Slashdot Mirror

I had a thought to build the charging mat into a kind of stand for the phone that would hold both in the ideal position to charge

The Nexus 4 Wireless Charger did this. It was quite nice.

...and I say that as a former ST owner, not Amiga. The hardware was astounding, the custom chips instead of pushing everything through the CPU was fantastic. I liked my ST a lot for what I did (SM124 'paper white' mono monitor, built-in MIDI ports) but there's no denying the Amiga was more powerful. PCs were nowhere.

Late eighties/early 90s I worked weekend and holiday job selling 16 bit games and computers. We were the first in the area to seriously specialise in them, so we got a bit of reputation. Sold a large amount of everything, then started moving into PCs. I could not believe the prices people were paying for such utter garbage - Amigas killed them.

Then there is programming. I remember looking at a declaration in C: far char *, and deciding never to do segmented memory model junk again and just do all my coding on the flat addressing of the 68000 range.

Amigas could have looked more professional and been built out of metal I think, and they would have been taken more seriously, But the my-mum-was-on-the-board-at-IBM-so-I-got-the-contract juggernaut of MS DOS, as hacked out and made ubiquitous by Compaq, had taken over by then and single manufacturer stuff was struggling to hang on - even Apple. The name Commodore was mostly associated with home gaming, so apart from Germany and Scandinavia it struggled to get recognition as a serious firm. Its own antics with suppliers and retailers didn't endear it much either - see Brian Bagnall's excellent book Commodore - A Company On The Edge. But the machines and capabilities themselves? Lightyears ahead.

There's one with "business packaging" that comes without the mouse (still has the numpad though). There's one on the UK amazon too.

That new Razer one looks nice, apart from being wired. Wireless was one of my must-have features, so after much research I went with the Drevo Calibur and I've been very happy with it. I've had it for about 9 months.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0...

What I _don't_ like about it is the small return key (it's like a shift key, one row instead of two) and the wireless battery life isn't great, it can only go about a day without charging. As much as I wanted wireless, I just leave the USB cable plugged in now lol.

What _some_ people might not like is that you don't get function keys, you have to press the function button and then a numeric key, for example FN+3 for F3. I totally expected this to be a pain in the ass but honestly it has never bothered me.

I too wanted a non-Windows keyboard but a good wireless non-Windows mechanical keyboard basically doesn't exist. The compromise I made was accepting a Windows keyboard that ticked all the other boxes. I intended to buy replacement key caps, but I've never got round to it.

The litmus test is, if this keyboard broke, would I buy the same one again? Yes I think so.

this has been studied for many decades, not related to software libre at all. the book i recommend is named "invisible dynamics": https://www.amazon.co.uk/Invis...

it outlines six systemic laws - and they are laws (not "guidelnes") - which, when you examine them closely, you will find that any software libre project (or any business) that violates one of those laws is a project that *will* be in trouble, in some form. as the book has to be paid for, i extracted the systemic laws and outlined them here: http://libre-riscv.org/charter...

they're really very simple, and are a down-to-earth reflection of the complexities of interaction between people. the systemic laws require that people recognise:

* the right to belong (to feel welcome)
* their role and the role of others
* the understanding of their difference in *their* level of expertise and that of others
* the understanding of the *seniority* of themselves (their length of service) and that of others
* the acceptance of reality (no "denial")
* the acceptance of both guilt *and* merit (no trying to take credit, and no taking away people's right to learn from their mistakes)
* REWARDING of achievements (this is *severely* lacking in the software libre world)
* RECOGNITION of achievements

if you think back on every newsworthy horror story on slashdot over the past 20 years, you will find, behind every one of them, that one of the above has been violated in some way.

* codes of conduct: so horrifically toxic that people feel sickened and repulsed by them, and leave. those that don't leave are under a constant cloud of toxicity and "guilty until proven innocent".
* corporations spongeing off of software libre projects results in shellshock, heartbleed, the GPG developer getitng USD $10,000 into debt; the gentoo lead developer having to work for microsoft due to USD $45,000 of debt
* the samba team taking credit, receiving awards, sponsorship, donations and shares based on my work, causing me to have to go work on building sites in order to feed myself.

there are many many more examples.

so it's been done... it's just not very well-known.

Do you remember the girl who nearly got shot because she was wearing a Clock T-Shirt?

Wearing electronics that TSA doesn't recognize is a bad idea.

Terrible story that. And people somehow seems to think it was "reckless" of her to walk through an airport with a LED display. What is wrong with people? And with security guards - you'd think they should know better than idiots who have seen countdown timers in Bond movies.

The situation is better in Europe. We have xray machines and random searches in airports - but odd electronics does not seem to be a problem. I always wear my SolderTime watch when travelling by plane. I sometimes have loose circuit boards & wires in my luggage too. (My pc broke down, tried to fix it while on vacation. Lacked equipment, so brought it back in pieces.)

I refuse to consider it 'reckless' to carry a powered hobby electronic project through an international airport and onto a plane - and I keep doing it to make sure we don't get that kind of security madness here. So far, they have confiscated a few forgotten water bottles, while completely ignoring my electronics. As they should. I used to pass waiting time taking pictures with my DSLR, but that resulted in too many boring pictures of gates and other banal airport architecture. So I had to stop.

If the cameras don't have IR filters, you could also wear a necklace with IR LEDs to blind them.

Do you remember the girl who nearly got shot because she was wearing a Clock T-Shirt?

Wearing electronics that TSA doesn't recognize is a bad idea.

Also, this isn't an opt-in system. Expect to have to go through the scanning area until they get a good picture.

Twenty minutes you total slow coach.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jamie...

Or you could do it with random ingredients in 20 minutes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And I have a random Jamie Oliver app that I got free on App of the Day back when I had a Kindle Fire HD

https://www.amazon.com/Zolmo-J...

My take is that none of these times include clear up and you need good knife skills to make the times.

The alternative approach I like is to make a large batch of food that I then freeze as individual portions. So I next weekend I will be making a batch of bolognese source. It will be enough for 12 portions and will take about two hours all told. So that's 10 minutes a meal, and it takes 2 minutes a portion to heat in a microwave, and 10 minutes for the pasta in a pan.

How long are you claiming it takes your tea kettle ?

How about 55 seconds?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/SABRE...

(b) i'm not affiiated with a university, so do not have a "tenure" that could be threatened

I believe the purpose of tenure is to grant academic freedom to the researcher. I don't see how criticizing RISC-V would "threaten" a tenured position.

whilst i am well-known (even myself) for not known for getting things totally accurate, i'm sure you know what i mean: a student or professor publicly criticising a highly-respected person... for example david patterson to pick one hypothetical name, would raise... a lot of eyebrows.

over the years i've read enough to be able to watch for the signs, and to give people the opportunity to sort things out for themselves... if they so wish. the six Systemic Laws of Organisations listed in "Invisible Dynamics" is one of the best guides i know. any one of those Systemic Laws gets violated, an organisation is guaranteed to be in trouble. *fixable* trouble... if they choose, but still trouble nonetheless.

Do you know of any online reference to these "systemic laws?" If these laws are reasonable, I'd like to perform my own analysis of the RISC-V community's stability. If there aren't any references online, would you mind briefly outlining what the six laws are?

the book's available on amazon, my copy's in storage and i really wish it wasn't. it costs quite a lot to replace https://www.amazon.co.uk/Invis...

as i can best recall them they are listed on page 23 with their associated "anti-laws" if that makes any sense, and they are something like:

* all contributions by all members, past and present, shall be respected.
* both the length of service and the level of expertise of any member shall be respected and taken into account
* there shall be no "denial". acceptance of "what is" is crucial.

i'm really sorry but those are the only three out of six that i can recall vividly. they're pretty obvious, and you can almost certainly think of situations in which you've seen these Systemic Laws be disregarded. hilariously a lot of them are the subject of Dilbert strips. CEOs telling you that "everything's well" (when it clearly isn't) has an *extremely* damaging effect as it completely locks up the *entire* company.

this despite trying to warn them that the Shakti Foundation is backed by UNLIMITED resources from the Indian Government, and if the RISC-V Foundation doesn't get their act together they'll fork the entire RISC-V software and hardware eco-system, and over the next 5-10 years drop a hundred million completely incompatible processors onto the planet, causing *exactly* the scenario that ARM described in their now-offline website.

Hmmm, this does seem like a worst-case scenario, but I don't see any incentive for the Indian developers to pursue a hard fork, especially if they are planning to release RISC-V commercial processors. A hard-fork for the governmental sector seems more plausible, but that would hardly jeapordize the integrity of RISC-V.

it does if i am helping them to create a mobile-class processor, that goes into smartphones, tablets, netbooks and chromebooks, which, due to their reduced cost due to huge volume, result in them being sold out of india on amazon, making their way world-wide, and people find that they're not DRM-locked and that they can quite easily replace the OS right down to the bedrock.

the problem will come when they find that the standard debian-riscv and standard fedora-riscv distros.... don't work. they'll then start investigating and find that they need a complete total hard forked version of debian, fedora and so on. at that point it becomes hell for the debian and fedora maintainers, who are pretty much guaranteed to be swamped with requests for support of such low-cost low-power hardware.

Apple adapters for the computers come with a plug that slots directly into the adapter (as per the photo in TFA) or a plug on a cable with an attachment that slots into the adapter at the other end. The cable looks something like this:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/exten...

Every major chemical company produces glyhosate products, here is one from Bayer: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bayer...

And no, Monsanto never sued farmers whose fields where infected. All lawsuits have been with people who "intentionally replanted patented seeds": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The patent for Roundup expired 18 years ago and since then all major chemical companies have produced their own version. Bayer e.g had this since many years: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bayer...

I bought three of these for various things, and they always seemed to work well. In particular, the 5600mAh one is thin, much thinner than the typical power bank based on cylindrical cells. I have never had any problems with them, but I shall stilll be disposing of them. I suspect that Amazon got bitten by a a slightly out of tolerance manufacturing technique, which happens to a lot of other power pack and battery makers too. Amazon is, unlike many of them, able to do a recall and willing to do so. I don't hold this against them, and I'd buy "Amazon Basics" again.

I am replacing the slim pack with this one from Anker: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/pr...

Amazon's returns process was pretty slick. They do send you an email with an external link, but:
The order number can be searched against your Amazon order history, and their help pages recommend you do this if you get an email about an Amazon order;
The product name, email, order number, etc, all matched what I had purchased;
The external site didn't ask for any personal information.

The external site only asked what power packs I had, gave a bunch of links to disposal information in various countries, and said I would get a refund. So the security risks are close to zero, even if the link didn't see legitimate.

"probably" isn't the right word... There's a market with cell phones designed to be inserted rectally.

Yes, yes it can.

If you're the user of a device and are being held under duress, the only thing that's going to protect your data is the ability to quickly and covertly delete it all. Even a PIN isn't secure against rubber hose cryptanalysis.

Your facial recognition concerns seem more about the S8's implementation than about facial recognition itself. Compare to the iPhone X which will show you your notifications if you bypass FaceID but now actually unlock the phone until you swipe up. It also requires that you actually look at the phone, as opposed to just catching a glance of your face. Most importantly, it can't be fooled by holding a photo of the user in front of the phone.

You may also be interested to learn about the existence of screen privacy protectors.

Right so a link to a USA commerce website urging British people to buy a book! Let's try that again with a link to the UK Amazon web site.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Basic...

Then get a dual USB A/USB C flash drive. It's the same as saying I looked for my Zip drive but couldn't remember where the Ultrawide SCSI cable was...it's just a transitory point in time whilst people switch over.

I personally guess this will be five to seven years before you start seeing desktops without USB A, but you've got to start somewhere.

Nor Taipei. The Taiwan solution is that convenience stores will collect the package and you can pick it up from there.

Actually people are trying this in the UK - basically supermarkets have a bunch of lockers which you can get stuff delivered to and pick it up.

In both cases it's an end run around the postal service - in Taipei the convenience stores run their own delivery service and in the UK it's an Amazon thing

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/he...

The Taipei one is interesting because rather than have people buy stuff mail order and skip visiting the store, the store actually gets a piece of the online delivery action by low balling the delivery price and piggy backing the service on the service they have to run anyway to deliver food to the convenience stores.

In the UK Amazon are in the odd situation of having to convince supermarkets to host the lockers for Amazon deliveries, even though the supermarkets see Amazon trying to compete them out of business.

Right for example

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jamie...

You can get to and from the restaurant in 15 minutes then? Realistically for the vast majority of people this is not the case.

If we're playing that game, I'll 'raise' you a WileyFox for £150 (UKP): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wiley...

It's got a fingerprint reader, NFC, decent screen, decent enough camera, decent processor, stock Android (almost crapware free), and you can use it dual-sim if you want (or put in a big SD card). It's not perfect, but I seriously doubt the Samsungs are either (being that Samsung software is universally terrible). Jury's out on the Apples, but I'll buy 5 of these before paying for even one Apple.

(I recall that the outer planets were detected before they were known this way)

Neptune was found this way, but that was likely coincidence. The early estimates of Uranus's mass (and the other planets, principally Jupiter's) were off by a few percent, which made Le Verrier's estimate for the location of Neptune essentially unjustifiable. But he got lucky, and Galle found the planet at the predicted position. Repeating Le Verrier's calculation with the revised Solar System geometry after the transits of Venus in the 1870s and 1880s just did not work - Neptune was again in the "wrong place". So ... there must be another perturbing planet out there, and off went Percival Lowell on his planet-hunt, which culminated in Clive Tombaugh's 1930 discovery of Pluto.

Come the space age, and actually putting objects of known mass through the solar system (the Mariner series, the Pioneers, the Voyagers) and we got direct measurements of the masses of the major planets, and that's when the initial errors in Uranus's position reduced to within observational uncertainty, and Neptune's too. Pluto, frankly, doesn't matter. The currently proposed PlantNine (Brown-Batygin2016) doesn't matter for Neptune and inwards ; neither does the Mars-ish proposed planet. Too small, too far away.

Intuitively the angles involved must be far smaller than typical mechanical tools could measure so how do they do it?

Well ... I'll give you a hint : they don't go down to the hardware store and buy a protractor. It's custom builds all the way, for professional "astrometry" work. There was a book on my shopping list for some years, which I never found time to buy or read, called "Dividing the Circle" ... here it is, of you've got the thick end of £100 and a couple of weeks of reading time to devote to it.

What do you consider "typical tools"? I work with steering oil wells, and for 30+ years people have been making their direction and inclination measurements to an accuracy of 0.1 degrees of arc (6 minutes of arc) ; we have to correct for how much a steel pipe 200mm outside and 75mm inside sags when suspended horizontally between two supported points 20m apart (the approximate size of the tools ; smaller tools, lower accuracy). This is utterly routine. For amateur telescope work, you get to within a half-degree (of arc) or so of your desired object, then start to "zoom in" using the patterns of relative star positions from your "finder chart". (Compiling those stellar atlases is a different kettle of fish ; Google for the technical publications on how the Hipparcos and Gaia satellites work for state-of-the art.) You measure positions on the sky relative to other stars ... and have to check for ones with known relative ("proper") motions compared to other stars. And every few decades, you have to buy a new set of star atlases. The standard (to amateur level ; professionals only work from online databases) work is Uranometria 2000 ; the "2000" part of the publication's name is the "epoch" to which the atlas was drawn ; the previous edition was done in 1950, the previous in 1900 ... it is literally never-ending. Until you use the databases, which can produce a star map accurate for your date and time of observing.

1. There's no way that storing years worth of textbooks would offset the cost reduction from increasing the print run. Particularly for the 101 books that sell a large number of copies.

2. If you were storing the books, you could just as easily print and store them overseas to avoid that tax.

3. The very same books are typically much cheaper in overseas markets where education is less expensive. For some, publishers even go out their way to make the text order different to maintain this markup, see for example Campbell Biology in the UK (Global Edition) vs. the US book.

For subjects like calculus, publishers have come up with the "metric edition" because US and EU college students can't use unfamiliar units.

1. There's no way that storing years worth of textbooks would offset the cost reduction from increasing the print run. Particularly for the 101 books that sell a large number of copies.

2. If you were storing the books, you could just as easily print and store them overseas to avoid that tax.

3. The very same books are typically much cheaper in overseas markets where education is less expensive. For some, publishers even go out their way to make the text order different to maintain this markup, see for example Campbell Biology in the UK (Global Edition) vs. the US book.

For subjects like calculus, publishers have come up with the "metric edition" because US and EU college students can't use unfamiliar units.

I call bullshit on the whole "pharmaceutical grade bicarb is so spesh-ul" argument. If you're in medicine in the UK, guess where you can order this grade, and at what price?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sodiu...

Note the big red caution that no supplier will ship this product to the US. Since the bloodstreams of British [patients are going to be the same as US patients, the reason for this is that US pharma is setting us up for another Daraprim.

If they get away with this one, we might as well fill our bathtubs for when pharma engineers a shortage of water.

This one is a great book about the early days of getting computer companies established. The significance of Commodore is often overlooked these days, but at the time they were trouncing the likes of Apple.

Unfortunately, Jack Tramiel never really evolved into a big company player and kept small practices like starving suppliers etc. going. The later nepotism didn't help much either. This is a fascinating book of how a company that should have become what Apple is today, with tech way ahead of its time, fell into ruin. Well worth the read.

• Running Lean . Ash Maurya. The step by step application of Lean Startup & Customer Development.
• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It . Michael Gerber. What you have to do to run a company that delivers better service consistently, works better, and is worth more with less effort. In a few words: work on your business, not in your business.
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less .Greg McKeown. If you find yourself stretched too thin, overworked and loosing motivation this book will help you refocus on your professional and personal life.
• Business Model Generation . Ostewalder & Pigneur. Their Business Model Canvas has revolutionized the way we think about creating business and accelerates a lot the creation of a viable business plan. Complemented with Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas.
• Information Rules . Shapiro, Varian (yes, Google’s Varian). A classic that is fully applicable now a days. The examples are old but not the business logic.
• Pimento Map . Cedric Donck. To learn how to evaluate a startup or business opportunity as an investor.
• The Management Playbook .Brandon Allen. Great reading about how to develop an effective management style.
• How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk .Adele Faber. Not only a parenting book, also good to teach you to talk and listen to your team.

• Running Lean . Ash Maurya. The step by step application of Lean Startup & Customer Development.
• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It . Michael Gerber. What you have to do to run a company that delivers better service consistently, works better, and is worth more with less effort. In a few words: work on your business, not in your business.
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less .Greg McKeown. If you find yourself stretched too thin, overworked and loosing motivation this book will help you refocus on your professional and personal life.
• Business Model Generation . Ostewalder & Pigneur. Their Business Model Canvas has revolutionized the way we think about creating business and accelerates a lot the creation of a viable business plan. Complemented with Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas.
• Information Rules . Shapiro, Varian (yes, Google’s Varian). A classic that is fully applicable now a days. The examples are old but not the business logic.
• Pimento Map . Cedric Donck. To learn how to evaluate a startup or business opportunity as an investor.
• The Management Playbook .Brandon Allen. Great reading about how to develop an effective management style.
• How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk .Adele Faber. Not only a parenting book, also good to teach you to talk and listen to your team.

• Running Lean . Ash Maurya. The step by step application of Lean Startup & Customer Development.
• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It . Michael Gerber. What you have to do to run a company that delivers better service consistently, works better, and is worth more with less effort. In a few words: work on your business, not in your business.
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less .Greg McKeown. If you find yourself stretched too thin, overworked and loosing motivation this book will help you refocus on your professional and personal life.
• Business Model Generation . Ostewalder & Pigneur. Their Business Model Canvas has revolutionized the way we think about creating business and accelerates a lot the creation of a viable business plan. Complemented with Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas.
• Information Rules . Shapiro, Varian (yes, Google’s Varian). A classic that is fully applicable now a days. The examples are old but not the business logic.
• Pimento Map . Cedric Donck. To learn how to evaluate a startup or business opportunity as an investor.
• The Management Playbook .Brandon Allen. Great reading about how to develop an effective management style.
• How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk .Adele Faber. Not only a parenting book, also good to teach you to talk and listen to your team.

As for interior, my current apartment doesn't have room for me to put a drying rack anywhere that I won't trip over it.

Get a retractable rack to put over the bath.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Braba...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/FINER...

As for interior, my current apartment doesn't have room for me to put a drying rack anywhere that I won't trip over it.

Get a retractable rack to put over the bath.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Braba...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/FINER...

The New Dark Ages Conspiracy and Cure Tooth Decay

The New Dark Ages Conspiracy and Cure Tooth Decay

It strikes me as somewhat odd that the British market doesn't have the same basic phone models we have in the US, but these mostly have the same functionality as the one I have in the US. Multiple handsets, plus the base has the ability to Bluetooth to two cell phones. I have a larger home, and we have the five-handset version (the feature is Link2Cell in the US version if you want to check out Amazon's offerings on this side of the pond for comparison). You can leave your cell phone plugged in and charging near the base, but you can still make and receive calls on it (in addition to on a landline, should you still have one - I do, although it's VOIP). I believe the newer ones are able to notify you if you get a text - though not able to read it remotely, which would seem to be a likely feature for the near future.

FAX machines are covered under a different standard, T.38, which just has to be implemented at your VOIP adapter/ATA. The Obihai 200 and 202 both support it, and they're not exactly expensive. If you have a modern hybrid service, where the telephone adapter appears to be analog to you but is VOIP from the internet provider's box upstream, it should already be doing this for you.

Ok - so I'm anal about this... but for those of us who are, it does do terrible things to our ability to hear what is being said. So be kind to those of us who have this disability.

This is a great discussion of the need for provision

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

based on the old joke

“A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife annual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

will be obsolete in a year or two?

When I bought my 780, and at the time (2013?), it wasn't nowhere even the best card and it's still not obsolete...

why would you sink 2x the cost of a console

Because as someone that has all the current generation consoles and just pre-ordered the Nintendo Switch, I don't see why I shouldn't have a graphics card for my PC that works well? I feel the limitations of my current graphics card and as someone that drives multiple monitors with a single graphics card, runs multiple games at times, does a little streaming, a little video encoding, a little 3d work - I just don't see why I shouldn't?

Some people seem to have completely lost sight of the whole point of playing games: it is to have fun...

Maybe it's just me, but I don't really want to play Star Citizen at 20FPS because I find the performance and framerate stutter to actually break my immersion and makes controlling the game frustrating. I don't like playing Final Fantasy XIV on my PS4 because the performance tends to drop significantly in raids when lots of effects are firing off and I am having to reduce my graphical options in order to make it managable at which point my enjoyment is diminished because even despite that, I find the frame drops and stutters really annoying...

There are games out there that will do fine on limited hardware doing few things. But, those games for some reason are of little interest to me and I genuinely don't find them fun.

Who in their right mind spends that much for a video card?

Me and I don't get your logic, it's flawed.

How does this lack of ENTITLEMENT "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"?

How does it hinder it in these particular cases? The things you listed aren't exactly classics. There are many other movies and television programs more substantial and important.

Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night (Do you consider VHS still a viable option?)

So buy it on DVD. In any case, old audiovisual content will very often be on old media formats like VHS. Get over it, kid.

Or you could use one of these.

The Daily Mail is about as reliable as Wikipedia is these days.

I'm guessing you are not familiar with The Daily Mail then. It has long history of running sensationalist, and frequently fabricated, material. The Daily Mail gets a whole chapter to itself in the excellent book Flat Earth News. Personally, I wouldn't trust the Mail (or the Daily Express) to tell me what day of the week it was.

A few years ago, on the BBC satirical show Mock the Week, Frankie Boyle commented that the quintessential Daily Mail headline would be "Immigrants Carry New Form of AIDS That Lowers House Prices"; completely untrue but guaranteed to push all the hot buttons of their target demographic in the UK.

Huh? I'm pretty sure I see MSRP prices on both German and UK amazon:

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

Why go half way? That beast has a 9800mAh battery and supposedly stays charged for a month :-)

I'm with you, though. A week for a cell phone charge is a reasonable expectation rather than having to recharge every night because it's "super thin". Once a phone or laptop computer is thinner than a finger, I stop caring about how thin it is and concern myself with features and battery life.

Cuckoo's Egg. Cliff Stoll. It's excellent. Here's a link to the book on Amazon. If you're a sysadmin you should read this. It's set in the era of mainframe unix and you'll know why the editor wars exist after reading. You'll also gain an idea of just how hard it is tracking someone when they have weaved their way through different links to get onto your system. Although factual, Cliff Stoll does a good job of telling the story with some good humour.

It works with Bluetooth and NFC, as well.

"A microscope. I suspect if they bothered, a CCD device would be cheaper and do a better job than a cheap manual/eye optical one, but have no idea if that's available."

For the price, these USB microscopes and similar offer incredible quality at that price point over any "real" optical microscope. You need to spend over $500 before an optical microscope "looks good" to casual users.

What "legal alternatives" would it recommend

Buying them? Like paying for them with money.

What "legal alternatives" would it recommend

Buying them? Like paying for them with money.

Perhaps he should start reading the post he's responding to instead? Didn't see any mention of weapons in Jason Levine(196982)'s post.

Yes, the AC was sarcasm. But it wasn't very good sarcasm so it's ended up at -1 where it belongs.

For those in the UK who would actually like to know about the reality of self defence in the UK, I strongly recommend parting with 2 squid for this e-book.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Self-Defence-Law-Practical-Understanding-Defending-ebook/dp/B00V44TZ2U
50 pages that explains the self defence laws in very simple language.

Realistically, I don't feel the need to have a weapon to feel safe in the UK. Most people don't and that is a good thing. But even if you did use a weapon in self defence you'll likely get off (the Rozzers will ask "Did you use reasonable force" and nod their heads slowly... the response should be obvious).

That being said, I know a bit of Krav Maga, so I'm not worried about being attacked by a knife wielding chav in as much.

No, this won't work. Sellers have groups (on FB or dedicated sites) where they organize people to buy their product for free or almost free (they provide a discount code) in exchange for a review. They don't usually tell you directly to give them a 4/5 star review (although I've seen that too), but tell you to contact them first if you are not happy and if you leave a 3 star or less review they simply don't give you any more free stuff... or worse!

When I say worse, this is an example recent experience of mine. I have a thing about exposing scams like that, so I joined a group to get a "Best Seller" pair of binoculars that was receiving suspiciously raving reviews, without paying full price. I reviewed it and, sure enough, it was really poor quality for the price (even magnification and effective aperture where nowhere near the specs), so I wrote a (rather generous in hindsight - probably because I had reviewed really horrible binoculars recently) very detailed and technical 3-star review that basically said these are worth less than half the price. I did get a message from the seller "thanking me for not posting the review", which is an interesting way of requesting I remove it, but that's it. Anyway, this review started to slowly get up-voted (about 1 vote per day) so it was on the front page after a few days. But one day, I see a dozen sudden downvotes, and the seller claiming I am a competitor in the comments (they actually claimed I own Agena Astro!) - they even messaged me to tell me I was reported for malicious slander to Amazon etc. So the review got buried. If you are wondering about the down-votes, I got emails from people whom the seller had asked to down-vote me (members of their review group), so that's how that works.

I don't think it is hard for Amazon to fix these issues. First of all, they should remove (or not "count") reviews that have used a promo code. That's the primary method these review groups work. Then completely ignore reviewers who drop-ship (another method) or work exclusively on promo codes - there are Top-100 or even Top-50 reviewers that are "serial reviewers", get everything for free with a promo code and always give 5* reviews (e.g. Top-50 on Amazon.co.uk). Lastly, run an analysis to identify downvoting/upvoting "rings", i.e. users that are asked to mass downvote legitimate reviews.

Up until a few years ago, I thought Amazon reviews were great at helping me figure out what to buy. Now, I only read reviews from items that are sold by Amazon directly, so that no seller has messed with them, the rest are not helpful at all.