to fly back to the US to report his stolen camera/watch/laptop - and risk it happening again - you are completely safe.

A new sport

I wonder how good the image recognition is for people.

You could just aim at a line of cones and have it slalom down the length of the M4!

8844m above Sea level

Just wait a few years and it's height above sea level will go down

The definition of ROFLMAO

> Metropolitan Police Service is conducting an investigation into alleged improper payments to police officers

Now I understand the Internet acronym

@Hameless?

Of course if you a graduate and you fall for that - you are probably due a refund on your tuition anyway!

So sell basic phones

I would pay $100 for a Nokia 1100 that worked in N America.

1 week battery life, waterproof, indestructible, no camera, a keypad with numbers on it!

"two in a bar rule"

Allowing two musicians to appear without a license did lead to the horror of Chaz 'n' Dave

Won't somebody think of the children....

ps. does the drummer count?

@Admiralty Charts

Alternatively you could start a revolution, overthrow the monarchy and create a new nation founded on the principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It seems like a lot of effort - but it's still easier than working with the bloody Postal Address File!

Further thoughts

Very few lecturers make any money from textbooks - it's just not worth the time/effort.

There are a few authors who do make a living, they are the ones on the 10edition of the intro physics/chemistry/engineering course books. In reality these haven't changed much - there haven't been many recent breakthroughs in Newtonian mechanics that make my 25year old copy of Keppler+Kelenkov obsolete. And any decent lecturer will produce notes that work with any edition.

The reason a particular textbook is required for many US universities (and probably UK ones now) is that you need to have your course material approved by the dept, the faculty, the state, two popes and the writers on the family guy. This is why so many lecturers are delivered on powerpoint rather than a blackboard - so that you can prove you covered all the required points in the approved manner. And this is for a science dept - imagine what a politics/economics/theology class must be like.

The nice thing about the approved textbook is that somebody else has done this. And you (or your dept) don't have to worry about a disgruntled student suing because you said or wrote something they dissagree with. They can go ahead and sue a Murdoch owned publisher if they want!

Proper URL

>really be that interested in people who are too stupid to type in a proper URL?

I agree with you and I have blogged about it at http://mywebsite.com/256_character_random_string_generated_my_CMS/article.html

US textbook prices

Not suggesting that there is any sort of monopoly or anything but....

US college courses are a big business for textbooks, much more so than the UK there is a textbook for the course and the course follows the textbook, often the publisher produces the entire course, lecture notes, powerpoint, midterm, final exams - everything.

One colleague gives a course where the textbook even comes with an IR remote - he is required to use this for a certain number of pop-quizzes during the course. The idea is to stop students sharing, photocopying, borrowing books or buying used older editions.

There are stories of special conferences by major textbook publishers for academics, being held in very nice resorts - but I don't teach so don't get invited!

@Awkward to sell

>more to it than brand

Except the thing that makes the pictures (the image and digic) comes from someone else.

It's like a buying a Rolls Royce that has a BMW engine and suspension (which of course it has) - you have to ask what you are getting that you don't get from a BMW?

Disabled use

A startup here was using the Segway technology in power assisted wheelchairs.

Instead of the full Stephen Hawking job, this is a small motor on a lightweight hand chair, which just gives you a bit of help on steep bits.

It can also sense tilt and acceleration and use the motor to control you getting up and down kerbs without risking overbalancing. Normally you need huge upper body strength to safely rock up a kerb because you need to be able to stop your entire weight if you start to tilt back.

Sadly it seems to be doomed by the mountain of FDA requirements when you are building anything with a computer in it for 'medical' use.

@Remember, remember

Careful - there is an offence of promoting terrorism

@Good idea, but

Or have any of the royal family explain the Turing-Church theorem and it's application to the Entscheidungsproblem

re: communist/labour loonies

Thank god we had the Daily Mail to protect us from Blair and Brown storming the palace and killing the czar

Silence is golden

Didn't they do the same thing to the brothers Maxwell - on the slightly more serious business of stealing 1000s of pensioner's money.

IIRC they just sat there silently while a bunch of lawyers argued whether there was any requirement to answer questions

@A routine flight?

That's why you should try and live next to loud angry people

Whenever they find a couple of dozen bodies buried under the floorboards, he was always a nice quiet chap who kept himself to himself.