Posts by J Ford26 posts • joined Sunday 30th March 2008 20:43 GMT
I've already nabbed the 'iPad Nano' moniker to rebrand my aging G2 ipod touch. They can't use that.
Surely an ID card will be worth a few quid on ebay, there can't be that many of them out there? She'll get more than £30 for it if it's the first issued.
I'll get a new telly when my old telly breaks, thank you very much. It's a Sony, so I might not have a long wait.
A turd at 1080p or in 3D is still a turd.
I'll accept this as long as we can tax all the countryside dwellers £50 per month to pay for the installation of trees and a nice view on my rundown urban street. Maybe a few sheep making pleasant Baaing too. Fair's fair, end the pastoral divide.
Microsoft has never really *got* elegant simplicity, have they? Compare the clown pants of the hotmail home page with the less visually abhorent gmail.
They need to learn that I don't 'want fries with that' and to remember that I 'don't want fries with that' everytime I use that particular application.
People with XP are people that are probably:
a) less likely to be impressed with Shiny New Things;
b) patient types who wait for the inevitable teething problems to be resolved before purchasing; or;
c) people who can't afford an upgrade (either to a new OS or for a new PC that comes with it installed).
All of which would be evident from the fact they wisely chose not to go for Vista. No big surprise that they are not overwhelmingly favourable towards a different, costly and unestablished new version.
I'm sure these sort of scams only make money out of investigative journalists.
Maybe facebook et al can suspend/terminate the accounts of people who followed the e-mail links, on the basis that they're too stupid to use the internet. Then again, they're probably exactly the sort of people their advertisers want ('make cash fast posting links on the internet' etc.)
Can we have a 'stupid people' icon of some sort?
This may be a vehicle to attack the BBC's free service - create your own pay model, then grumble to whichever lackey global trade/competition regulatory organisation will listen that it's unfair that a 'state broadcaster' is giving this stuff away.
I bet even with subscription the site will still be stuffed full of adverts, just like the subscription TV channels he operates.
In an economy where there is little growth in tangible goods, you make money by persuading people to pay for things they usually get for free. Don't underestimate the digger - I remember being able to watch live football for free, without advertising, and the initial very vocal resistance from people to the idea of paying firstly monthly subscriptions and then pay-per-view.
The news content of the BBC has become increasingly dominated by bought-in news (dominated by US stories as it saves on translation costs), articles generated from press releases, or plugs for BBC programmes (I stopped watching breakfast news as it seemed to consist solely of footage from Strictly Come Dancing or other 'entertainment news' drivel) . Traditional journalist numbers have been heavily reduced in cost-cutting and replaced with non-content, some of which is lifted from the internet (there seems to be an obsession with Twitter which I hope will pass quickly). Front line reporting is a rarity. This from an institution not reliant on advertising revenue, which should not incur any loss from free distribution of their content.
Proper journalism is important, as the alternative is the unaccountable whinging of a billion bloggers, regurgitating each other's lies, prejudices and conjecture as fact (or FACT to use the preferred syntax).
I've noticed a lot of link farms are copying entire news articles in an attempt to draw traffic, if you come across an unattributed story somewhere and google a selected quote in order to find the original source you may have to wade through pages of this crap before finding the original story source. There needs to be some control on this for reasons of functionality at least (a 'report link farm' button on Google with consequent demotion in search engine results would help).
How the hell do you run up a mobile bill of £75+ per month, given there are numerous options out there with unlimited everything for about £35/month? Surely one of those deals plus a grey market unlocked handset represents a better deal if you really must have a shiny toy?
Mine's the one with the practical and functional PAYG Nokia 3210 in the pocket.
It will penalise heaviest the companies which make cheap and easily broken crap. Visit any tip and there are certain brands of electronic/white goods that are always there, others seldom seen. If it creates an incentive for more durable, better quality items then that's a good thing.
There are certain companies whose business model seems to rely on things breaking just outside the warranty, I hope it hurts them the most.
There's a crashed tie-fighter in the lake to the west. Possibly
http://www.bing.com/maps/default.aspx?v=2&FORM=LMLTCC&cp=55.933056~-4.779871&style=h&lvl=19&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&phx=0&phy=0&phscl=1&encType=1
Fail and fail quickly please, this romance is over. Hopefully ebay/Paypal will falter and something better appear. It shouldn't be hard to produce something with a better user experience.
If they want to save money perhaps they could stop redesigning the interface every couple of months so that it becomes increasingly slow and difficult to find what you are looking for, and get rid of the pop-up window crap that works badly on mobile platforms.
Oh, and throw in some kind of meaningful guarantee for Paypal too, not spurious claims of fraud protection that are non-existant when you try to claim back defrauded monies.
The solution to an intermittant supply is to create storage and also adjust demand to match supply where this can be done practically. We have enough time to think up these solutions before wind becomes more dominant in supply.
Hydroelectric storage facilities to cope with peak demand already exist, although there may be limits for suitable sites to create many more of these. Using wind energy to create hydrogen via electrolysis is another possibility (which could be used for thermal generation or transport).
On the supply side, all these electric cars and other devices are going to need charging, however an intelligent charging/metering system (similar in principle to economy 7) could be envisaged whereby battery charging is prioritised at times of peak availability. Perhaps this could be encouraged by a variable tariff changing dynamically with supply - with the user setting the maximum price they want to pay for the charge & the system cutting out when this is exceeded (so the wealthy can still pay more if they absolutely *must* need a full charge for their overconsumptive wagons the next morning). If battery capacity and drive system efficiency sees massive improvement and a weekly rather than daily charge routine becomes the norm it will become a case of deciding which night to plug in the charger, people will be watching the 'supply forecast' after the news and weather to inform such decisions.
Other energy uses could be considered on similar principles, not every use of energy has to be met at an immediate point in time.
@sooty
If you read the article, the 'ruse' in this case was that of the sellers being skint tourists, presumably selling their own goods to raise money rather than stolen ones. They're taxing the gullible, not necessarily the dishonest.
It's a neat combination of the old 'need bus fare/train fare to get home' scam with the laptop-bag-stuffed-with newspaper/potatoes' trick. Imaginative, these con artists.
I need to get one of these, and then whizz about on a BMX solving crimes with the assistance of similarly equipped accomplices, before returning to my bedroom lair with the dial-up modem on dexian shelving. Technology is at last catching up with 70's children's TV.
Now, about that flying car....
(can we have a flying car icon please?)
From BNP supporters comments:
Ludicrous exaggeration: check (floods of DDOS hits_and_floods of forriners)
Frothing hyperbole: check
Unqualified statistics: check
"Poor oppressed white people": check
Paranoid finger pointing ("it woz the BBC/Joos/Searchlight what done it") : check
"liberal media" (those pinkos at the Daily Express, obviously): check
"Everyone else is racist": check
"Everyone else is Marxist": check
"Oo, I'm so victimised": check
Whine whine whine: check, check and check again.
Can I call house?
Honestly, if running a website is beyond the capability of these chumps, how stupid do you have to be to offer them real power and responsibility? (actually, I think Gordon could probably offer them a post running a gov IT project...)
Presumably if we're all about sending people back to their ethnic origin then it'll get a little crowded once all the Americans and Australians have returned here.
Doesn't add up, does it? Any of it.
The BNP's whole existence is based on portraying themselves as 'victims' (the poor, downtrodden white male) so this plays into their hands, producing the same comedic exaggeration in their response as found in their other literature.
I wonder if it hit their impressivly pointless efforts (supported by US right-wing activists) to ballot-stuff the comments sections of the Daily Mail website (amongst other sites) to make their supporters comments most popular?
It is good that the data came out, but at the same time someone has profited from their dishonesty by selling it to the media, which is not OK with me and suggests their motives may not have been purely one of whistleblowing. Corruption/dishonesty is a bad thing to occur in all levels of public service and they deserve to be exposed.
There is also the question of whether the leaker had any party political motiviation behind leaking the data and who it was sold to. I'd like to know, regardless of whether this is something prosecutable or not.
My cats often like to sit in the middle of the road washing their posteriors, and having seen the occasional near miss, I'm all for something that alerts them to oncoming traffic in the age of the silent electric car. Of course, eventually we will have some sort of GPS beacon attached to felines which automatically applies the brakes of approaching traffic, but until then, just a little noise would be nice.
Next up will be proposals for people getting their photos of public places pulled from Flickr and similar public sites, because they could potentially be useful to terrorists, that is if they haven't been nicked for taking a photograph in the first place.
Live search has more useful pics of GCHQ. You can even see a long service trench in the roof for budding x-wing pilots to take out the reactor core.
His mistake was ripping off journalists and important people that the police will actually listen to and investigate their complaints. Friends who have seen their stolen possessions on eBay have never had any interest from the police in investigating the theft, even when they've bid on and won their own items and got the scumbag's address.
...most people I know were excited about getting themselves photographed by the googlemobile, and are looking forward to trying to spot each others faces/cars/pets when it goes live. I hope the blurring doesn't spoil such fun.
...to set up a discreet offsetting scheme for celebrities and media types to assuage their guilt. What's the going rate for 4m2 of reforestation work?
