threegee

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.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...litics-12242397 Well there's a surprise then! Obviously Honest Alan couldn't quite make it past chapter one. Sad really, as he seems one of the most straightforward guys amongst the entire bunch of financial-holocaust-denying Labour front-benchers. And.. it's now back to the old global problem cant, and pure unadulterated Balls! Could have been worse though. Could have been Mrs Balls - AKA Yvette - mouth disconnected from brain - Cooper. Maybe Andrew Neil should now ask her who she thinks it was that wrote the rule book that the UK Banks were required to operate by in the years and months leading up to the banking crisis? A golden opportunity missed! If a couple of the banks had been let fail then they could have been reopened as town community banks. Banks that did not indulge in "financial products" or even mortgage lending; had a very high fractional reserve making them rock solid, and were isolated from each other to prevent contagion in case of bad management. The community banks could pay out all their profits to depositors, regarding every pound deposited as a share, and reward the management in proportion to the interest paid. The market would take care of the rest. That's the sort of thing I'd have expected from a true socialist government with its head planted firmly in the reality of a capitalist world. But Labour isn't a socialist party and hasn't been for yonks! It's like the Democratic Party in the states - a bunch of fast talking lawyers and social climbers who have difficulty holding down any sort of regular job.

Goodness you're right! Or "in theory" at least. Must have somehow missed the likely three editions of Click where this revolutionary development ("developer revolt") was proclaimed. http://news.cnet.com...015954-264.html Now, all the iPad needs is a battery door; a CPU several times for powerful that that weedy ARM chip; an SD slot; an open properly multi-tasking OS; and a 50% reduction in price, and I will buy one - quite probably!

You can catch a brief look at the Iconia in the Apple UK marketing arm... sorry I mean BBC... current edition of 'Click'. The program has been expertly edited to show Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer taking about 0.2 seconds to hit the window close box on an Iconia he's balancing in his left hand. Conclusive proof - according to the Beeb fanboys - that Windows 7 is no good at all for touch devices. Not once during Steve Ballmer's demo, or indeed the entire program, is the Iconia name mentioned; though by way of BBC balance the iPad is mentioned countless times. We also learn on the program that the Apple iPad was the first Internet Tablet and now everyone is copying it. This has caused me to view my collection of Nokia Internet Tablets going back several years in an entirely new light. If I were Ballmer I'd simply buy the Beeb and sack all the fanboys. But, maybe he's too late and the other Steve got to his cheque book first! ---- This post written on a touch-screen running W7 (and quite soon to be dual-booting Linux). Everything works just fine, though I'm convinced the BBC iPlayer isn't suitable for use on touch-screen devices! What! You can't even run BBC iPlayer on an iPad? Did you hear that on Click? Ummm, probably not.

The sad truth is that most local people with get-up-and-go, simply get up and go. There are quite a few reasons for this; some intrinsic, but others have much to do with local attitudes to success. We don't even celebrate our historic greats like other areas do! Is the reason why we still ignore this town's great engineers simply down to the fact that they were of "the wrong" political persuasion?

We'd still need a president. Consider what that would involve, plus which past-sell-by-date political hack would likely be appointed to the position. Tony Blair or ... or ...? And... the job is often for life! Have I changed your mind yet? You don't need to be a royalist to give muted support Lizzie, simply a realist!

Wish I was a Playstation person to help you; sadly I only know about WiFi so can only help in general terms. I'd focus on the "the SSID you entered may not be correct" part of the error message. Normally you don't have to enter a SSID as you get a prompt list of which one to connect to. But if you do have to enter it manually then you'd better get it exactly right! I think you may be confusing five RJ45 (Ethernet) connectors on your box with WiFi. As far as WiFi is concerned any decent box will allow as many connections as in the IP block it has been configured for. That generally means about 254 wireless devices!!! Make and model of wireless router may help here as there will be be info screens which can be displayed on a regular computer which can be used to help identify the problem. The first thing I'd do if there was a mystery problem with WiFi would be to connect the devices with an Ethernet lead. If you can't get a wired connection you're pretty much wasting your time trying a WiFi one. A good wired connection will prove that things like DHCP can be eliminated, and will help home in on the problem.

Just to illustrate that dual screens with soft keyboards are indeed the way forward:- http://www.acer.com/iconia/ This is a real product scheduled to hit Europe (I think Spain first) later this month. At in excess of £1200 I'll be sticking with my singe, dual touch screen and keyboard for a while yet though. Mentioned this before, but soft keyboards make a lot of sense in computer manufacture as you can ship the same product internationally. Only those manufacturers who like to charge up for smaller markets have anything to lose from this. They are also good from the consumer point of view as how many machines have died a death through spillages into the keyboard. They are more hygienic and can be easily cleaned. Also the keys can change on-the-fly to suit the mode (state of the Caps Lock say) or the application. On the Iconia placing you palms on the palm rest automatically invokes the soft keyboard, which disappears you no longer require it for input. Sounds obvious and simple, but then a lot of good ideas are! Update:

Because I think that e-Bay passively encourage this sort of thing because they make money out of it. Dealing them when you have to is like knocking your head against a brick wall, and in this case I don't have to, so I won't! My duty is to consumers, and not to do the job of a faceless American megacorp, which seems only bent on making money out of sellers, and not looking after buyer interests. You obviously haven't read what I wrote earlier. These flash devices only store a small part of the data submitted to them, but just enough to pass a cursory acceptance test by a gullible buyer. They are totally worthless, and deliberately built as scam devices. If they were just factory seconds they'd still report their paltry capacity correctly. They are A COMPLETE FRAUD; no excuses; no other interpretation.They are also dangerous, in that they are sold as data backup devices, and so could easily result in the loss of costly or irreplaceable data.

We're now up to 199 suckers, and only one person has sussed out it's a scam but seems resigned to not getting a refund! The torrent of bad feedback will be a short while coming I think! At which point the seller account will be abandoned - as usual! Why is there no one at e-bay who has the elementary common sense to stop this happening? It's not as if they weren't making large profits and so couldn't afford to police their listings properly.

You're right not to be too sure - it was actually taken in the morning.

Naah - then he'd be selling lemons instead of apples!

Here's a particularly blatant one; and the dummies who run e-Bay are actually promoting it in their targeted ads! http://cgi.e-bay.co....em=160522621381 157 suckers and counting. The only recent bad feedback the seller currently has is for the "128GB" one here: http://cgi.e-bay.co....em=160522620555 And that buyer hasn't even taken the trouble to tell anyone why he's unhappy! Wonder how many people will test it to capacity on receipt, and worse, how many will think they've taken a good backup of their valuable data! Caveat e-Bay! [ Important Note: remove the dash in e-bay to get links to work. ]

Now renders without the horizontal scrollbar on my phone and so gets a fair bit more in the frame. Can we fix the "smiley gap" and get the homepage accepting the new geometry? Also a default image for folks who can't be ar.... bothered to upload a picture with their stories would be a big advance. I vote for a pix of Tommy, but maybe we should have a democratic poll?

And... this is the turd who - according to some - deliberately pushed Railtrack into bankruptcy by lying to them about government support in order to fulfil some dastardly political scheme. Where were the courts then to protect the victims from his naked abuse of political power? Probably where the courts usually are: protecting their paymasters and the establishment. Interesting how quickly attitudes change when the truth can no longer be denied. I'm sure old T. Dan Smith would have had something interesting to say on the subject!

It's all a huge pretence Monsta. The Govt. is pretending that the £9K will somehow help balance the books, when in fact many students won't repay it at all, and by the the time most are asked to repay it £9K will be worth diddly squat anyway! A pure paper exercise. The students are pretending that it's a real issue, when again the ones that don't get decent paying jobs after uni won't have to repay it. The ones that get £100K jobs (probably the minimum wage in 2030!) will likely discover that it's fully tax deductible, and by the time they have to repay they won't miss it anyway. The real issue is the accrued burden of national debt and taxation on future generations, but the politicians are grateful that the students haven't wised up to that one. ...and... BTW: MPs see themselves as making the law, so quite naturally also see themselves as not bound by it in the same way as us mortals. Hence the dismay at their expenses being challenged.

Ah, the venerable BDOS error on X: problem! You'd think that after 35 years they'd have fixed that bug. Anyway, smells of Java to me; which is why Android has no great appeal, and also why MeeGo will rule in a very few years time.

As it happens I'm a onetime co-owner of The Gardners Arms, though didn't know that until I flicked through the deeds. I've also so many connections to the town's canine mascot that I'm almost ashamed to reveal that the closest I've ever been to one is the focus length of the odd camera. So... don't blame the kids that our education system has failed to give them even the remotest clue to their town's history and place in the world; the problem is generic!

a ) Forget all the agency/dole crap and run off some *small* cards on your computer with your name address, phone number, and a very short previous employment summary. Add a polite request for a job, indicating your willingness to work hard, and what sorts of things you think you are good at. Keep it all very short! b ) Get out a local trade directory and ring around to find which smaller business have their head office on or near the premises. c ) Get on your bike and visit each asking politely for two minutes of the boss's time. *Do not* ask them if they have any vacancies. If they won't see you then and there leave your card and ask for it to be passed on. If they say they have no vacancies simply say that you can earn more for the firm than they will need to pay you, and you'd like them to give you a chance to prove it. You might have to visit 100 employers, but one of the smaller firms will be bright enough to employ you. The one that is will be the one you would want to work for anyway. In 40 years of running a business I've only been directly asked for a job two or three times - I still find this incredible! Though I've had to wade through countless hundreds of pointless job applications. On every occasion I've tried to accommodate someone who had the get up and go to actually ask personally. Personal contact, and demonstrated willingness is everything.

Bypassing Portugal and going straight for Eldorado? April they say, but then I thought all the signals pointed to an Irish crisis next February and not right now. As a condition of the Irish - ("There is absolutely no truth to a rumour concerning external assistance" -- Irish ministry of finance) - bailout, it seems bondholders will get back less than their original investment. That's right and proper, and if only Alastair Darling had had the guts to do this we wouldn't be in quite the mess we are in. But, therein is a long-term benefit. In the short-term it will only bring on the inevitable as bondholders - who by the very nature of the product hate losing money - start being picky about which bonds they buy. Contagion is the word I'm looking for, and it's coming to (another) country near you quite soon!