threegee

Italy could easily have avoided meltdown, but it's now past the point of no return. The difference between the way we went (including all the painful things which the dumb lefties are protesting about) and the Balls - too deep too soon, max-out the credit cards - stupidity! Failing to get on top of their debt means that the cost of servicing it has spiralled and there is now no chance of continuing to fund it into next year. Silvio doesn't actually give a damn here, as it's a poisoned pill for his rivals to have to swallow. Up until a few months back the Euro could have survived if they'd cut-loose Greece and made the necessary moves. Now, as we are agreed, it's just a matter of time. All of which highlights the historic differences between our nations: Germany consistently gets the detail right, but gets the really big issues very wrong (nuclear power being just one recent example). The UK muddles on, but on the really big matters we always manage to scrape it together in the end, though often it's "the nearest run thing you ever saw"! Which I suppose touches on the parallels being currently drawn between Sarko and Napoleon!

Nope, we are not talking some debt-laden Western nation here; we are talking the one with the mind boggling current account surplus (and the one we buy all our ultra cheap goods from). http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15425390 There's nothing a government can do about imported inflation; it's plain silly to pretend we can and maintain impossible targets.

My operation scar goes further down than his!

iPad owners! http://tech.fortune....otato-computer/

http://www.bbc.co.uk...nology-15383516 http://youtu.be/-EI75wPL0nU Even the best present-day cameras sure have a long way to go!

No chance; she'd need at least half an hour to fix her hair and makeup for the final photo op!

You apologise, and retire with $70M in the bank?

Well it's obviously raining, so quite probably yes. If only the Radio Constructor had been bigger I could have used it to keep the Hovis dry. Keith: it's a well-known fact that around 1960 it was always raining. People put this down to all the nuclear weapons testing going on. Secretly, I just knew that this theory was rubbish, and that it was due to man-made climate change - as a result of all the new Ford Prefects Elliotts was selling!

A "nut job" who has reportedly collected $70M on the strength of this! I'm predicting the world will end before Christmas - and so you should send me all that pay rather than drinking it away.

After big media's fawning BS about Steve Jobs calms down just some of the truth starts to emerge: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15400984

Hang on, King Abdullah is a nice old despot, and doesn't deserve to be on a list with mass murderers like Mugabe! Maybe his security lot have roughed-up the odd "trouble maker", but he is a reformer, and things are consistently moving in the right direction. Without him the religious nutters would call all the shots, and we'd have another Iran on our hands. There's also the argument that it is us who have taken this women drivers thing far too far! And where is Bashar al-Assad on this list? Should be at the very top I think!

Brilliant! I particularly like Bedlington, not just the dog! The sort of thing I could have come up with myself - though maybe I did!

From memory the Wales' lived right on the West side of Great North Road, Gosforth. Somewhere around the Brunton Park area. Industrious family, but not a commute I'd have fancied! The newsagent next to Walter Wilson's in the photo is the only place in Bedlington I could get the "Radio Constructor" magazine in Bedlington circa 1960 - would bike down there regularly in the rain. Can even remember some of those covers!

Oh well! Returning to your original question: my vote is for Herman Van Rumpoy. I didn't vote for him and no one else seems to have either - ergo, as our President he's a dictator of the grandest kind! A sewerage pipe seems too good for him!

Let's hope he is still alive - shooting him is just too easy a way out! Deserves to be thrown into one of his own prisons, but that wouldn't be allowed as inhumane!

Yup, that too! Do you believe Dave's current promise on this? He's the sole arbiter what a "transfer of powers" means, so yet more politician's weasel words! "When the time is right"; those five woolly tests for joining the Euro; ho hum! I feel that whatever stirrings of true democracy we are about to witness are likely to be knocked on the head by Mili's-band of upwardly-mobile morons - steered by the appalling Ed Balls, and cheered on by Mrs mouth-disconnected-from-brain Balls! And no prizes for guessing how the Lemming Democrats will vote. Remember your election claims to "fairness" and "democracy" Mr Clegg? No? Oh well, no one above the age of political maturity ever expected you would! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11401594 Still, one can always hope!

Backbench MPs have agreed to hold a debate on a referendum on our membership of the EU. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-15354203 Let's hope this starts the ball rolling on some genuine democratic process. With the Euro teetering and the politicos myths about it now thoroughly discredited this could be exactly the right time to re-examine the mess the political classes have got us into. Great that three options are proposed. Left to their own devices the politicos would rather a stark in or out - with all the scaremongering warnings about the latter - were the only possibilities. Even UKIP doesn't want the latter. We need to get back to what we actually agreed to thirty odd years ago: a commercial free-trade union, not a federal Europe!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15344297 Graph says it all. Double digit at some point in the coming years - the natural consequence of printing money!

Time in use: Over six months. Current Configuration: 2 Samsung Spinpoint F4 2TB SATA 5400RPM Hard Drives. Price: About £64 plus about £55 each for drives - all from Amazon on free delivery. Description: The DNS-320 is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) box. Mine came with the original Version 1 firmware, but the upgrade to the latest version was painless. So painless that I've forgotten how long it took - but it was of the order of 15 minutes. The latest firmware completely transforms the feel of the thing and reportedly fixes a few bugs. The box also has an auxiliary USB port under a flap on the front, and this seems to do the job of networking that odd USB hard drive quite well. I don't think this USB will network a printer though (don't need to so never tried it), but I could be wrong here. The unit supports stand-alone bit torrenting, FTP, and has a scheduler for automatic transfers, etc. etc., though I've not had occasion to try any of the bells and whistles yet. In Use: Initially I bought the box with only one 2TB drive. This was because I didn't want to invest in RAID until I decided the NAS was going to be of some use. Also I didn't want to buy two drives from the same manufacturing batch to use in a RAID setup. Consequently I waited well over three months before ordering up the second Samsung Spinpoint F4. When it arrived I slipped the top cover off - the whole thing is utterly screw-less, and the drives are simply held in place by gravity - and dropped the new drive into the second slot power on! The little blue LEDs seemed to be doing something so I refitted the top and walked away. A day or two later I slipped the top off and hot-pulled the original drive. It was very satisfying to find all the NAS data still fully accessible, and I popped the original drive back in again. Not wishing to push my luck on live data this is as far as the experimentation has gone, though I'm sufficiently confident in the set-up to not feel too compelled to keep keep further backups of the data. Logically I should probably blow another £55 and use it to swap with the mirror drive every so often, and store the third drive remotely - yes, will get around to this real soon! Verdict: Excellent value for money, particularly when you consider you are buying a complete (ARM CPU based) networking computer here. The whole thing is a bit plasticy - unlike the more expensive Netgear NAS I was considering last year - but it's easily solid enough. Transfer speeds measured from my laptop using a cheapo 1Gbit/s network switch are of the order of 20-24MB/s second (bytes/sec not bits/sec folks!), which is plenty fast enough for multiple HD video streams or full computer backups. The only improvement I'd like to see is a hard on/off switch so that the box powers up itself after a power outage; you need to press the power button after a power glitch, and if the unit is sited remotely, as mine is, you have to go seek it out to press the power key. Would instantly buy another one, and may well do so when the 2TB of RAID space on this one starts to run out. Recommended!

The "Where does it mention "Asian", or is this in FACT just a typical unintelligent sterotype?" thread is a laugh a second.

The big boys often have less of a clue than the small guys. There's actually nowhere much to go if you are an investor, though anything (save Govt promises) beats bank/BS deposits. In inflationary times investments in good companies with real earnings and with pricing power is the way to go. If you can pick them up during the inevitable blood-on-the-screens days then so much the better. This is why the markets are turbulent yet resilient. The big losers will inevitably be people on fixed incomes, and people who refuse to take multiple small risks. And, if you are Joe Average Worker with no savings, your problem is being caught in the vice of price inflation without the usual corresponding wage inflation. This is the paradox of the markets: by far the bigger risk is to convince yourself that you aren't running any! As for the general situation - well, yes - we are all supremely &*&&*&*'d!

"Politics on the rates" a firmly established principal in good ole Wansbeck, so why should national government be any different?

It's not rational. It assumes that the Banks exist in the same world of accountability as their customers. What is rational - and would have prevented the current credit free-for-all - is a levy on fractional reserve lending. You or I expect to have to pay for a licence to do this or that, but the banks get a licence to create money for free.

It's down into the bunkers for the euro-politicos! "Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said Thursday the ECB would offer an unlimited amount of 12-month and 13-month credits." Isn't this fait currency thing all about credibility and confidence? And, take a look at the 30 day gold price. As I pointed out earlier: you can't preserve wealth by following a herd mentality. Merv seldom says much of significance - well that's his job - but he's determined not to be on the wrong side of history. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15210112 Will more QE work though? Well, if I was being compulsory purchased and found my fund in possession of oodles of QE funny money I'd be tempted to move it to more stable climes, and not do what he hopes I'd do with it. The only real term "benefit" will likely be stir up a bit more inflation. Why doesn't he come clean and bury the 2% inflation target nonsense for good?!

http://www.bbc.co.uk...nology-15180835 Maybe we should be considering a move to technologically advanced Bulgaria?