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so you have to make the pasta, make the filling, then load the machine with dough and filling, then wait two minutes per ravioli, then apply pressure to each one to check it is sealed and waterproof then drop them in the water to cook them. Or, seeing as you have made the dough already, roll it out, pop it over a ravioli tray http://www.amazon.co.uk/World-... put a spoonfull of filling in each bit and roll over another sheet of pasta, job done 12 at a time.
I can see 3d printing as being interesting for high end intricate and decorative chocolate/sugar creations. Most pasta is formed by extrusion anyway, and you probably could do something interesting with 3d printing pasta, but not ravioli.

Anyone who thinks this is a good idea should read: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Ro... Possibly the funniest read I've ever had, especially as I saw elements of myself in his character... Oh and if you thinks it's a bad idea I still recommend the book.

My car already has a GPS tracker on it, with GSM texting if it moves, and integration into the fuel pump (or any 12v-controlled output) to allow remote-disable.

It cost me GBP30 ($50?) on Amazon. It's this one:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/pro...

Takes no longer to install than a car radio, hides BEHIND the car radio (and still gets good GSM/GPS signal), even gives you an SOS button if you want it (texts the emergency numbers programmed into it with GPS position), geofencing, speed warning, remote live tracking on Google Earth, etc.

Sorry, but you're at least five years too late.

Sadly, I fit this into a 1997 car, so it's probably worth more than the car. And with a GBP 5 / month SIM card, I get free texts to and from it.

You can buy mice with more then 3 buttons. (4 and 5 often are scroll up and down). Buy one where your thumb also has a function like on on this one and there are many, many more mice like that. Cheap and expensive both.

yep. Noticed for some reason slashdot dropped the amazon link. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Trackm...

All you really need is something the size of a shuffle but with a microSD slot.

The Sansa Clip is similarly sized as the iPod Shuffle. It has a micro SD card slot and later firmware updates allow FLAC and OGG.
It is a great player that survived my abuse for years, with only a silicone skin over it.
I have no direct experience on the successor Sansa Clip + but I would assume that it is similarly awesome.

All you really need is something the size of a shuffle but with a microSD slot.

The Sansa Clip is similarly sized as the iPod Shuffle. It has a micro SD card slot and later firmware updates allow FLAC and OGG.
It is a great player that survived my abuse for years, with only a silicone skin over it.
I have no direct experience on the successor Sansa Clip + but I would assume that it is similarly awesome.

This one is a King amongst toasters

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dualit...

What next, gentile dvda?

Oy.

What next, gentle dvda?

Here you go

I wonder if anyone here can comment on one of Cherry's laptop style models like the Stream XT, it sounds pretty good from the reviews and its only obvious crime is the half-height function row, and maybe lack of height adjustability.

Something like this?

• 1. "Of course they were, most men were taking bullets on the various front for them"
• Is that really true? You might be the type of man(?) this was aimed at? Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain, 1942
• "It is always impolite to criticize your hosts; it is militarily stupid to criticize your allies."
• "When you see a girl in khaki or air-force blue with a bit of ribbon on her tunic - remember she didn't get it for knitting more socks than anyone else in Ipswich"
• (For a semi-balanced opinion on this little "book", I suggest reading the review by Peasant, which explains that the original was actually seven pages of ratty typescript, that the brown cover is a modern fake, and then has thoughtful ideas on the reasons for its use in 1942.)

• USA census 1940 Continental USA population about 132 million, plus about 2 million for Alaska, Hawaii, etc.
• 26.4% aged 5-19, so about 7.0% 16-19; 38.9% 20-44, so about 23.3% 20-34; 19.8% 45-64;
• so about 30.3% aged 16-34; assuming 50% male, that's about 20 million males 16-34;
• so about 35.4% aged 35-64; assuming 50% male, that's about 23 million males 35-64.
• In splitting the 20-44 counts I'm assuming that year by year births for those ages were roughly equal; I'm also ignoring that older people have higher mortality rates than younger people, because that's not going to have a major effect on rough calculations for these ages.
• The total serving in US army, navy, marines, coast guard were 1.8 million in 1941 rising to 12.2 million in 1945, or a (possibly misleading) yearly average of about 7.7 million.
• You also need to understand that a large number of those serving would have been in logistics and other support, a necessary requirement of modern war which Churchill seemed not to understand fully - he periodically complained about how many serving personnel in British and Commonwealth and Empire forces in the Middle East were not actually fighting.
• So from those numbers I suggest that "most" USA men were never anywhere near a front In World War 2. I'm not casting aspersions on their courage - I'm merely pointing out that in World War 2 most USA adult males were, like almost all USA adult females, considered not suitable for fighting and/or more useful in manufacturing, etc.

• 2. "There wasn't much women on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day"
• True. However, about 15% to 20% of the French Resistance were woman, and resisting the Nazis wasn't exactly safe. I would be surprised if the percentages in, for example, Belgium and Holland, were not similar. And that's before we consider the Soviet women who fought as soldiers, partisans, in tanks, and in aircraft (bombers and fighters):
• Night_Witches
• Soviet_women_in_World_War_II
• Women_in_the_Russian_and_Soviet_military
• Manshuk_Mametova
• Nina_Lobkovskaya
• Lyudmila_Pavlichenko

• 3. And all that's before we even get into the subject of how many men in *any* army actually fight.
• Britains

Not with any consistency it seems. They are apparently fine with Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby which doesn't even include the letter "e" once in the main text (there's a nice bit of humour/irony in there being an ebook version though).

Sort of, I'd call it a 'digital book', though, and prolong the humor.

Not with any consistency it seems. They are apparently fine with Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby which doesn't even include the letter "e" once in the main text (there's a nice bit of humour/irony in there being an ebook version though), with all the readabilty issues you might expect that to bring. The works of James Joyce also still seem to be listed, come to that, so I'm somewhat curious as to just how this "readability filter" get applied. I sure hope it's not just based on reader comments, because if it is a group like Anonymous or /b/ is about to have a book censoring field day.

On the otherhand, if they can start with some of the religious dogma out there...

Not with any consistency it seems. They are apparently fine with Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby which doesn't even include the letter "e" once in the main text (there's a nice bit of humour/irony in there being an ebook version though), with all the readabilty issues you might expect that to bring. The works of James Joyce also still seem to be listed, come to that, so I'm somewhat curious as to just how this "readability filter" get applied. I sure hope it's not just based on reader comments, because if it is a group like Anonymous or /b/ is about to have a book censoring field day.

On the otherhand, if they can start with some of the religious dogma out there...

The pun subtitle was "Calisthenics and orthodontia" which was dropped fairly soon. So the Dr presumably referred to a dentist (although most denists are not doctors).

First edition: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Journa...

Not in the UK.

You can Google for "Churchill Coventry dilemma" but make sure you read the sober articles, not the conspiracy theories. As it happens, when I just Googled the top five links all deny that Coventry was deliberately sacrificed.

For a short trustworthy account of Ultra I suggest "Top Secret Ultra" by Peter Calvocoressi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz
... while Churchill was indeed aware that a major bombing raid would take place, no one knew what the target would be.

Peter Calvocoressi was head of the Air Section at Bletchley Park, which translated and analysed all deciphered Luftwaffe messages. He wrote "Ultra never mentioned Coventry... Churchill, so far from pondering whether to save Coventry or safeguard Ultra, was under the impression that the raid was to be on London."

Scientist R. V. Jones, who led the British side in the Battle of the Beams, wrote that "Enigma signals to the X-beam stations were not broken in time," and that he was unaware that Coventry was the intended target. Furthermore, a technical mistake caused jamming countermeasures to be ineffective. Jones also noted that Churchill returned to London that afternoon, which indicated that Churchill believed that London was the likely target for the raid.

http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/myths/myths/he-let-coventry-burn
... What did Churchill know and when did he know it? The most succinct summary came from one of Churchill's private secretaries, John Colville, in his book, The Churchillians (London, 1981), page 62: ''All concerned with the information gleaned from the intercepted German signals were conscious that German suspicions must not be aroused for the sake of ephemeral advantages. In the case of the Coventry raid no dilemma arose, for until the German directional beam was turned on the doomed city nobody knew where the great raid would be. Certainly the Prime Minister did not. The German signals referred to a major operation with the code name "Moonlight Sonata." The usual "Boniface" secrecy in the Private Office had been lifted on this occasion and during the afternoon before the raid I wrote in my diary (kept under lock and key at 10 Downing Street), "It is obviously some major air operation, but its exact destination the Air Ministry find it difficult to determine." ''

I really hope this was written by some adolescent who is fustrated because no publisher will accept the book

Ahem

If you really want to put a stop to companies (snip) never preorder(snip)(snip) Anything worth buying on launch day is still worth buying two weeks later, and you'll save yourself quite a lot of money by avoiding duds

This also goes for things people sit in tents for outside the sore. Also goes for movies and a LOT of other things.
I even used to be the first one downloading a new distro. Now I wait for that as well. (I can run the Beta anyway if I want to help testing)

Perhaps only if there is a fixed limit on what will be sold, it is worth it and even then (e.g. life concert tickets).

Most things are not that limited and just an extra warning: companies do not tell "what a collecters item will be, history will.

It is already. See: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsun...

LOL that you're trying to tell Matt Fucking Dillon off about Amiga history

I am strongly in the opinion that I am right here, but it doesn't offend me if I get schooled.

A good source can be found on Page 60 of "Steal This Idea: Intellectual Property Rights and the Corporate Confiscation of Creativity" by Michael Perelman, published in 2004 through Palgrave Macmillan (Amazon link).

Alternatively, you can probably find an on-line source using Google.

I do have to say it's a new one to me, so congrats on originality I guess

I'm not original, I've read this story and heard this story from/in a few places of authority previously.

Was it this? Computer Programming Techniques: A TutorText

TutorText books are a bit difficult to find. I couldn't even find a cover image. On the plus side, I found a dirt-cheap copy of the one above on Alibris It might be worth the risk to pick that one up.

This is an excellent point. Of course replicators existed on Earth before cells had DNA. According to Nick Lane DNA would have been rather late to the party and is more a useful technological advance that gives cells a more independent existence than they would otherwise have.

Math is hard, I'm a girl.

So, be a palaeontologist. We need more palaeontologists with tits like yours.

ALL of these have since been lost and had to result in going back to carrying around an extra device or two just to accomplish the same task that was possible just a few years ago with a cell phone and USB cable.

I don't get the problem. Stuff like Micro USB drives or are way more portable and easy to carry around than a cable alone.

Walk into a store and buy a fully assembled name brand (Dell, HP, etc) PC, complete with warranty and guarantees, without ANY software preinstalled. You can't. Your analogy fails.

Actually you can get a Dell laptop or HP laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed. But the point is virtually nobody wants a PC without Windows pre-installed (unless they're buying a Mac) so even though those companies are free to sell PCs without Windows pre-installed - and some do while some tried and abandoned it due to lack of sales - it is much cheaper for the end user to sell it bundled with Windows than it is to sell it without an operating system and have those 99% of non-Mac PC users then have to buy a retail copy of Windows to install.

In the UK at least, Samsung still seems to be the highest rated, along with Crucial who both get 4.8/5 from numerous reviews.

In the UK at least, Samsung still seems to be the highest rated, along with Crucial who both get 4.8/5 from numerous reviews.

to find that the audience prefers misinfotainment over news. They demand entertainment over learning. Illusion over reality.

I am old enough to remember a day when the news was actually just that... News.... No opinion mixed in. Just the facts. When opinion was offered, usually after the real news, it was labeled as such.

Then media consolidation happened, the fairness doctrine was tossed and newsrooms nationwide were expected to turn a profit.

You've hit the nail on the head. If you haven't already, I'd recommend reading Flat Earth News. It covers how the new owners of news organisations increasingly cared more about sales (and advertising) than real news, cut their journalist head count (especially serious investigative journalists), and now get most of their content from a handful of agencies (which is why you see the same stories, often word-for-word, in multiple outlets).

Yeah, I sure didn't miss the noise when I eventually got a Compaq keyboard in the late 90's. Although, strangely enough, my favorite keyboard is a cheap-o model from iTronic, the Scorpius M1, which was $12 in 2005. It lasted about 6-7 years, but I damaged the plastic-circuit board cleaning it one too many times. Unfortunately, the only place you can still get them is in the England and Ireland, and no international shipping. Should of picked one up when they were still available in various European countries that *DID* do international shipping.

Now I'm making do with a Corsair K40, which I like quite a bit more than my old Logitech G15, although the back-lighting on the G15 is much brighter.

Here you go:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Duke-...

Now... I want my flying car ;-)

I replaced 50x GU10 50W bulbs for 3W LED equivalents (no longer available) that were more expensive (slightly warmer light). Here in Scotland, energy prices are more than the USA - so the initial investment of 50 bulbs cost 20x as much as the GU10's burt due to the lower wattage (3W vs 50W) would pay back in 2 years (which they have) from lower overall electricity prices.

However, we've had a lot of failures. So far over 10% of the 50 have failed - usually blowing the main house fuse when they went. So the porblem at the moment is there is no way to assess the failure rate for LED household bulbs. This is having quite an impact on the payback period for the bulbs. .

Of course. I read about this quite a few years ago in a book called Global Warming and Other Bollocks. It has a chapter on salt. I'm still recovering from being told that egg yolks are as bad for me as smoking, though I don't eat 20 eggs a day (or smoke any more), it turns out that actually they're probably only bad for people with heart disease or diabetes.

Anyone losing the will to live yet? I could go on...

I believe I linked to both copies that included the MasteringBiology. The only difference seemed to be that US one might have a copy of the text as an e-book. I doubt making an encrypted PDF or equivalent merits the huge price difference.

Still your comment about the probability book is interesting. I wonder if this is particular to mathematics?

Here' s another example from Chemistry: Organic Chemistry by Bruice. In the US it's hardcover, in the UK paperback.

Amazon UK price $99.96
Amazon US price $240.60

it's possible that the difference is the publisher. Coincidentally, the two books I list are published by Pearson who are headquartered in the UK. It may be they price their books for the independent markets, whereas US publishers are more likely to stick to one price? That's pure speculation though and we'd need quite a few more data points to figure that one out.

The US textbook market is crazy.

An easy example is Campbell's Biology Plus MasteringBiology - a pretty standard 1st year Biology textbook. Amazon UK price $87.56. Price for the US equivalent is $190.40.

Take a look at the Logitech Skype TV box. No computer to speak of, just plugs into a HDMI and Network (they do a wifi version)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Logite...

hope that helps.

Only a half-wit conspiracy theorist dumbass would think they aren't trying to find a cure.

I think this is one case where conspiracy theory is basically the truth. Big pharma has created one of the most systematic systems of scientific fraud on the planet - running multiple studies and carefully cherry picking only those that happen to produce positive results to promote their new drugs, over the old ones with expired patents being just one of the tricks they use. If you want to see an excellent discussion of it from a statistical epidemiologist, read Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre.

In some cases, the new drugs have actually been proven to be worse than nothing at all later on, a fact that the drug companies almost certainly knew when they released them onto the market.

Believing that a company that is ostensibly devoted to improving the lives of people, but actually engages in this crap, just to make a buck, would deliberately withhold a cure for something in order to continue selling a repeat treatment? All too easy.

Get one of these - works just fine (although was only £8 when I bought one), hdmi>dvi cables also work.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/pro...

I don't understand the "-1, Troll" moderation.

Quirkology by Richard Wiseman, an interesting read, is a compilation of rigorous experiments in social psychology, many of which were conducted, *gasp*, without the subjects' consent.

Retail stores do research on consumers' behaviour in order to try to sell them more sugary, salty and fatty snacks. Addiction to those nasty foods is a very real issue with health consequences. Where's the outrage?

Here, this should help you.

I bought a Mountek nGroove Snap car mount; Sits inside the CD slot of your stereo, holds smart phones and small tablets up to 7" using magnets and an adhesive-attached metal plate. You need to adjust it every few days, but it only takes a few seconds to do and is rock-solid afterwards.

"The 10.5-inch device weighs just 467g and measures a mere 6.6mm in thickness" ...

Not really that amusing. Screen sizes in even the most solidly metric countries are often measured in inches.

It is listed at 10 pounds. The listing is here.

Until the IWF blocked an image on wikipedia public awareness of their activities was pretty much nill.

And then the IWF backtracked as fast as they could (i.e. slowly and reluctantly). The Scorpion's Virgin Killer album was, after all, available at that time on Amazon and from high street stores in the UK. The image in question has never been deemed illegal in any jurisdiction, and the album is probably still available in some places.

Panasonic's combo microwave ovens are quite popular in places with relatively small household kitchens, and would be more popular still if they were designed to be "built in" to cabinets rather than requiring lots of space on all sides. Newer heat insulation materials are certainly plausible (and some of them can already be found in "built in" self-cleaning conventional ovens), and I suspect that such combi ovens will be popular (I'd buy one!).

Here's a not-very-randomly selected example of a reasonably popular combi microwave oven (I have one!):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Panaso...

The only problems with it are all related to the UI, which Panasonic recognized and fixed in their latest generation of combi ovens, which now tend to feature a further self-cleaning surface (top as well as back) and easier to clean materials than stainless steel and ceramic for the other surfaces. Mostly that has come from advances in the microwave emitter aperture with the goal of "chaotic" standing waves throughout the oven cavity with arbitrary reflectors and absorbers; there is a feedback system in the newer ovens. Other lessons they learned was avoiding burning out the magnetron when it used immediately after a high-temperature convection program, and damage to the glass tray and rotating assembly under unusual grilling settings.

The metal tray / wire rack problem is an area of active R&D, and in modern ovens one can often use a supplied wire rack in any combination programme, and on lower microwave settings one can use a "spark ring" or the equivalent when dealing with metal dishes and trays. Arc detection is likely to find its way into this sort of oven, allowing AIMD style arc avoidance, effectively solving the "metal in microwave" problem. There are smoke and vapour sensors already in higher end ovens that at least in principle could cut power in the presence of outgassing from melting plastic or combustion products.

Generally speaking the companies that are keen on combi microwave ovens are attempting to fully replace multiple appliances, and face the challenge of being price competitive with multiple appliances that do one thing reasonably well. In markets where kitchen space is vast, they likely will not do as well, and probably therefore advertise less into them. But that still leaves lots of Europe, Japan, and so forth.

I was about to post the following, when I realised I wasn't logged in. When I logged in, your post had appeared. So:

Subject: Why does the FDA have to get involved?

It's not food. It's not a drug. There's no surgery involved, as far as I can tell.

Why does the FDA have to get involved with something that is, essentially, a wearable tool? If I wanted to mod a reacherinto something I could strap to my arm, with a couple of electrodes attached to, say, my forehead to detect a raised eyebrow and active the claw, would I need FDA approval to sell it?

I know it is no longer sold - read the reviews to get the idea, but a pre-pre-release of this technology from Sony, could explain why this particular tape was selling for 39.2 million pounds each, while masquerading as a simple DV tape.

I purchased this for £120 about 5 years ago (and came with a keyboard and mouse!):
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/pro...

For its time, this was a mini PC done right.
But now, 5 years later on (when the tech should be improving) i'am yet to see a device that will replace it.

Have i simply been missing the mini PC tech scene. Is there a device similar to this?
In the mean time, i'll keep waiting for someone to do the mini PC Justice.

ps. AMD + Linux = Nasty drivers.

You could buy a watch that doesn't require a battery for less than £ 50 with a design made in the '60s. The main advantage of a watch is that the power compsumtion is very low compared to a smartwatch, the functions are limited to keep the time and there's non need to have connectivity or software updates.