threegee

And.. I thought this thread was another Prince Andrew story!

The short answer is yes; this time it's personal! Gaddafi is blaming al-Qaeda **and** Zionists **and** the Crusaders (the West). That has to be a historic first: all the bitterly opposed forces of history are somehow lined up against him. To some extent he's right, but that doesn't mean he's not a paranoid, manipulative, murdering, power-hungry, friendless SOB. There's hardly a nation on earth that wouldn't like to see the back of him. It's quite simply pay-back time!

Oh come on, use your imagination! We've got those two massive new aircraft carriers Gordo ordered and we can't now cancel. I'm sure Gaddafi could be persuaded to cling on to power until 2019 to 2023 when they are commissioned. This leaves us plenty of time to develop convincing cardboard-cut-out strike aircraft to line up on the decks. When that lot comes sailing over the horizon every dictator in the World is going to want to leave for Sharm el-Sheik as fast as they can clean the billions out of their private safes. Only a matter of time until Britannia rules the waves again - you can bet your civil service pension on it!

Not to minimise the seriousness of the problems, or these guy's dedication, but I don't believe the levels of radiation are anything like as high as the media would have us believe. Sure a few hot spots right close up, but it's completely indistinguishable from background levels in Tokyo and other places we are being asked to believe there is/will be a serious radiation problem. Looks like over 15,000 deaths from the tsunami, and hundreds of thousands homeless, many camping out in freezing conditions with minimal food, and all the media can do is constantly harp on about nuclear meltdown and radiation. Never let grim reality get in the way of a good shock-scare story! I haven't done the math, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out that the ongoing amount of radioactive material emitted by a select bunch of coal fired stations exceeds this release. Anyway I think the Japanese authorities have it about right in the 20Km highly-precautionary evacuation on all present information, and that the hysteria in other areas (particularly in the USA) is just plain dumb, or at worst exploitative.

Oh look, Mr G. has declared a "ceasefire"! Must have been all those messages of condemnation that were starting to weigh on his conscience. Anyway, can't have had anything to do with the long overdue UN authorisation for action, because they "absolutely do not recognise" it. Wonder what happened to the bit about civilian and military activities in the Mediterranean becoming "the target of a Libyan counter-attack"?

I'm told that he's joined the great employed, and is working hard to save Britain from Brown/Balls debt legacy! He is around though; just spreading his time more productively..

So Yahoo sidesteps the injunction by referring to him as "former bank chief"? A whole world of difference between that and "banker" then! Another injunction; another £50K in legal costs - please; ching! Can you take out an injunction against being reffered to as "former chief of a near-failed bank who is not living in the real world, and who - if it were not already obvious - clearly has more wholly undeserved money than sense"? If the word banker now has derrogatory connotations I wonder who exactly had a significant hand in this coming about?

..and all this time I though it was our lawyer! Anyway he's got to share it with that extended Mexican family, so that doesn't count. And just remember when you buy that computer with Windows 7 Starter Edition and find you have to pay another £50 directly to M$ (no middle man) to get access to the code that you already have, and that they spent oodles of time and effort crippling, that Bill really needs the extra money to get back to the #1 spot W7 Home SE = Windows 7 Ha Ha, So You Thought You'd Bought an Operating System You Could Use Edition!

Things looking rather bleak for Punch Taverns! http://online.wsj.co...303-712110.html

Didn't do a free customer survey, so off to a bad start. Pictures someone, please?

Goodness I think you are probably right. Never been that far down Palace Road for several decades. Thought it might have been Sleekburn school, but not even close, forgot about the old "Bedlington Station Grammar School". Google has caught someone popping up from behind a bush at the bottom of the road. Seems you can't even play truant these days without getting caught on camera!

Very interesting, but not a Bedlington building I think. Note that Rediffusion has two f's. http://www.rediffusion.info/

The first virtual product placement is apparently due to take place on tele this morning. They're inserting a coffee machine into a program at a cost to the advertiser of about £100K! Seems to me an awful lot of trouble to go to just to get a picture of a product into a program. Interesting to see how this is done as there's apparently no pre-knowledge of where it is going, and it has to be inserted into whatever spatial real estate is available. Seems to me to preclude any sort of interaction, but you never know! Where is this taking us? Is it Stork, is it Butter, or is it Virtual (and which is easier to spread)?

Spot on - well, maybe left a bit, stop!

That's the one Fourgee; formerly Hay's the Chemist (as opposed to "the top[end] chemist" which was Binks). Unfortunately it's off Cympil's picture at the right, but we must have a really old picture of the Vulcan Place / Marketplace corner somewhere. Betty Charlton / Oliver was definately very well known to our family, as I wouldn't remember the name unless it had been repeated many times. Unfortunately I can't fill in any of the details - it was one of those many things that as a kid you don't connect with, so just becomes part of the background noise. Pity you didn't post this in the 1980's! The Olivers (and I'm assuming here the same Olivers) were good friends of Dr. Brown's family, and I remember Eileen Brown often inviting them over to Horton Road.

Southeby's Website And see Lot 13 Though is it just me that isn't drawn "entirely and irresistibly into its intense chromatic poetry"? I can just about make out a pair of nostrils in the bottom left quadrant, but mainly what I see is a lost opportunity to relieve just a tiny bit of misery in the world. Maybe Gaddafi is right... and we are all on drugs!

But.. never trust a website with a headline like: Is the Sun Causing Global Warming? ---------------------------------- For the uncertain here the answer is: Of course not, it has always been a tad over -273c here on the Earth's surface!

Iconia being shipped in the UK this week apparently. But at £1500 I will pass this time around! Maybe this model is targeted at people who pay £600 plus for tablets with weedy phone CPUs in them? Recon they'll be heavily discounted within months. https://www.simplyac...ia_1037586.html A very powerful machine, but It's overkill and far too big. Nothing bigger than a 12" screen is a portable in my book, and about 10" or 11" is ideal. Nor is the 2.5 hour battery life a serious contender when we've come to expect 7 hours plus from modern netbooks. And at almost 3 Kgs!! When are we going to see soft-key + dual screen technology on a decent performance netbook or genuine portable?

There's no apparently - it's a Jewish joke, or started out as one! The original is slightly more raunchy, and dates from a circa 1995 comedy/humour newsgroup posting. Like many internet phenomena it does the rounds over and over again, often at intervals of several years. You can check what Armstrong/Aldrin etc. actually said here: http://www.hq.nasa.g...1/a11.step.html and you'll note that NASA has updated the page to say "...let me state that Neil never said "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky" at any time during the mission. Indeed, on November 28, 1995, Neil wrote for the ALSJ, "I understand that the joke is a year old. I first heard it in California delivered by (comedian) Buddy Hackett". What is amusing is the speech Richard Nixon was to deliver in circumstances of them not returning, particularly as all three Astronauts are still around and Nixon has been dead for 17 years: http://beconfused.co...ed-on-the-moon/

Motorola's new Atrix 4G can be either a Phone, a Media Player, or a Netbook! More photos: http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2011/02/09/motorola-atrix-4g-unboxing/

Sadly I've had to vote no. Reasons already stated by others. I'd add that the first question in starting any enterprise shouldn't be what or even where, but who. By that I mean you need a flair for any individual business (a service differentiator in modern parlance). If you're simply seeing cups of tea simply as 50p pieces then you're probably in the wrong biz. Sounds like you're looking around for something to start; sounds like you see a cafe as some sort of public service. The first question is what would really get my interest? What could I stick out low (and likely negative) returns and l-o-n-g hours in for quite some time until I get it right? When you get that right in your own mind then the practical questions like location kick in. Cafes need a high paying customer turnover, and the location to facilitate that, to make a go of it. You want them in and out pretty fast. If you attract lots of kids sitting around because it's somewhere warm for them to go, then the sort of clients you need to keep the operation going will simply avoid. That's the sad truth of it! Providing a sustainable public service has to be seen as a side-effect of catering to the market, otherwise you are running a charity and should register the enterprise as such. The Oval Just starting something to see if you can make-a-go-of-it helps no one, and is what most of the people who have taken these units have done. The units are there because someone who knew very little about people's behaviour, and even less about economics, drew them on a map because it looked like good "planning" at the time. They weren't relevant to the local economy in the car-less 1950's and are even less so these days. They took a bit of business away from the traditional shopping areas in the town and traditional corner stores - which were already too spread-out, and helped no one in the long run - let alone the Bedlington rent/ratepayer who ultimately had to pick up the bills for the folly. A bulldozer was mentioned! And, congratulations having the very good sense to ask local people what they think!

It needs to be pointed out that this is a pre-release version and there are problems with MS Internet Explorer 8, even some with their weird compatibility mode switched off. Seems to be no problems with Fry-a-fox though. So if you are using Microsoft IE 8 (and perhaps earlier than 8), then switch to Firefox at least until someone somewhere fixes something. That's probably a good idea anyway. I've got my suspicions that people using BT Internet may still be having a problem registering. This may be because BT don't adhere to the standard defining email address'. If this is the case it's a b***** scandal, though I don't at all feel that anyone patronising BT is simply asking to be messed around - well not much anyway!

Device Magazine is claiming it has seen (and photographed) the N9-00 replacement prior to its launch in Barcelona. http://www.devicemag...o-mobile-phone/ The truly amazing thing about this is that they are claiming it's x86 powered. Now that might mean nothing to the average phone user, but it's a huge leap forward in mobile phone power from the weedy ARM chip fitted to the current generation of smart-phones. We are looking at more RAM, more CPU, and more graphics capability than many desktops of a decade ago. Or to put it another way, a 3.5G+GPS+Bluetooth capable netbook shrunk to fit in your inside pocket or purse! And far more power than the current generation of Android/Apple tablets - with mobile phone capability - in a much smaller package. The double-wedge design is intriguing; with AMOLEDs the screen could be thin enough to be hiding a real keyboard. If there is only one launch it could be the larger "tablet" one first, followed by the smaller models. Can 32nm really give us a decent battery life with a real CPU in a case size as small as the red one, or will that have to wait for sub-30nm geometry chips? 2011 is sure going to be an interesting year!

Look mum - no backlight! They come in transparent too!

...an SD slot! Doubtless the Beeb will put on a special edition of Click in April, and there will be queues at the Apple centres backup up around the corner clutching their 600 smackers. Before you get too excited though: some people in the know doubt that the SD read/write capability will be fully integrated into the operating system and will just be a data exchange feature.