The Answer?

Playmobil, of course! Get to it, El Reg!

Nutters

And Tim Flannery, the chief of the commission, waned us that it was never going to rain again, that Melbourne would run out of water. Since then we've had major floods in Queensland. NSW and Victoria.

Oh ... Flannery also warned that teeth containing fillings should be removed from corpses before cremation to avoid a major pollution threat. Go figure!

Happened some time ago ...

This happened, at least for GMail, some five or six weeks ago.

A while before that I experimented to see if an account could be created with no ID whatsoever. It could.

I then needed to check again (to try to get a handle on some "strange" e-mails) and things had changed. You still did not need to give another e-mail address for contact. Indeed. Google told you that you did not have to. But then, after negotiating the captcha, Google required a contact 'phone number for a recorded message or SMS giving a verification code. The reason given for this was that there had been "suspicious activity on your account."

Ad it still works that way.

How odd that there's no "suspicious activity" if you DO give and alternative address.

Google wants that contact information but cannot even be honest about the reason.

They're missing the point!

The powers-that-be should be cracking down on the grunting instead of leaving it to people to reduce the annoyance factor.

Much of the grunting is designed to mask the sound of the ball hitting the racquet . The sound can give vital information to an opponent and masking it could be seen as a form of cheating!

Can we have ...

... and evil Google icon, please?

Hmmmm ...

What's to stop somebody deliberately changing style? We could have a digital copy-and-paste return to those old blackmail notes that used cut-out newspaper headlines.

The anonymous writer could just copy a "suitable" phrase from one document and one from another and so on. Would that work?

They missed one!

Will probably "brick" a significant number of Macs.

Well!

Well? Where are you? Still asleep?

You're winning the bloody Ashes!

There's no El Reg!

This is Christmas??

What next?

Windows for Warships? The mind boggles!

I'm so sorry about that headline ...

I should think so, too! It's not fair to udders!

They've backed down!

The South Australian government has backed down on this. The law is in effect but will not be enforced (they promise) and will be repealed immediately after the election (they promise).

ISP don't have a clue, either

The ISP I use here in Australia enforces a strong password policy ... and then stores the passwords in plain text.

The database is available to all employees, including the out-sourced "help" desk!

They insist that there's no security problem.

Conspiracy theory???

Aha! What this means is that Apple want to USE the vulnerability for CONTROL!!

Gotta stop them adults!

"Grrrrrr. I'd like to be treated as an independant adult, instead I'm assumed to be little more than a child."

You miss the point, AC. They ARE treating you as an independent adult. Remember that independent adults who might actually THINK are the last people they want to be allowed to access any information they consider undesirable!

BTW, can we have an evil Conroy icon, please?

Nice bit of culture!

Scroll down to the bottom of their home page at:

http://www.phones4u.co.uk/

Come on!

Who is going to be the first to welcome our new demonic soul-reaping, parallel globo-Nazi, hyperspherical juggernaut-dinosaur overlords?

Anyone remember the P900?

Oh yes ,,, and the P910i ... for both of them SE promised on-line upgrades but, for both of them, the "upgrade" site gave the message that the handset had the latest firmware. The problem is that it also did that with a colleague's handsets that had firmware with earlier version numbers.

I'm left with the feeling that upgrades were simply not available and am determined never to buy another SE 'phone.

Actually, given disastrous experiences with Sony's computer products in reliability terms ...

Well?

Isn't anybody going to welcome our new cross-dressing, cage-fighting Over ... err ... Thingies?

Huh??

So they can extend the range to 80 cm by using a relay unit ... what's wrong with a 1 metre cable?

AWESOME!

The conspiracy theorists can say what they will ... these are amazing pix.

Imagine having been on the Apollo 14 mission and being able to look at a photo taken from space of the "footpath" YOU made!!

This is patent-worthy?

Run that past me again ... Microsoft has a patent for code needed to get around the limitations of its own ridiculous 8.3 filenames???

assault and battery (groan)

Put him in a dry cell!

35 degrees??

Earlier this year, in Melbourne, Australia, the ambient temperature hit 45 degrees. It was a time of major bushfires. Would the iPhone have failed? So much for emergency communications!

KDE with xandros

It's worth remembering that getting KDE running on the Eee PC is somewhat trivial using the original Linux installation.

And you can switch between the so-called "full desktop" and the "easy" GUI without difficulty.

Everything works without any tweaking and I haven't felt tempted to bother trying different distros.

He doesn't get it, does he?

"He summed up his disdain for "the netbook space" by simply saying: "We think the products there are inferior."

Methinks he's missing the whole point of the netbook! I have three of them now and I wouldn't be without them. But I don't want to do graphics-intensive work on them ... I want to use them for the tasks they were designed to do well. And I want to be able to take them anywhere ... any time.

Mind you, in an emergency I did use an Eee PC 701SD to get a PowerPoint presentation on to a 30-foot video screen ... no other system would run it properly ... and it looked great.

Has anybody told Bill Gates?

But like so many others, Allen still questions whether web openness will succeed in the mobile world. "On the internet, there's no central party that controls the bandwidth," he said.

Lovely to hear that coming from a M$ person!

Are you sure?

"Trust us - that's the proper collective noun for fertility researchers."

Are you sure? According to the OED, "fecund" is an adjective ...

Not sure what your IT angle is ... unless it's I/O ...

PC Tools? Not impressed!

Can we hope that PC Tools will now improve its security and accountability?

They keep credit-card details on-line and use them to renew a subscription even when you say you don't want to! They then ignore repeated e-mails.

And, despite the fact that they have my money, without my authorisation, Registry Mechanic STILL tries to get me to renew!

Anecdotal evidence from other users suggests that this was not an isolated incident.

Boring ...

Who was that boring man waving his hands around and stroking his ego instead of "stroking" the 'phone? Boring ...

Oy!

Where's the picture of the Eee PC user, then?

Tut, tut!

"Eee PC 701 and friend: looking forward to a hard drive"

You just couldn't resist it, could you!

But, apart from even more excuses to run that pic, the news is more than welcome