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Really? Here's the only link I could find:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/tag/mehth/products/

So, just listening to that music can make you slim. I'm intrigued.

I remember getting same-day delivery on books from Amazon UK in 2008. At the time it was only Birmingham and London areas that they did it in, but now it looks like they service more areas.

Right you are boss:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=sr_nr_n_0?rh=n%3A340831031%2Cn%3A429887031%2Ck%3Anetbook&keywords=netbook&ie=UTF8&qid=1376997870&rnid=340832031

Not shown on that page, but I notice that both MSI and Zoostorm have current, new models on the shelves. I've had good experiences with other Zoostorm machines (including most sold with No OS, if you look for it), so I'll definitely be looking them up for my next Netbook purchase.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Veet-Men-Hair-Removal-Creme/dp/B000KKNQBK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376658253&sr=8-1&keywords=veet+for+men
I would advise against eating or drinking whilst reading this, at least if you value your keyboard. Also, possibly NSFW.

On amazon UK.. my mom sent me this. http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B000KKNQBK

And no its not in their list.

Truly the best. None better. In the past, I've sent the link to coworkers sitting close to me. They laugh so hard, it stops all work as others investigate. Over 700 reviews for your reading pleasure.

And no its not in their list.

Oh, hush. Don't use logic and facts to disabuse a "typical 'merican" of his world view (USA #1! USA #1! USA #1!)

My fiance and I (American) just spent a month in Ireland. The first trip out of North America for both of us. She's a registered nurse and had a view of "other countries" health care systems that made them out to be little better than dark age medicine, despite my opinion to the contrary. And since neither one of us had any actual experience that was where we left it.

While in Ireland, she came down with a strep throat infection. She was terrified of having to go through "this foreign health care". I called the front desk of the hotel we were in, the hotel doctor came and examined her within an hour, in our room. He checked her throat, agreed that it was strep, wrote down what she needed to get and recommended we see the chemist across the street and a block up from the hotel. We walked over and got a tube of Anesthetic / Antibiotic lozenges... over-the-counter, no prescription required, and cost about $5. The chemist (pharmacist) actually asked her about as many questions as the doctor before selling them to us. She actually ended up using about two tubes until she was fully cured, over the course of about 4 days. The doctor didn't charge me, and I thought it would show up on our hotel bill. It never did, so I don't know what it should have cost and was lost in the process, or if it was free since he only spent about 15-20 minutes with us.

The last time we had to deal with a case of strep was her daughter, and that took getting into our GP schedule, next day was the earliest he could see us, paying the $40 co-pay, getting a prescription, having that filled for $160 (hadn't met the deductible yet), and it taking 4-5 days for the cure. She was so amazed at being able to get an antibiotic over-the-counter, and for such a cheap price, that was so effective she started researching modern Irish (Euro) medicine, and came away very favorably impressed. So much so, that she is now trying to convince me we should immigrate. It helps that she fell in love with absolutely every aspect of Ireland we encountered, except for the roads.

Indeed. The whole situation reminds me of the hybrid gas/electric BMW I8 or Toyota Prius cars compared to the superior Tesla Model S car. You get some rather unnecessary compromises that way, at least in the long term.

Anyway, you can get a 1TB SSD drive now for under £500, and prices will obviously keep falling. These HDD companies better adapt soon or die. Drives include:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crucial-960GB-Solid-State-Drive/dp/B00BQ8RGL6

http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/harddrives-internal/solidstate/128gbandabove/Samsung/MZ-7TE1T0BW.html

I think you've missed the point. The sort of chargers you are suggesting people buy are the very ones that have been injuring people.

Um, yes and no.

I have yet to have my phone burst into flames, and I've charged it through a microUSB cable from my computer for... well, years. And believe me, it's not a $20 microUSB cable.

Actually, this is probably what I have, and that costs £1.84, or under $3. Is Apple really $17 better at making USB cables than Nokia? Or perhaps you're suggesting that my Gigabyte motherboard or Enermax PSU is just waiting to kill me through my phone?

I'm not denying that there are cheap, poor-quality counterfeits. But that's a different issue. There are lots of companies that are perfectly capable of making decent hardware. Apple using a proprietary cable reduces the choices you have of good quality replacements in order to gain, from the perspective of a non-Apple user, almost nothing aside from the opportunity to give Apple more money.

(Things are different for some of their other connectors, like the magnetic power cord.)

Because USB mains adaptors don't exist, right?

Well, if you ever speak to any animator, you'll usually find a copy of this tucked away on a shelf nearby. I actually started my career as an animator, but these days I find myself programming instead (because i found it to be much more creative). I know of no artist (in the film industry, or otherwise) that thinks contract-work is in anyway a form of creative expression. Their creativity is usually bottled up until they get a chance to let loose on their own sideline projects.

People didn't vaccinate their kids because they heard a (false) series of stories on the news. The problem wasn't that they didn't trust their doctor too little but rather that they trusted the news too much. If you saw a steady parade of (dis)information from a news source you regard as credible, why would you doubt it? Saying vaccines cause autism is a nice sound bite which is easy to understand whereas the counter argument that there is no credible evidence of any link is harder to explain.

Agreed. But there's an important factor you missed; complacency resulting from the success of vaccinations on previous generations.

I grew up in the late 1950's and 1960's when diseases like measles, polio and others still killed people (especially kids) every year and left others with life changing disabilities. My folks, and their peers, wouldn't have dreamed of refusing vaccinations; they could see the clear and present dangers that resulted from NOT vaccinating.

Roll forward a few decades and vaccination had completely eradicated these diseases in the western world. So when modern parents decided not to vaccinate their kids (due completely unfounded autism scares), they didn't realise the enormity of the genuine risks they were exposing the kids to.

Re the media coverage of the "MMR Scare", which was (and in some cases still is) shameful, it is well covered the chapter "The Media’s MMR Hoax" in Ben Goldacre's excellent Bad Science. The tabloids, in particular, continued to report Andrew Wakefield's opinions as gospel, long after the overwhelming weight of readily available evidence proved them bogus.

Congrats on the new baby! A moses basket with a sheepskin liner worked really well for us for family movie time.... baby sleeping peacefully while we watched. Happy memories. I can also strongly recommend this excellent book which meant we had a wonderful, calm time with our baby, completely unlike what we had been told to expect.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/When-Your-Cries-Deborah-Jackson/dp/0340830212

meths

This concept of nationalism is simply less-granular racism and is flawed at its core. People are united by beliefs (I'm excluding religious 'beliefs'). Through cooperation, self-organizing cross-'national' groups can achieve wonders. Your next-door neighbour likely has far less in common with you than an Internet friend from the other side of the world.

The truth is that power-mongers dotted around the world are engaging the local cannon-fodder by any means necessary to aid in their war of control against fellow power-mongers. Propaganda is one aspect of this - stop buying into their illusory representation of reality.

For the love of god, read 1984.

Leo was developed by Lyons, a food manufacturer/wholesaler/retailer. There's a very nice book about about it, A Computer called Leo.

You might be interested in Greg Egan's Orthogonal series, set in a universe where time is a space-like dimension. He puts plenty of further reading on his website as well.

Just how poorly must your company be run if you fuck up scrabble, that you bought.

Traditionally, the problem with computer versions of games like Scrabble is that companies had to find an excuse to sell new versions of the same concept every year (or whenever). This seems to have been the case with the PC versions of scrabble. Which generally resulted in contrived and pointless secondary features, or worse, their messing around with the basic game itself (and just as likely screwing it up). For example, the countless stupid variants of Tetris (like Tetris Worlds) even though the original didn't need all that rubbish, or pointless updates of "classic" games like Space Invaders with stupid gimmickry that appear on every console.

Of course, this shouldn't apply to online games. People can (or should) keep paying- or attract advertisable eyeballs- as long as they're playing. However, it might be that someone felt that there was a need to keep the game fresh and interesting for fickle casual players (whether that was true or not).

That said, my gut reaction is that it's not even at that level of cynical-but-in-good-faith... it's more plausible that someone in the company is doing this purely for the sake of being seen to be doing something, thus justifying their job. Doing nothing while the money rolls in might be fine, but then... why are they employing that manager and his team? Some guy telling his boss that what Mattel or the previous management did was fine, and they should keep doing that isn't really making himself look good, even if that's logically the best thing to do.

So they'll change for the sake of change.

I say dubious, because for all the vaunted survelliance ongoing right now, it failed to stop the Woolwich stabbing attack [dailymail.co.uk]. It failed to stop the Boston marathon bombings

The surveillance is a tool, not magic. Even if the surveillance program provides good information it is still only an input to the security services. They still have to act upon it properly. In the case of the Boston Marathon bombing, the FBI appears to have dropped the ball, ignoring the direct warnings of the Russian security services. And somehow they didn't latch onto the trips to Dagestan. The security services are staffed flesh and blood that can make mistakes, no magic software is going to change that.

I think we are on a very slippery slope, where the temptation is all too great for the ruling parties to take the path of least resistance and extend the coverage gradually to all undesirables and enemies of the state - from terrorists to child pornographers to murderers to robbers to copyright infringers and finally to common members of the public.

Although I'm willing to agree that the security services need oversight from Parliament, I think there is a limited prospect for the sort of extension that you fear. In most democracies the dividing line between national security and ordinary criminal offenses tends to be well drawn and guarded. The two systems tend to live under different rules.

If you think this is impossible, look to China where it is happening even as we speak. The Chinese government even justified its censorship and surveillance of the internet on the basis of public security in a White Paper [english.gov.cn], including the following gem

I would hope it wouldn't be necessary to belabor the point that the British system of government is quite different in both manner and outlook from the government of the People's Republic of China, often referred to as Communist China. I think there is little danger there. They actually have a genuinely oppressive government there and have at best liberalized some.

What lies at the end of the slippery slope? Alan Moore might have the answer. [wikipedia.org] I suggest you look at his book, it is an intriguing read.

Thank you, but I'll take Alan Moorehead to Alan Moore any day. I've seen V for Vendetta. The movie is beautiful, the ideas are nonsense.

'A' for Absurd

The Light Horse did good work back in 1917.

Great movie, if you've never seen it: The Lighthorsemen

A brave man might have charged the Turks, back in the day. Only a fool would charge an Israeli tanker defending Israel in a Merkava.

Stay cool. ;)

Do you have to pay extra to not have Stuxnet installed out-of-the-box?

Not if you accept advertising.

Wonder documents for democratic enhancement! Act now!

This little blue pamphlet changed my life! It can change yours too!

Do you suffer from low vote count?

Too tired to run from the secret police and government mobs? Not healing quite as fast? You may be suffering from low Freedom count.

Is an economic collapse coming from sanctions on nuclear activities? Read this to know how to prepare!"

Revealed: One weird trick that the Mullahs don't want you to know that you can use for more freedom and prosperity.

I quit my job at the Natanz nuclear centrifuge plant and am now working from home selling love tonic on the internet and have tripled by salary! You can too! I'll tell you how.

Moderately naughty full length Western night shirt style ankle revealing T-shirts with snappy slogans!:
Bad government didn't end with the Shaw!
I prefer my cranks on truck, not in governing council!
Restore Persian glory! Out with the Ayatollahs!
Why is it in Iran that Human Rights always seem to be wrong?
Chop spending on missiles and Photoshop artists, not heads!
Iran is a granola dictatorship: our leaders are nuts and flakes

If I remember rightly, a character does something similar in Greg Egan's Distress. I forget the details, but it doesn't end well for him.

Dunno if this will work on grandchildren, I've only ever tried on nephews. These.

I remember seeing a whistle device that you attach to your key ring. When you lose your keys, you whistle and your key ring beeps.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tobar-Keyfinder-Keyring-Whistle-Activated/dp/B000246JIQ

Yes it is a problem that can be solved with very simple analog electronics. That was my first thought when I read the summary, but I guess that wouldn't be cool today.

I remember seeing a whistle device that you attach to your key ring. When you lose your keys, you whistle and your key ring beeps.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tobar-Keyfinder-Keyring-Whistle-Activated/dp/B000246JIQ

I could not find a version of retail Windows 8 anywhere

You're looking for something that doesn't exist because it's no longer needed.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Microsoft-Windows-WN7-00403-English-Version/dp/B009HI2W66/ref=sr_1_2?s=software&ie=UTF8&qid=1367939128&sr=1-2&keywords=windows+8

OEM is the new retail. MS unified the TOS; Win8 OEM's terms are essentially identical to Win7 retail's terms, including the ability to resell it.

I'm not saying that there isn't life elsewhere I'm just pointing out your ridiculous statement that it cannot even be possible that there isn't life out there.

The universe is big but as far as we know it isn't infinite. Multiplying the probablilities of lots of unlikely events quickly gets makes things very very unlikely.

Francis Crick once wrote 'The origin of life appears to be almost a miracle so many are the conditions require to get it going'.

Paul Davies who I believe heads up SETI has written a whole book about this question and having read it I can tell you that he is far from convinced that there is any life elsewhere.

No-one's told Asus or Acer then?

No-one's told Asus or Acer then?

Option C:

Sure you can put your stuff on my phone - knock yourself out: http://www.amazon.co.uk/worlds-unlocked-mobile-phone-frills/dp/B004D3OFQK

More seriously, if the company wants to call me out of hours on my personal phone, then that's okay, but it's a privilege. If you do it, expect to give me something in return. If you're calling me during the night, then maybe send me a text first so I have a chance to wake up and not wake up the entire house. If you fail to do this, then I reserve the right to leave my phone on silent (or in another room), or selectively ignore you next time.

If I'm required to click about on the company intranet or reply to emails or whatever, then you'd better give me the tools to do that, otherwise I flat-out can't do it. You wouldn't ask me to write code without a screen, would you?

They're old farts, only know Cobol and Ada. It's impossible.

Bah .. steer away from those new-fangled languages and stick with good old autocode

• Gilmour Impact Tripod Sprinkler 199TRI
• Hi-Rise Tripod Sprinkler
• various other telescopic tripod sprinklers

CC.

The reading level is closer to elementary school, but some of the math is fascinating to high school and above. It certainly could be used for an interesting math extra project. A great gift for kids:

The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure [Paperback]
Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Author), Rotraut Susanne Berner (Illustrator), Michael Henry Heim (Translator)

ISBN: 0805062998

various Amazon links:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805062998/jbenterprises/
http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805062998/johannsbookst-20/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805062998/johansbooksparto/

These tablets are being offered for sale at £549 (US $834.32) and £634 (US $963) respectively. The Kindle Fire HD costs from £159, the Google Nexus 10 costs from £319, while the Apple iPad costs from £399. Even if there were nothing else wrong with Windows RT, trying to sell tablets for between 150% and 350% of the price of the comparable market leaders was never going to work.

As it is, if you actually want a Windows RT tablet for some reason, you've got to know that there's going to be a huge fire-sale of these things, and soon. Why would anyone pay those prices?

Actually inspired by this book - not by goofing off at work: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Weight-Coronet-Books-Brian-Lecomber/dp/0340219998/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top/275-5495205-5025956 I was mostly kidding, but we do have one guy famous for getting in the middle of email threads and CCing everyone even remotely connected to the issue when he works from home and adding almost no new content.

Mine was £1.45 with free shipping (and unfortunately no tax paid, thanks Amazon): http://www.amazon.co.uk/MicroVillage-PREMIUM-HDMI-Cable-Metre/dp/B000Z6YS6Q/

here in Scotland, I always have a handful of Huawei USB 3g modems. Useful for home-office broadband as a backup (plugs directly into the Vigor Draytek router); I have one in a battery backed portable wifi hotspot (which is great for camping or whilst on the road) and usually a few in my bag when I'm out on client site. I use them with Fedora Linux; they work very well out of the box through networkmanager.

Top tip, use an external antenna and you'll get much better performance.

Here. Not an original accessory, but works fine and includes NFC should you need it. Yes, it does make the phone a bit thicker and heavier - the weight I don't mind (I find the S3 to be too light), the thickness I almost mind, but going from 2100mAh to 4400mAh means I can get three days of my regular use.

yep see here http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Female-Brain-Louann-Brizendine/dp/055381849X/ I've never heard a female dominated industry say they are aiming for more male leaders in their area. As a post above said - we should be aiming for equal opportunity not equal representation

For another viewpoint on the compatibility of science and religion see Sir Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks's http://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Partnership-Jonathan-Sacks/dp/0340995246

It's quite in line with classic jewish thought (e.g. Maimonides).

The original radio series is by far the best and funniest version. As people so often say, the pictures are better on the radio. If you haven't heard it, buy yourself a present.

10 seconds searching Amazon turned up an MHL cable for £3.50, extremely cheap.

So how much is the power supply it needs? Yeah, a cable that needs a power supply to work. Not to mention the fact that it can cut out phone and wireless signal.

10 seconds searching Amazon turned up an MHL cable for £3.50, extremely cheap. The Apple version is £37.

Standardized cable you say? Try plugging an MHL cable into a Nexus 7. Won't work? That's because the chips required for MHL were too expensive and they were left off the Nexus 7.

I'm not sure how that makes it non standard. Are you saying for something to be standardized every device must support it? That's crazy talk.

10 seconds searching Amazon turned up an MHL cable for £3.50, extremely cheap. The Apple version is £37.

Standardized cable you say? Try plugging an MHL cable into a Nexus 7. Won't work? That's because the chips required for MHL were too expensive and they were left off the Nexus 7.

I'm not sure how that makes it non standard. Are you saying for something to be standardized every device must support it? That's crazy talk.

You are probably not familiar with MS's UK pricing policy. As a rough rule of thumb, take what you would consider to be a reasonable price in the US, then double it.

Best I could find at a glance was "Home and Business" for £175 ($265)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Microsoft-Office-Home-Business-Licence/dp/B00A2ILYZ0/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1362037821&sr=8-3
"Professional" for £318 ($482)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Microsoft-Office-Professional-2013-Licence/dp/B00A2IM080/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1362037821&sr=8-4

You are probably not familiar with MS's UK pricing policy. As a rough rule of thumb, take what you would consider to be a reasonable price in the US, then double it.

Best I could find at a glance was "Home and Business" for £175 ($265)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Microsoft-Office-Home-Business-Licence/dp/B00A2ILYZ0/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1362037821&sr=8-3
"Professional" for £318 ($482)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Microsoft-Office-Professional-2013-Licence/dp/B00A2IM080/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1362037821&sr=8-4

Exactly.

I have one of these £24 / $36 Logitech Bluetooth audio receivers connected to my hi-fi and then send audio to it from my tablet, phone or PC. The weak point of the audio feed is then either the DAC in the Logitech device (seems good to me), the analogue RCA cables (again, fine by me), or the Bluetooth A2DP profile. I'm not sure about the specifics any more, but the Bluetooth A2DP profile is more than adequate for my MP3 collection.

Oh, and I use Google Play to host my ~100GB MP3 collection so it is accessible and streamable from any device.

From the article: "Each smartphone in the network can operate up to about 100 feet away from its nearest neighbor. VoIP works over up to 5 hops."

By my maths, that gives phone calls over about 500 feet (152 metres). Point to point communication using cheap PMR446 radios would do a better job if the mobile network went down, with a range of up to a few kilometres in open space and a few hundred metres in the city (though channel collisions might be more of an issue than with VOIP over wifi). These are as cheap as £15 for a pair. Heck, I could probably just about shout over 150 metres :oP

I will grant that the key benefit of this approach is that it works with the phone you have, and working with the equipment you have is pretty much the only option for communication for the general populace in an emergency (such as the earthquake in Haiti that motivated this work). However, you would need to have a suitable ad-hoc VOIP system that can run on a local (not connected to the internet) network and ideally connect using mobile phone numbers as VOIP identities (a bit like a distributed version of Viber).

However, the article notes that the mobile infrastructure was still operational, just overwhelmed by sheer weight of traffic. It is therefore also likely that some internet connectivity remained as both often rely on similar backhaul connectivity. In this case, having phones that can connect to the mobile network via wifi access points (e.g. UMA) would also have helped, assuming that the network "crash" was a bandwidth or connection density issue and not a crash of the backend subscriber management systems. Orange in the UK have this technology deployed, but the number of compatible handsets is very low. As pointed out by others, offloading a portion of calls and data over internet connections makes sense for the operators in non-disaster conditions too, reducing contention for limited bandwidth. I for one would like to see UMA technology become standard in all wifi capable smartphones.

I was going to comment that SD cards have a write protect tab, but then I remembered that you flick that switch to enable CHDK on Canon cameras so the protection is only in software, not hardware.

Another thing that has a write protect tab is the Zalman Virtual Drive USB device. I'd be happy enough to boot from one of those on a daily basis. I already use a few USB keys with ISOs on for different scenarios.