threegee

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.

The problem with your argument is that we were never out of recession. Throwing the last bit of credit on the credit cards around and pretending it's manner from heaven never impressed anyone in the know. People don't know just how close we came to an old style Labour-induced Sterling crisis. If that had happened there really would have been blood (and piles of garbage, and unburied corpses) on the streets! The other problem with your argument is that Labour don't have a "cause" to defect to. All they can say is that the cuts are too fast; note, not that they are unnecessary. They want to defer them. Take the medicine later. For us to be "the sick man of Europe" once again. Sorry but you had the New Labour experiment and it didn't work! It's going to take years to unwind Gordo's economic "prudence" - for the economy to be rebalanced between public sector spending and private sector wealth creation, and for inflation to take care of the rest. If there was an ounce of socialism in the present Labour party they'd have come up with some radical ideas like community banks (see the discussion on another thread). All we have on the Labour front bench is a bunch of people who are desperately trying to justify their existence, and their expenses, by saying "not" in the right places. We don't even have the sort of old-fashioned "champagne socialists" who used to spout at the picnic for a couple of hours, before getting into their limos, and returning to their mansions in the South just as fast as their chauffeur would take them. They may have been wrong-headed, but at least they truly believed in something other than self-advancement, and were worthy of some respect.

http://www.phonesrev...hone-or-tablet/ Do hope not as the leaked specs sounded like the dawn of a new era. More recently it has even been hinted that the device has an x86 (Atom) CPU and not an ARM derived chip. That would have made it the first true pocket computer; but at this stage it's difficult to see how even a highly optimised 45nm Atom chip could have any sort of useful battery life in a package that small. MeeGo is still on the way this year though, so anyone thinking about buying an Android based device or iPad should take a long time to make up their mind as far better is on the way - this Summer for sure! Though I won't be buying a MeeGo tablet any time soon as my Acer 1825PTZ has ten times the performance of an iPad and oodles more besides, all for less money than an iPad.

However - there are a lot of people who don't really understand what happened. Just as there are a lot of people who continue to vote Labour no matter how may economic messes they get us into. While the intrinsic population has wised up over the decades, the Labour elite has cynically ensured that there are another two million left-leaning citizens and their booming offspring in our country who have little knowledge of their previous !*!@#-ups, and who will replace the diminishing number of citizens who vote as their uneducated parents did. If that sounds cynical then try this: There simply won't be any meaningful banking reform! That's because the banks are too powerful, and for their part have engineered that by internationalising their business they are more powerful than any single government. That's a situation which the europhiles (whatever their political persuasion) have walked right into with their eyes wide open. The only possible reform can be a bottom-up one along the lines I've hinted at. A genuine People's Bank - please note Mr Ronnie Campbell - with government guarantees and a whopping fractional reserve. If you have the common sense to explain to your electorate how the present system really works Mr C, then you'd have far more people queuing up to use it than you had trying to get their money out of Northern Crock. You do know how the UK banking system works don't you Mr Campbell? If not then use the Internet to do some research, then get off your backside and apply some of those socialist principals you profess. A lot of local people - of all political inclinations - will back you, and your Wikipedia entry might then read less like a cruel joke on the intelligence of the people who elected you!

Ah yes, but in the end Oliver comes through, and the Bumbles end up as inmates of the very workhouse they cruelly mismanaged. Bumble on politicos - you have nothing to lose but your credibility.

Wouldn't it be refreshing if Dave said he wasn't going to employ a spin doctor in chief? That the country had to take him as he was toff or not, and that he'd simply get on with the job of clearing up the mess and getting us back to sustained growth, without worrying about what the media hacks told everyone to think. That's how it used to be, and it worked!

He's undoubtedly got "personal problems", but it's also clear he was never comfortable in the job, or the right person for it. That reflects on Red Ed, and also on entire Team Labour, as they have no one to fill this important role other than the guy who was one of the major architects of the current disaster. If they want the public to believe that they have any degree of economic competence then they need someone other than Ed Balls! Once again Labour is hoping that people with short memories, youngsters, and immigrants will fall for their tripe. It doesn't have to be like this; they could return to their roots and rethink their professed socialism to fit it in with 21st century circumstances and free market economics. That's not going to happen because none of them has the wit or intelligence to do it. Being a Labour MP is simply a leg up the ladder for people who couldn't do it any other way. Akin to being a used car salesman - except I'd probably need to apologise to used car salesmen everywhere for even suggesting that. No, I don't think local community banks should indulge in mortgage lending. Local banks never did this historically; that's the province of building societies. It gobbles up and ties up capital for decades which should be used to promote local enterprise. I'd call them local enterprise banks, where local people could back local business and local jobs for an assured and guaranteed return, and KNOW that their money wasn't fuelling house price inflation and speculation.The sort of money available to finance the local housing stock simply isn't available from local savers, even when the fractional reserve multiplier kicks in, and for rock solid stability we'd need something akin to a 25% fractional reserve.