"In terms of $100m, I'd say that refers more to the valuation of the company," Musk said. "It wasn't as though there were a thousand cancellations just due to the New York Times article. There were probably a few hundred."

This is a 100% bluff. If they had cancelled orders, he would know EXACTLY, to the last one, how many they lost (and he would NOT be shy to scream about it). It's not that they sell millions of their cars, when "a few hundred" would a reasonable margin of error.

the perfect complement to the Surface Windows RT :)

I think I'll say "pass" and buy one ultrabook instead, to cover both bases

...

nah, I'll buy just a cheapo laptop, and a cheapo tablet, that'll save me a couple of hundred quid...

...

actually, I already have a cheapo tablet... ok, so just a cheapo laptop!

....

and I have a laptop. Granted, it's ancient, like.... 4 years old or something, but it still comes with 4 Gb of RAM, and I changed the hdd to sdd last week, goes like a charm. And since I bought a Windows 7 upgrade disk a few years back (good move!), now I'm running a 64-bit version. Yes, the battery's fucked, despite careful management, so what, I still have my cheapo tablet to take with me. It's a perfect complement to my cheapo laptop, and both cover my bases, entirely, and will do, for the next few years :)))

what about OEM?

it's 100 bucks for now and 200 for the W8 pro. Will it shoot up to 200 / 300? Oh well, I guess I'll give it a pass and wait for the next one, unless they keel over in the meantime.

they only follow the US

which has more than once decided to apply their own laws abroad, and won (but of course). The latest example being that Swiss bank a few weeks ago. That was only to protect the US tax man, and the Chinese only want to protect the purity of their vision, can't blame either, right? :(

there's money to be made

off them labour camp inmates. And don't tell me google wouldn't do it, cause they do no evil.

Apparently bad weather has meant a lot of expensive repairs (?!)

I thought they would have outsourced repairs to Bangalore, surely?

500 squid, lol

methinks they forgot it's 2012, end of, rather than 2010. No matter. First cheapo tabs are already available, about 200 quid a pop. Yes, the specs are rather... uninspired, and so is the quality. But that's just the first wave. Second is coming, and the price will be not much higher.

and, then, this 500 quid non-Apple like toy doesn't come with an sd card slot, nosir, which clearly indicates its target audience, the suckers willing to pay 100 quid extra to have 3G (wow, what a margin), and similar bargains are available, when they want more internal memory. Sorry, I'll wait for a cheapo, these precious extras will come at little extra cost.

GPS... wow, look at this on Samsung specs list,

AGPS Glonass Supported, rotfl.

"Ta series of hasty, self-interested and high-risk business decisions"

they speak about their own decisions, presumably, when they bought, and swallowed, the tale of fabulous profits to be had on facebook float?

or until 2014. Maybe

cause you know, why should we ever drop them prices, if they still sell very well thank you? And if a punters grumble, let them fuck off and go buy cheaper on Mars, or Venus.

it's funny

how they think that censorship of this kind makes any difference whatsoever.

The only difference is, it has set a precedence: "we have already blocked those nasty pirates, so now let's use the momentum and block... eenie meenie miney mo, which one should it be... the hard porn, the pedobear, the occupy the streets "excremists"?

wait, what about "grey imports" websites, they're illegal too, right?

ok, so now...

what?

...

they were found out to be lying about a rogue engineer, so what happens next with this very low-key affair?

...

...

yeah, so I thought.

this was a brilliant stroke

of force majeure

how can I EVER thank you, Google!

for offering all those fantastic freebies, like free storage protected from your snooping, free OCR in no way feeding the data into your own systems, free ads on the side, as usual in NO way related to the contents of my (my?) G-locker.

but hey, who cares about privacy, it's all freeeeee, so come on, ya freetards, in your millions, come to daddy!

It will not be looking into emails in real-time.

she says.

and then, they will bury the news and it will be real time, but hey, who's going to be go after her when this happens? Will they put the ex-minister May against the wall? She will have been gone, and forgotten, along with all her honourable predecessors.

Really, how do they manage to recruit the same type of a nasty character to the same post over and over again? The same spiel about terrorists and pedophiles and pirates with every new one. As if any piece of snooping legislation has made them disappear... those nasty characters ;)

A reward could be set up

for the first Regitard reader to receive such a letter.

what reward?! I dunno... an interview with the Register, or any other glamorous prizes, plenty of choice out there...

I'm impressed, really

I mean, it takes a fully-matured politician (or a lawyer for THE Rapidshare, not rippedshare, or rapidshear, or other such clones), to say:

"we're reinforcing our efforts to eradicate it"

- and not twitch a single muscle in his face

This one beats ALL other quotes of this week for me. This week, last week... I guess the Register should run a best quote of the year competition.

ok, maybe the google quote on the "can't bother to search our employees' emails" might give it a close shave...

maybe he was distracted

through involvement in something much more important that semi-automatic landing procedure (boring, boring, boring, press that button Dave), like, I don't know, various things spring to mind, none of them polite to mention, but widely known to have happened in professional and private environments.

dozens...

and dozens of similar tablets, all from £120 - £200, at least some of them with gingerbeard ;)

some even come with a gps. And a sim card slot. And two cameras.

And then, there are more than just a few which fall, easily, below the £100 mark.

Yes, a solid comparison or review of a decent selection, say... "the cream of the bottom", would be welcome indeed.

asking price was too low!

They should have asked for 3bln, would have been 500 mln better off. In hindsight.

this is regular piss-taking

tactics by ALL companies. They make up a claim, they know very well it's just bull. So what They know the competition is watching closely. So what? They know they will get a slapped wrist. But then, so what? The adverts have been aired, you can't take it back, the slap is just that, a slap, no penalty. So... until the next ad, bye!

50 years

or "up to 50 years", it's nonsense, like those blank CDs, supposedly "to last 100 years", as they claimed 10 years ago, when CDR was "the" thing. They're all dead now, with little use. But hey, they said "up to", didn't they?

In any case, give it a few years and there'll be something with 10 times more capacity available, also to last xxxx years, etc.

opportunities a-hoy

I'm sure many governments which we love to label "regimes" but love even more to trade with them, will watch this closely. And so will the companies who love to tell everybody how pro-democracy they are* but wouldn't mind a finger in the pie, nosir.

Did I miss anything? Ah, yes, the advance democracy govs we voted for, they wouldn't even bother to observe this unfolding with close interest, right? After all, snooping on your own citizens is so unlike them (snooping on others is ok).

* in full accordance with local laws and regulations, see p. 46433 of our simplified T&T, section "Privacy & democracy", sub-section "variants & exceptions", with an intro "we really hope you didn't get that far, but in case you did, we will make it as garbage-filled as possible, so read on you moron, sir and don't even think that the plain English translation of the following 15 pages of bullshit means: "we don't give a flying (...) about democracy, did you think otherwise?!"

shocking revelations

"Unexpectedly high phone bills mean many customers are suspicious that they are deliberately being exploited by companies, by being held on the line unnecessarily for example"

wow, ofcom, wow! How many years of research has it taken to come up with this shocking revelation?

In fact, they don't even dare suggest this "exploitation" might actually be for real, they merely pass on the comments from the customers, who "are suspicious that..."

Give them another 100 years, they might start thinking about actually investigating. No, wait, look at the broader picture, why should they?! Spending more money is good for economy I hear, therefore making people save money by restricting rip-off options surely brings the economy to ruin. Now I see why the latest economic downturn - people were saving too much!

these particular Polish "lawmakers"

are just a bunch of opportunists. Like everybody else they jumped on the bandwagon to get something out of this whole mess. Unfortunately for them, it seems that their PR stunt got them nothing but the scorn of those people who they want to use, i.e. the young protesters. The leader of this... party ignored what happened to other politicians who had tried to hijack the protests and got booed and publicly called various... names. At one of the latest protests in Warsaw, he got jostled "a bit" and with some reluctance he was marched back to his car.

And then, obviously, other opposition parties try to score their points and pour shit on the government, only to find out, to their shock, that on many internet boards people post links to media articles from last autumn, with neatly laid out results of how various parties voted on ACTA. And hey, most MPs of most opposition parties voted for it. Ouch.

All in all, a huge "fail" for the whole establishment.

And then - bang! - a phone call from "a lady from the US embassy who called the parliament office to find out details of how individual MPs voted at a commission, promptly convened in Polish parliament, which was to send a formal request to Polish PM to postpone signing of ACTA". This call was rather unfortunate and shows that somebody forgot to do their homework - the Soviet embassy always wanted a detailed report on how their Polish comrades had just voted in the parliament, to monitor for any instances of undesired deviation from the socialist democracy. Or something like that.

Surely some of those MPs who voted against will have some explaining to do, if they happen to try to visit the land of the free now, or in 27 years time. As the saying goes: we don't forgive, we don't forget ;)

Kindle, Kobo...

we decided on Kobo over Kindle, particularly with the pre-Christmas price drop, and based on various comparison tests. Having tested what went to a relative, I'm quite happy I didn't get one for myself. Yes, it's ok, and probably less locked down than Kindle, and with epub support. But the 4-way navi pad is a pain and being rubber covered you never know if you press right (and you often get it wrong, going "up" instead of "right". Yes, I would prefer a hardware button on the side. Bundled software is crap, and why the f... do I have to register to install it? Yeah, so they can push their s*** back at me, and then probably lose my data to some hack. Fortunately I stumbled upon the obvious software choice that Kobo decided to keep shtum about - Calibre does the job well enough and there are even plug-ins for those, who want to unlock their DRM-chained purchase.

It's all a bit of a f*** with all the formats and conversions (why the f**** can't they read common formats such as rtf?).

And then, there is a matter of handling contents, when I loaded the device with some 300 Mb (not that much, huh?) of the books I had scanned and read, the device would get so sluggish that it was hardly possible to navigate the menus. Sadly, it seems to automatically scan for and "tag" whatever you drop into its memory. And then, the flash every page, or every 4 pages, depending on your settings, this is annoying. Yes, it's the nature of e-ink, but you won't find a word of this "feature" mentioned by any of the e-book reader manufacturers, nosir.

And, on top of everything, you need a source of light to read them, so no more wasted eyesight reading off a lit screen of a "smartphone".

But the price is just about acceptable, considering the (non-removable) battery life and the decent quality of text display. Give them another year or two and they'll drop to 50 quid and become less clunky.

oh, blame the EU

when it fits us!

but hey, don't be mean! Think how far this £2.20 can go. How many hospitals, schools and playgrounds could be bought! And the roads! Think of all the roads we can fix between Kabul and Kandakhar can be fixed, before they blow them up again in 3 days. How many tonnes of fuel can be burnt to hunt down those... evildoers. How many new and lovely peace-making weapons we can buy (think of the Children, think of all the BAEses there...

(sound of a ranting going quiet as the man is being dragged back to his padded cell)

this move could save...

#1. [enter any large number, the more 000s the better]

#2... and in the meantime, the estimated price for this is [enter any large number]

#3... and when the idea has been finally scrapped/deemed unworkable/over the budget / unfit for purpose / 10-years-behind-the-schedule, it will have cost [take the large number from # 2 and add one zero]

no, wait, this is scarecrowing! It will actually provide the savings promised, will cost much less to implement than provisioned for, it will be delivered BEFORE the schedule and it will definitely NOT generate yet another 5-line entry in the media on another parliamentary commission which will have spent [enter the figures from #1, 2, 3 and add an extra 0] years & £££ to come up with any conclusions and recommendations on how not to do it again.

WTF

do I have to pay for access, when I already pay taxes which pay for the upkeep of the British Library?

iPads...

iPad1, 3 of, check.

Kinect - 5 of(two ex-demo, three ex-display), check

Dr.. Dr... Driiiii.... Dreeee... Dre Beats headphones, also five, hold on, wtf is the sixth one!? Nevermind, check

Belkin USB 2.0 aka high-speed cable, down from 29.99, price slashed to 24.99, check

Mouse pad revolutionary (revolutionary mouse pad?), 2.5 mln, check

ok boys, let's rrrrrroll

I will repeat this wonderful piece of fluff:

"Self-regulation by banks in the past 30 years has created and maintained effective, secure and stress-resistant payment systems."

Effective, secure, and stress-resistant. Am I missing... "cost-effective", in terms of "cost-effectiveness for the punter"?

Nosir, the self-f-regulation above is not about saving YOU YOUR money, it's about milking you in the most cost-effective (to them) way. But hey, the writing's on the wall with SEPA. When, in the past, I had to pay dearly to send and _to receive_ money from various countries, now I pay 1 EUR, give or take, and wait no longer than 24 hours for the transfer to be completed. No, not when a GBP account is involved, then I'd wait a good few days, pay to send money, pay to receive, pay to convert from GBP to EUR and back to the third currency... (all the the oh-so-special convertion rates) - and think of England.

that said, if the euro as a currency is going down like a piece of a German satellite, SEPA might be soon dead too. Just this once when the eurocrats have created something useful for a man on the street :(

nah, it's never gonna happen

I think I have seen this argument in history books before, and spoken confidently by people more famous than Dr Rid. Like that one, that the man will never be able to take to the skies, or that the machine gun would cause such unthinkable slaughter on the battlefield, that no-one would dare use it. Ouch. There was also something about cloning, etc. etc.

Dr Rid seems to follow this silly notion that if something hasn't been done before, it won't be. Yet he forgets we're talking those 6 billion (and counting) clever bi-pods with grey matter between their ears, generating those wonderful ideas all the time, a lot of them revolving around how to find a new way to kill other bi-pods, quickly, painlessly - or otherwise. Give them enough technology and they will a way, sooner than later.