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You really couldn't make this up! Screencap from engadget.com of recruitment ad's posted just after the fading signal reports became widespread. Ring, ring... personnel ... "CEO here. Sack that idiot ????? and hire three RF engineers who know what the %^% they are doing. NOW!"

Spot the ever-so-subtle knocking copy from Motorola's ad agency:

Thread title corrected: the moderators here are a cut above the rest!

Apparently not the only time he'd asked for help and was refused. That £4M would have paid for a lot of help, and lives would not have been lost. Some similarities with the Derrick Bird shootings here. A guy who couldn't cope by himself being put-upon and ignored. It seems that social services were completely hung-up on "protecting" the kids, and failed to see the broader picture.

...and independent engineering tests confirm that this is a real hardware problem. http://blogs.consume...etwork-gsm.html Read just some of what Apple have removed from their discussion boards here: http://cc.bingj.com/...fddb6d,f506f19b

...and they will be fully compatible with your PC! http://www.product-r...se-date-update/ Likely not too many of them will require you to dump all your data and ship them back to the factory for a new battery either.

The overpaid civil "servants" at the MOT have known about these for going on for ten years, yet they've sat on their a£$£s and done nothing. What the hell are they paid for! Now the overwhelming evidence from other countries is that they are fine, all they have to do is create a "Compact Pedestrian Assister" or some such category; say they can't occupy more than so much pavement space, and exceed a certain speed. (Bearing in mind the current specs, and to prevent people using highly modded ones in public.) It's not a great leap in imagination, but clearly beyond the Jobsworths! It's like the UK existed in some sort of separate universe with different physical laws from the rest of mankind. Or maybe it's our civil servants who do?

Just about every other civilised country encourages them and legalises them as an environmentally friendly method of transport, but our MOT knows differently. http://www.telegraph...in-Britain.html Maybe that's because they are NOT road vehicles! Try using your eyes, and the half of your brain that you've still got left Jobsworth!

"No John, you've made this mistake before! The RED one is the Taser, the YELLOW one is your wife's cooker igniter!"

Absolutely agree with you Malc. A totally disproportionate response to a guy who was always going to commit suicide when found. In the old days a hand full of coppers would have patiently handled it and tried to talk him out of it. Compare and contrast the Sun Inn Murders. And, for all the so-called specialists, highly-paid experts, and endless "assessments" we have these days, they still let a suicidal revenge-seeker out of clink! I can't believe you are serious about kids playing games around the street corner Vic. Fingerprints and DNA samples - how dumb is that? A complete lack of common sense reigns these days. The UK kids you are referring to were likely killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time or by accidents with parents legally held weapons that weren't properly secured; they didn't get killed playing kids games. Here's another little tale of Northumbria Police: Guy doing our garden comes to me in obvious shock. "I'm being been shot at!". You can't be serious, says an almost unbelieving me. He opens his hand and shows me a couple of .22 pellets he'd picked up off the concrete path. Have you been hit? "Yes, here and here". I immediately go and ring Northumbria Police to report this. Nothing more happens. Later we ring to ask what's happening. Put in touch with a junior copper who reluctantly tells us that he's looked into it, but he daren't take the matter further as the guy who was firing the gun was a relation of his police sergeant, and so it would be best to let the matter rest! In all my years experience this is on far too many occasions a most unprofessional police force. I believe the reason for this is near total lack of accountability at the local level.

Even carrying a toy gun, that quite obviously is a toy gun, and posing no immediate threat to anyone? Shooting to kill a proportionate response of course! Still, they've always had a problem telling metal from plastic, and with proportionate responses: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2168430.stm Anyway, times are a' changing; it seems that after today you can't even buy a surrendered weapon from local police anymore! http://news.bbc.co.u...ar/10562425.stm

"Eye-witness Judith Ellis said that two police cars collided in their efforts to get to the scene, which she described as "mayhem"." Yeah, sounds like a typical dispassionate and well coordinated Northumbria Police response involving mentally unstable persons. The "criminal" is probably unstable too!

They've just announced that he's supposedly made threats against the wider public, but we are not permitted to know exactly what this means. "Operational reasons" of course! Page curiously pulled from the local Beeb website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/england/tyne/10556948.stm Sounds like the "murder squad" at Northumbria Police are gearing up to commit another appropriately white-washed murder. Does anyone seriously believe that they are committed to a "safe arrest"?

Samsung EcoGreen 2TB now selling for exactly £90. That's £4.50 for 100GB. How long before we see a reasonable cost 3TB drive?

Looks like he probably drove through Bedders, but didn't stop for Fish 'n' Chips!

Yes. Full spec. here: http://www.samsung.com/uk/consumer/tv-audio-video/blu-ray-player/blu-ray-player/BD-C5300/XEU/index.idx?pagetype=prd_detail&tab=specification User Manual here: http://downloadcenter.samsung.com/content/UM/201004/20100424150739437/01941P-BD-C5300-XEU-ENG-BM-0423.pdf Features here: http://www.samsung.com/uk/consumer/tv-audio-video/blu-ray-player/blu-ray-player/BD-C5300/XEU/index.idx?pagetype=prd_detail&tab=feature

$595 !!! Users of Nokia Maemo (Linux Based) phones and ITs are quietly chuckling, as they've been doing remote system admin for years without shelling out (unintended pun) a single extra buck. The merging of Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin into MeeGo is looking very promising. You can already boot a development image on an N900. Watch out Google, here comes open source with clout!

Is the Samsung BD-C5300 Blu Ray Starter Kit the best bargain ever? http://www.rgbdirect...SAMSUNG-BDC5300 ..and also from many other suppliers. Well it depends. Take away the six Blu-Ray disks and you've got a cracking top-quality and state-of-the-art Blu-Ray Player for maybe £80 or so. But wait, there's a lot more! This sleek little baby has an RJ45 Ethernet port, and - unlike several other home entertainment items I've bought with an Ethernet port - this one actually does something; the software is there to use the Internet connection! The software is Samsung's internet @ tv that's built into other recent Samsung products (like TV's and Home Cinema Systems) currently on store shelves. Samsung want you to buy their USB WiFi dongle for £50 or so to be able to connect to your home wireless LAN. But you can wire it directly to your ADSL box with a budget Ethernet lead and enjoy higher performance without shelling out any more cash. That's the route I went with a couple of l-o-n-g custom made leads butted together and hung from room to room, just to see if it was worth stringing a permanent Ethernet connection around the outside of the house. The answer I eventually arrived at was that it is! But, I was going to do this anyway. Now, it will probably be this week or next rather than after Christmas. Internet @ tv promises a lot more than it actual delivers just now. For instance when you select Facebook you get told that it will be ready in April (note to Samsung: Which year will that be? It's now July!). But what it delivers is already well worth it. Google maps on a 50" full HD plasma TV has to be seen to be believed, and YouTube has taken on an entirely new perspective now that I don't have to juggle it around in windows an 8.9" screen, and can view it from the comfort of the sofa. The hardware (?) graphics codecs already in the Blu-Ray player are obviously put to good use here, as the playback is a lot smoother than on any of our netbooks. On a note of caution: it wasn't easy to get the first Internet connection, and I can imagine that many people have thrown internet @ tv back at suppliers for just this reason. Once I did get a connection it was possible to upgrade the firmware from xx.8.1 to xx.13.4 in about ten minutes and this seems to have solved the connection problems. I've seen other reports of this on the net put down to poor cable drivers in the box's Ethernet connection, supposedly only good for tens of feet. This isn't so - my BD-C5300 is working just fine into a couple of very long daisy-chained Cat 5 leads right now. I think the problem may have been confusion due to the auto-sensing on my router ports. Anyway, I overcame it with a bit of fiddling with the Samsung's Network settings and inserting an old (fixed gender) Ethernet switch very close to the Samsung, then playing with the connections until the LEDs on the Ethernet switch showed what looked like a promising conversation. When the box upgraded itself over this connection the lashup proved to be no longer necessary, and the Samsung connected to my rather complicated LAN purely on automatic everything (no manual configuration required), and without any extra hardware assistance. People with little computer networking experience might want to insist on the box having the latest firmware before delivery, or ask a local hardware hacker for a bump start. The BD-C5300's performance in its advertised role as a Blu Ray player is faultless. An HDMI cable straight into our TV, and in seconds 1080p HD pictures were wowing all around. I've used the cinema 24 fps option as my (non-Samsung) TV does seem to support this and this seems to result in very smooth motion on the big screen. True home cinema at long last, and at a price that's amazingly affordable - even for a pensioner! The box also has USB ports front and rear so you can play HD material on USB Flash Memory keys and external hard drives (which must be self powered). Conclusion: If you don't already have Blu Ray then grab the package whilst it's still available! (But don't spend £19.90 on a £3 HDMI lead! )

It's OK, it's all in the imagination. There isn't a problem at all. Doesn't quite explain why the calls then fail to get through, but maybe that's psychosomatic too? BTW I hadn't up until this moment realised that multitasking Apple style involves only those selected apps that Apple gives you permission to multitask. In my naivety I'd though that it meant what the rest of the World has always considered it to be. So, there you are: back in pre-history when we ran a TSR program on an early PC we were really multitasking all along! You live and learn - unless - you are an Apple fan, when you simply queue, pay double, and worship!

I know nowt about football - and really don't want to - but it's very similar to software projects. At core they are both "people things". With "people things" when there's far too much money available (to "guarantee" a good result) it's then positively guaranteed to go totally TU! This is particularly true with team people things, where the human interactions are what runs the show, and the manager only thinks he does.

And now... the iPhone that you have to be careful to hold in the way Steve Jobs tells you to hold it: http://news.bbc.co.u...ogy/8761240.stm Maybe when they get on to the iPhone 172c they'll have learnt what proper mobile phone manufacturers learnt about designing good phones - twenty years ago!

This time Google gets stitched-up! http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/scotland/north_east_orkney_and_shetland/10401345.stm

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Cider Tax scrapped! Is there a single measure in Darling's pointless April budget that now still stands? 20% V.A.T. - as long predicted here - won't come in until 4th January 2011, so a tiny bit of relief there. The welfare cuts are going to take a long while to sink in. 25% cuts to many government department budgets are going to be very traumatic. But for once the North East has come out better than many other regions, especially if it can rise to the challenge and start creating many more private sector jobs over the next few years.