Ditto... how the eff do you forget your laptop? Phone, maybe I can buy - the holster broke, it slipped out my pocket in the cab...
One place I worked at for a while, in France, was in an industrial estate. They'd carefully secured everything with magic keycard entry and security, and were very careful about letting laptops out of the building. I eventually got permission to travel with my laptop on the basis that I was spending weeks at a time off at the R&D centre several hundred miles away, and got a habit of taking it home in the evenings as well. I mention this because I walked in with my laptop one Tuesday morning and discovered that over the previous night, somebody had walked in and stolen every single laptop from the building. For a while I was the only person with a laptop...
So yeah. Laptops are tempting targets and do tend to 'disappear', so some of these 'forgetfulness' issues may actually be assisted by larceny. I find it a little inexplicable that so many people actually lose them in the literal sense, but I suppose it's not all that difficult. If for example you've been from say Austin to say Milwaukee via Memphis and Chicago, and upon exiting the airport you're lugging around a small suitcase, a cabin bag, two plastic bags containing duty-free and a bottle of water to replace the one confiscated at the airport respectively, and a laptop bag, then it seems not beyond the realms of plausibility that you might inadvertently leave something behind in the taxi. This only gets worse with really long-haul flights, which often leave you disgustingly overtired and dehydrated and generally incapable of counting your own shoes, assuming you remembered to retrieve them from the X-ray machine on your way through, let alone the number of items of luggage you have on you and whether you packed your laptop in the briefcase or just carried it around the airport in its metrosexual little neoprene sock.
I have no explanation for the number of idiots who lose laptops on trains in the UK, other than to say that if you make it through a trip from Penzance to Glasgow with your soul intact, let alone your luggage, you are already doing pretty well.
Not that I give a monkey's about this entire discussion, but:
There's a big difference between natural and unnatural death. What you're saying is like comparing death by murder and death by old age because they both have the same end result.
The word 'natural' is frequently used to imply acceptability, like there's some kind of ethical magic involved in leaving stuff in its default states. Here's one for you: a guy with untreated diabetes dies; another gets an infected scratch, gets septicemia, dies. Are these deaths natural? Yes. But acceptable, given that each could probably have been fixed or handled? What if a doctor saw them, couldn't be bothered to treat them, and let the illness progress?
Why does anyone believe that prefixing anything with the word 'natural' changes anything at all? Nature, red in tooth and claw? We human beings, we're all about defeating nature - not getting inconveniently eaten by predators, for example - and frankly that's pretty much exactly what I like about humanity. Letting 'nature' do its thing is not a very human or humane characteristic. Old age is not your friend just because it is 'natural', either.
Andymadigan's points/examples are interesting, and are not solved by chucking around the idea that that which is untreated is 'natural'. And yes, not creating is often the equivalent of destroying, which is why involuntary manslaughter/criminally negligent homicide is a crime; where there is any duty of care, to stand back and say "hey, Nature did it [and I could've stopped it, but hey, I was busy]" is not a defence.
If the aging process could be halted, say with Larry Niven's non-existent but convenient boosterspice, there would be some difficult questions regarding the legality of failing to make the fix available - especially in countries with a nationalised health service, like the UK, where people are already using the legal system to challenge non-availability of certain cancer/alzheimers treatments, etc. Whilst I don't seriously imagine anyone will be inventing the cure any time soon, old age is a slow, debilitating and invariably terminal illness. It is not necessarily a nice or dignified way to die, and if you think that the idea that it is 'natural' makes it easy for the patient, then you are probably wrong.
Singapore is pretty clean and I suppose you could eat off the sidewalks there, but the trouble is that quite a lot of insects already do so. Go take a look outside the hamburger joint (McDonalds?) near Bugis Junction mall/the Intercontinental... when I was there, that street was swarming in cockroaches. Much like NYC, in fact... consequence of a warm summer climate?
Me, I'd list from worst to best London and Paris, NYC, Singapore, then all those disturbingly clean Scandinavian cities (Stockholm, for example).
Was in Pittsburgh a week or two ago for a conference and had already read that the city was supposedly polluted, etc... but it was beautiful there. Of course I could still have been breathing arsenic for all I know since I haven't yet taken to carrying around a dosimeter, but visually at least, the place is as near to spotless as I have ever seen anywhere. Additionally, by comparison to many major cities people tend on the whole to be friendly/harmless and, while it rains quite a lot, the bonus is that you also get some really nice skies...
I'd recommend the place. In fact it was so unexpectedly nice that I'm still slightly in shock about it.
You know, that 'someone authoritative' in science is generally 'asshat #472 on the conference circuit'. I don't know why people seem to have this sweetly naive belief that just because people are peer-reviewed, they are automagically excluded from being asshats. The world is full of (for example) papers written for the deluded by the slightly less deluded but relatively cynical, generally on the principle that taking a controversial stance guarantees newspaper articles and hence funding. Wikipedia somewhat discourages the author from adding their own papers to the article, come to that, which is largely because the world is full of people who think they have discovered perpetual motion or whatever.
The professional is a person who is able to make cautious and effective use of information sources, and who is careful to apply a pinch of salt to every source, including peer-reviewed papers, journal articles, the Word of Bill Gates and Wikipedia.
What you describe is specific to the undergraduate situation. Postgraduate is a different issue entirely.
First, there's bench fees - cost of consumables during the course, sometimes hilariously expensive. Depending on what you study, they can equal the cost of tuition. And the cost of the course is not limited to the magical 3100/year limit... Then, there is the minor issue that postgraduates do not appear to be able to get a loan for whatever they have to pay, unless you count career development loans that do not come with the cushy set of conditions that an undergraduate student loan offers.
Education is a total rip-off in this country. It's still slightly worse in the US, but the UK is working on it.
I think it's probably OK to cite wikipedia when talking about transporter beams so...
'"The six circles on the platform are generally used as targets for the subjects to stand on, but they do not appear to represent any limitation of the hardware to six or fewer people. People have been transported carrying others, in a coffin style transport, and once animals, hay, and other inanimate objects". This is explained in the TOS episode, "The Day of the Dove". Spock and Scotty had said that doing a transport like that could be risky. They could "beam into a deck" or an inanimate object and get stuck there.'
You were probably thinking of "The Day of the Dove", then. I can't believe the amount of space Wikipedia devotes to the Collected Works of Gene Roddenberry.
Also, the Eee and the Air are comparable only in the sense that they are both oddball designs. The fact that the Eee is almost in the 'impulse-buy' range for a huge number of people means that people tend to be fairly relaxed about the device's capabilities. For $300-$400, what would anybody expect? It's almost in the same ballpark as a handheld like the Nokia N800, and there is a high tolerance of weird quirks on handhelds. 630Mhz is enough for hanging out with, 512 megs of RAM is enough for a bit of web browsing, and then there's that long list of features (modem, Ethernet, headphone/mic, a collection of USB ports)... Sure, you know your chances of using a modem this year are almost nil, but so what? You may not even know exactly what you intend to use the Eee for, but at that price who cares? Buy one, stick it in your bag for a few weeks and see how it works out.
Given the cost of a Macbook Air, those who have not robbed a bank lately will probably find that the price tag has an abrasive effect on their ability to ignore niggling little details. Certainly if you make insane quantities of money and your environment is so well regulated that you will never find yourself without wifi or power (for >5 hours) or in need of a microphone socket -- and if for some reason you really do feel that the one thing you require is the thinnest possible device, which as others have said is not the most obvious metric -- then the maths will look different to you. I've seen it described as the 'ultra-high end of the low end'. If that's the market segment a potential buyer is in I guess that it will make more sense to them.
The Air has the feature list of a gadget, not a subnotebook. And that is fine, but it's not priced like a gadget, unlike the Eee. At least at the cost they are selling the thing for in the UK, it is expensive enough to require serious thought.
Just in case you travel through the UK any time soon, note that the rules have been slightly relaxed on carry-on gear, depending on the airport, the airline and possibly the weather. Some specifics have been published recently.
FWIW I've never actually been on a flight on which a power outlet was made available, although I've travelled a lot in the last couple of years, including some very long flights. I think that is because only business class and above usually get gifted with this sort of thing. Also, no-one ever weighed my hand baggage, so I'm much less concerned about weight than bulkiness. Although I started with a Toshiba, I ended up using IBM/Lenovo, who seem to me to have anticipated absolutely everything that the IT business/programmer type might ever want to do and built it into their T and X series, but then, my requirements are not yours...
What you describe is much more like German law. But read what you wrote again: You need a TV Licence to use [whatever] to watch or record TV programmes as they are being shown on TV.
You don't need a licence just because you own a tuner. You need a licence to use the tuner. And if they have reasonable evidence that you are in fact using the TV for that purpose, then you are liable. If this is not the case, you may keep every room in your house stacked to the ceiling with various devices capable of receiving or recording broadcast television, and have no need for a TV licence whatsoever. Incidentally, your satellite example demonstrates just this; whether or not the satellite shows BBC, it is being used to watch or record TV... so there is nothing inconsistent there. The law says nothing about your choice of channel.
I appreciate that there is considerable confusion out there about this, but this is in fact how it works in the UK. That is why, when the scum come knocking, I can cheerfully show them my TV and video recorder gathering dust in the spare room. It's got a tuner, but it isn't tuned. Ergo, the goon in question has not a legal leg to stand on, has no proof of anything, and can fuck off back to the infernal pit from which it emerged. If on the other hand said goon found a TV in my living room, tuned, attached to a satellite dish and the remote control sitting on the sofa, that might constitute evidence.
OTOH, you're right about the BBC's long term goal. They do want to increase fees and fee coverage, and would love to equate internet access with TV access as other nations (like Germany) have already done. That would be because the BBC share an infinite capacity to waste huge quantities of money with sufficient greed to want to get their hands on more.
The bot scenario is very nearly what people generally hope will happen when they write an article, though they obviously are happier if people are the ones reposting the thing everywhere since it implies that an actual human being has read and liked your stuff. On the other hand, this is not exactly what article publishers are generally hoping for, although they're starting to come around to it these days.
In academia your reputation depends primarily on people actually reading your work. The same thing is presumably true in fiction, although in fiction there are somewhat fewer readers' conventions and hence a little fame may be a little less immediately helpful. In the eprints world (ie. academic articles available online) there have been many studies looking at impact analysis and online availability, and the evidence is overwhelmingly positive - overall, you do not lose from allowing this sort of activity.
There's no point writing for an audience of two people -- yourself and the editor, assuming there is one. If your name gets known, lots of people will type it into google, go to the real web site (since it will almost certainly appear way higher than any duplicates) and coincidentally view ad banners; but realistically, ad banners on a web site are hardly the revenue stream that a writer would be dreaming of. Freelance authors make a pittance, but even so, the ad revenue on the personal web site scenario that you suggest would very likely be tiny by comparison, unless you're already famous, in which case why are you wasting time writing free stuff for your personal website when you have all those other things to do? If it's for promotional purposes, then great, don't poison the grapevine by being rude to your fans, because they'll pass that detail on just as fast.
If you sell a story to a website you are probably doing it in the hope that it will lead to something better paid, like the book contract that virtually every writer seems to covet, or offers of contract work... And you generally won't get a book contract until a) the guy making the decision recognizes your name and/or b) you have a proven record of success, which essentially means you can demonstrate the popularity of your work. Being able to say that "People are talking about it all over the 'net" is not a disadvantage.
I say this from the perspective of a (occasional) technical writer who does not make money from ad banners on a personal site and knows nobody who considers it a significant revenue stream, although I know plenty of people who use the personal-site approach as part of marketing books, consultancy or appearances at conferences...
And if it were not within six months, they sold you the warranty. Which means that the warranty itself has to fulfil reasonable expectations - so they have to provide a service that a 'reasonable individual' would consider satisfactory. There are also ways to complain about unfair contract terms (I think it's Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999).
They have offered a guarantee on top of statutory rights; they may also see fit to sell a warranty, which is basically an insurance policy. Consumer rights on the guarantee are set out in http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2002/20023045.htm (see 'Consumer Guarantees'), so you can sue on the basis of their failure to keep to the terms of the contract.
There's a nice example of failure to keep to the terms in the Trading Standards leaflet on the topic. They also suggest some strategies for solving this sort of problem.
Feel free to CC PC World on all of the discussion that you have with any of these organisations. PC World are taking the piss and they know it - they just don't think that you do.
Purely as an aside, not that it is all that relevant to this particular discussion, deaf-blind does not have to mean dumb. Helen Keller was perfectly able to express herself in speech and in writing, and wasn't backward about coming forward on a whole variety of topics. Although whether what she said was particularly understandable is another question.
On the other hand I doubt that she was a very good conversationalist, given the challenges. Which she was quite clear about herself, writing in 'The Story of my Life':
"The deaf and the blind find it very difficult to acquire the amenities of conversation. How much more this difficulty must be augmented in the case of those who are both deaf and blind! They cannot distinguish the tone of the voice or, without assistance, go up and down the gamut of tones that give significance to words; nor can they watch the expression of the speaker's face, and a look is often the very soul of what one says."
Another question commonly asked about her is whether she really knew what she was on about, given her sheltered upbringing and the fact that she'd only ever read about most of the things she spoke about. OTOH, you could ask the same about just about any pundit. Either way, she broadcast her opinions widely in both text and speech, so if you call John C Dvorak vocal you can say the same of Keller...
Actually, I was in Austin a few months ago and people there were uniformly polite and welcoming. Quite different from my previous experience of the US. I'm told that Austin is the big exception in Texas, and that if I'd been in any other city things would've been different -- but all the same, credit where credit's due, I'd recommend the place any day. Even the immigration guys (seeing as I have a European passport and all) were laid-back and polite, from 'how you doing' to 'have a nice day, now'.
And as for the airport security on the way back, I wish BAA at Heathrow and Gatwick would go bankrupt and be taken over by whoever arranged those guys, because it's been years since I heard a civil word from a BAA minion. Whereas the guy at Austin airport quickly discovered I spoke German and prattled away in it for a good five minutes - it was not a busy time of day, I was early, and apparently he'd been stationed at Heidelberg or something.
I don't really enjoy the idea of my fingerprints, bank account details and hamster's pedigree sitting in an American database (or any other, come to that). But, fair's fair, the whole experience was extremely positive. As for culture, the place may not be Venice or St Petersburg but for a variety of reasons, I'd far rather be in Austin than (say) Hamburg, Exeter or Milton Keynes.
If you read Douglas Adam's book 'last chance to see' you will find a little footnote at the end of the book, which reprints a letter received by the authors shortly after the associated radio series went out.
"Dear Douglas and Mark, We enjoyed the Yangtze dolphin programme - but listened with a touch of guilt! We recently spent three months working in a number of factories in Nanjing. We had a wonderful time with the people and ate well. To honour us when we left, one of them cooked a Yangtze dolphin, so really there should be 201. Sorry about that.
Yours,
PS Sorry, it was two dolphins - my husband reminds me that he was guest of honour and had the embryo."
There's a Terry Pratchett quote which, loosely paraphrased, goes something like 'Like all uses of the word `community', it gave the feeling that they were using it in a very specific case that does not include you or anybody you know'.
There's also a very active research set that delights in sending out mindless little questionnaires to evaluate this and enumerate the other features of said F/OSS community. Personally, I've long since stopped wasting time actually answering said questionnaires, and so I suspect have many people who, objectively, might be said to form part of said community. Like herding cats, this; or, more accurately, like trying to persuade busy people to fill out endless questionnaires.
As someone who has been known to publish in peer reviewed journals, I can assure you that you should take everything you read in them with as much salt as you can handle!
Peer-review means that it has been checked out by a small number of people, who may or may not have been half asleep at the time (they may not even have seen it; it is common practice to get your students to do your boring paper reviews for you).
I'm not necessarily arguing that the system sucks - to be fair it does tend to get rid of the majority of perpetual motion kooks most of the time - but you should be sure to apply healthy cynicism when reading peer-reviewed work just as in all other walks of life.
I have had a similar experience -- laptop suspended and resumed fine for the first six months or so, following which one day on hitting the resume button the thing spends five minutes making painful noises, followed by a message explaining that XP had 'recovered from a serious error'. Following that, it never agreed to hibernate again, although sleep still worked. No weird software involved other than Visual Studio.
I'm inclined to blame hardware for part of it, since the laptop was also the only one I've ever seen to provide a blue screen of death upon plugging in a standard Microsoft PS/2 mouse using the microsoft signed mouse driver. But still, wiping and replacing XP actually fixed the hibernate, so even if it was poor hardware that caused the issue I'm not too impressed with the solution.
Maybe it's a mixture of hardware, drivers and luck.
"Slow down cowboy! Slashdot requires you to wait two minutes before even thinking about repeating what you just said..."
They may have to add something to the lameness filter, too. Assuming that statistic about the average guy thinking about sex every seven seconds on average is accurate, there will otherwise be a lot of interesting if off-topic stray thought comment spam out there.
To be exact, the BPI have stated that they 'will not pursue' consumers who copy music for personal use. Which means that, in an informal sort of way, the UK has suddenly acquired 'fair use'. But that has yet to be codified in law as far as I know.
Slashdot Mirror
Ditto... how the eff do you forget your laptop? Phone, maybe I can buy - the holster broke, it slipped out my pocket in the cab...
One place I worked at for a while, in France, was in an industrial estate. They'd carefully secured everything with magic keycard entry and security, and were very careful about letting laptops out of the building. I eventually got permission to travel with my laptop on the basis that I was spending weeks at a time off at the R&D centre several hundred miles away, and got a habit of taking it home in the evenings as well. I mention this because I walked in with my laptop one Tuesday morning and discovered that over the previous night, somebody had walked in and stolen every single laptop from the building. For a while I was the only person with a laptop...
So yeah. Laptops are tempting targets and do tend to 'disappear', so some of these 'forgetfulness' issues may actually be assisted by larceny. I find it a little inexplicable that so many people actually lose them in the literal sense, but I suppose it's not all that difficult. If for example you've been from say Austin to say Milwaukee via Memphis and Chicago, and upon exiting the airport you're lugging around a small suitcase, a cabin bag, two plastic bags containing duty-free and a bottle of water to replace the one confiscated at the airport respectively, and a laptop bag, then it seems not beyond the realms of plausibility that you might inadvertently leave something behind in the taxi. This only gets worse with really long-haul flights, which often leave you disgustingly overtired and dehydrated and generally incapable of counting your own shoes, assuming you remembered to retrieve them from the X-ray machine on your way through, let alone the number of items of luggage you have on you and whether you packed your laptop in the briefcase or just carried it around the airport in its metrosexual little neoprene sock.
I have no explanation for the number of idiots who lose laptops on trains in the UK, other than to say that if you make it through a trip from Penzance to Glasgow with your soul intact, let alone your luggage, you are already doing pretty well.
Not that I give a monkey's about this entire discussion, but:
There's a big difference between natural and unnatural death. What you're saying is like comparing death by murder and death by old age because they both have the same end result.
The word 'natural' is frequently used to imply acceptability, like there's some kind of ethical magic involved in leaving stuff in its default states. Here's one for you: a guy with untreated diabetes dies; another gets an infected scratch, gets septicemia, dies. Are these deaths natural? Yes. But acceptable, given that each could probably have been fixed or handled? What if a doctor saw them, couldn't be bothered to treat them, and let the illness progress?
Why does anyone believe that prefixing anything with the word 'natural' changes anything at all? Nature, red in tooth and claw? We human beings, we're all about defeating nature - not getting inconveniently eaten by predators, for example - and frankly that's pretty much exactly what I like about humanity. Letting 'nature' do its thing is not a very human or humane characteristic. Old age is not your friend just because it is 'natural', either.
Andymadigan's points/examples are interesting, and are not solved by chucking around the idea that that which is untreated is 'natural'. And yes, not creating is often the equivalent of destroying, which is why involuntary manslaughter/criminally negligent homicide is a crime; where there is any duty of care, to stand back and say "hey, Nature did it [and I could've stopped it, but hey, I was busy]" is not a defence.
If the aging process could be halted, say with Larry Niven's non-existent but convenient boosterspice, there would be some difficult questions regarding the legality of failing to make the fix available - especially in countries with a nationalised health service, like the UK, where people are already using the legal system to challenge non-availability of certain cancer/alzheimers treatments, etc. Whilst I don't seriously imagine anyone will be inventing the cure any time soon, old age is a slow, debilitating and invariably terminal illness. It is not necessarily a nice or dignified way to die, and if you think that the idea that it is 'natural' makes it easy for the patient, then you are probably wrong.
Singapore is pretty clean and I suppose you could eat off the sidewalks there, but the trouble is that quite a lot of insects already do so. Go take a look outside the hamburger joint (McDonalds?) near Bugis Junction mall/the Intercontinental... when I was there, that street was swarming in cockroaches. Much like NYC, in fact... consequence of a warm summer climate?
Me, I'd list from worst to best London and Paris, NYC, Singapore, then all those disturbingly clean Scandinavian cities (Stockholm, for example).
Was in Pittsburgh a week or two ago for a conference and had already read that the city was supposedly polluted, etc... but it was beautiful there. Of course I could still have been breathing arsenic for all I know since I haven't yet taken to carrying around a dosimeter, but visually at least, the place is as near to spotless as I have ever seen anywhere. Additionally, by comparison to many major cities people tend on the whole to be friendly/harmless and, while it rains quite a lot, the bonus is that you also get some really nice skies...
I'd recommend the place. In fact it was so unexpectedly nice that I'm still slightly in shock about it.
The full text is available on the ACM digital library for subscribers.
University and ACM members ought to be able to download it from here.
You know, that 'someone authoritative' in science is generally 'asshat #472 on the conference circuit'. I don't know why people seem to have this sweetly naive belief that just because people are peer-reviewed, they are automagically excluded from being asshats. The world is full of (for example) papers written for the deluded by the slightly less deluded but relatively cynical, generally on the principle that taking a controversial stance guarantees newspaper articles and hence funding. Wikipedia somewhat discourages the author from adding their own papers to the article, come to that, which is largely because the world is full of people who think they have discovered perpetual motion or whatever.
The professional is a person who is able to make cautious and effective use of information sources, and who is careful to apply a pinch of salt to every source, including peer-reviewed papers, journal articles, the Word of Bill Gates and Wikipedia.
What you describe is specific to the undergraduate situation. Postgraduate is a different issue entirely.
First, there's bench fees - cost of consumables during the course, sometimes hilariously expensive. Depending on what you study, they can equal the cost of tuition. And the cost of the course is not limited to the magical 3100/year limit... Then, there is the minor issue that postgraduates do not appear to be able to get a loan for whatever they have to pay, unless you count career development loans that do not come with the cushy set of conditions that an undergraduate student loan offers.
Education is a total rip-off in this country. It's still slightly worse in the US, but the UK is working on it.
I think it's probably OK to cite wikipedia when talking about transporter beams so...
'"The six circles on the platform are generally used as targets for the subjects to stand on, but they do not appear to represent any limitation of the hardware to six or fewer people. People have been transported carrying others, in a coffin style transport, and once animals, hay, and other inanimate objects". This is explained in the TOS episode, "The Day of the Dove". Spock and Scotty had said that doing a transport like that could be risky. They could "beam into a deck" or an inanimate object and get stuck there.'
You were probably thinking of "The Day of the Dove", then. I can't believe the amount of space Wikipedia devotes to the Collected Works of Gene Roddenberry.
Agreed with the portability point above.
Also, the Eee and the Air are comparable only in the sense that they are both oddball designs. The fact that the Eee is almost in the 'impulse-buy' range for a huge number of people means that people tend to be fairly relaxed about the device's capabilities. For $300-$400, what would anybody expect? It's almost in the same ballpark as a handheld like the Nokia N800, and there is a high tolerance of weird quirks on handhelds. 630Mhz is enough for hanging out with, 512 megs of RAM is enough for a bit of web browsing, and then there's that long list of features (modem, Ethernet, headphone/mic, a collection of USB ports)... Sure, you know your chances of using a modem this year are almost nil, but so what? You may not even know exactly what you intend to use the Eee for, but at that price who cares? Buy one, stick it in your bag for a few weeks and see how it works out.
Given the cost of a Macbook Air, those who have not robbed a bank lately will probably find that the price tag has an abrasive effect on their ability to ignore niggling little details. Certainly if you make insane quantities of money and your environment is so well regulated that you will never find yourself without wifi or power (for >5 hours) or in need of a microphone socket -- and if for some reason you really do feel that the one thing you require is the thinnest possible device, which as others have said is not the most obvious metric -- then the maths will look different to you. I've seen it described as the 'ultra-high end of the low end'. If that's the market segment a potential buyer is in I guess that it will make more sense to them.
The Air has the feature list of a gadget, not a subnotebook. And that is fine, but it's not priced like a gadget, unlike the Eee. At least at the cost they are selling the thing for in the UK, it is expensive enough to require serious thought.
Just in case you travel through the UK any time soon, note that the rules have been slightly relaxed on carry-on gear, depending on the airport, the airline and possibly the weather. Some specifics have been published recently.
FWIW I've never actually been on a flight on which a power outlet was made available, although I've travelled a lot in the last couple of years, including some very long flights. I think that is because only business class and above usually get gifted with this sort of thing. Also, no-one ever weighed my hand baggage, so I'm much less concerned about weight than bulkiness. Although I started with a Toshiba, I ended up using IBM/Lenovo, who seem to me to have anticipated absolutely everything that the IT business/programmer type might ever want to do and built it into their T and X series, but then, my requirements are not yours...
What you describe is much more like German law. But read what you wrote again: You need a TV Licence to use [whatever] to watch or record TV programmes as they are being shown on TV.
You don't need a licence just because you own a tuner. You need a licence to use the tuner. And if they have reasonable evidence that you are in fact using the TV for that purpose, then you are liable. If this is not the case, you may keep every room in your house stacked to the ceiling with various devices capable of receiving or recording broadcast television, and have no need for a TV licence whatsoever. Incidentally, your satellite example demonstrates just this; whether or not the satellite shows BBC, it is being used to watch or record TV... so there is nothing inconsistent there. The law says nothing about your choice of channel.
I appreciate that there is considerable confusion out there about this, but this is in fact how it works in the UK. That is why, when the scum come knocking, I can cheerfully show them my TV and video recorder gathering dust in the spare room. It's got a tuner, but it isn't tuned. Ergo, the goon in question has not a legal leg to stand on, has no proof of anything, and can fuck off back to the infernal pit from which it emerged. If on the other hand said goon found a TV in my living room, tuned, attached to a satellite dish and the remote control sitting on the sofa, that might constitute evidence.
OTOH, you're right about the BBC's long term goal. They do want to increase fees and fee coverage, and would love to equate internet access with TV access as other nations (like Germany) have already done. That would be because the BBC share an infinite capacity to waste huge quantities of money with sufficient greed to want to get their hands on more.
The bot scenario is very nearly what people generally hope will happen when they write an article, though they obviously are happier if people are the ones reposting the thing everywhere since it implies that an actual human being has read and liked your stuff. On the other hand, this is not exactly what article publishers are generally hoping for, although they're starting to come around to it these days.
In academia your reputation depends primarily on people actually reading your work. The same thing is presumably true in fiction, although in fiction there are somewhat fewer readers' conventions and hence a little fame may be a little less immediately helpful. In the eprints world (ie. academic articles available online) there have been many studies looking at impact analysis and online availability, and the evidence is overwhelmingly positive - overall, you do not lose from allowing this sort of activity.
There's no point writing for an audience of two people -- yourself and the editor, assuming there is one. If your name gets known, lots of people will type it into google, go to the real web site (since it will almost certainly appear way higher than any duplicates) and coincidentally view ad banners; but realistically, ad banners on a web site are hardly the revenue stream that a writer would be dreaming of. Freelance authors make a pittance, but even so, the ad revenue on the personal web site scenario that you suggest would very likely be tiny by comparison, unless you're already famous, in which case why are you wasting time writing free stuff for your personal website when you have all those other things to do? If it's for promotional purposes, then great, don't poison the grapevine by being rude to your fans, because they'll pass that detail on just as fast.
If you sell a story to a website you are probably doing it in the hope that it will lead to something better paid, like the book contract that virtually every writer seems to covet, or offers of contract work... And you generally won't get a book contract until a) the guy making the decision recognizes your name and/or b) you have a proven record of success, which essentially means you can demonstrate the popularity of your work. Being able to say that "People are talking about it all over the 'net" is not a disadvantage.
I say this from the perspective of a (occasional) technical writer who does not make money from ad banners on a personal site and knows nobody who considers it a significant revenue stream, although I know plenty of people who use the personal-site approach as part of marketing books, consultancy or appearances at conferences...
And if it were not within six months, they sold you the warranty. Which means that the warranty itself has to fulfil reasonable expectations - so they have to provide a service that a 'reasonable individual' would consider satisfactory. There are also ways to complain about unfair contract terms (I think it's Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999).
They have offered a guarantee on top of statutory rights; they may also see fit to sell a warranty, which is basically an insurance policy. Consumer rights on the guarantee are set out in http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2002/20023045.htm (see 'Consumer Guarantees'), so you can sue on the basis of their failure to keep to the terms of the contract.
There's a nice example of failure to keep to the terms in the Trading Standards leaflet on the topic. They also suggest some strategies for solving this sort of problem.
Check out the Trading Standards site. Contact Consumer Direct. Talk to them early and often.
Feel free to CC PC World on all of the discussion that you have with any of these organisations. PC World are taking the piss and they know it - they just don't think that you do.
Purely as an aside, not that it is all that relevant to this particular discussion, deaf-blind does not have to mean dumb. Helen Keller was perfectly able to express herself in speech and in writing, and wasn't backward about coming forward on a whole variety of topics. Although whether what she said was particularly understandable is another question.
On the other hand I doubt that she was a very good conversationalist, given the challenges. Which she was quite clear about herself, writing in 'The Story of my Life':
"The deaf and the blind find it very difficult to acquire the amenities of conversation. How much more this difficulty must be augmented in the case of those who are both deaf and blind! They cannot distinguish the tone of the voice or, without assistance, go up and down the gamut of tones that give significance to words; nor can they watch the expression of the speaker's face, and a look is often the very soul of what one says."
She also describes the process of learning to speak.
Another question commonly asked about her is whether she really knew what she was on about, given her sheltered upbringing and the fact that she'd only ever read about most of the things she spoke about. OTOH, you could ask the same about just about any pundit. Either way, she broadcast her opinions widely in both text and speech, so if you call John C Dvorak vocal you can say the same of Keller...
Actually, I was in Austin a few months ago and people there were uniformly polite and welcoming. Quite different from my previous experience of the US. I'm told that Austin is the big exception in Texas, and that if I'd been in any other city things would've been different -- but all the same, credit where credit's due, I'd recommend the place any day. Even the immigration guys (seeing as I have a European passport and all) were laid-back and polite, from 'how you doing' to 'have a nice day, now'.
And as for the airport security on the way back, I wish BAA at Heathrow and Gatwick would go bankrupt and be taken over by whoever arranged those guys, because it's been years since I heard a civil word from a BAA minion. Whereas the guy at Austin airport quickly discovered I spoke German and prattled away in it for a good five minutes - it was not a busy time of day, I was early, and apparently he'd been stationed at Heidelberg or something.
I don't really enjoy the idea of my fingerprints, bank account details and hamster's pedigree sitting in an American database (or any other, come to that). But, fair's fair, the whole experience was extremely positive. As for culture, the place may not be Venice or St Petersburg but for a variety of reasons, I'd far rather be in Austin than (say) Hamburg, Exeter or Milton Keynes.
If you read Douglas Adam's book 'last chance to see' you will find a little footnote at the end of the book, which reprints a letter received by the authors shortly after the associated radio series went out.
"Dear Douglas and Mark,
We enjoyed the Yangtze dolphin programme - but listened with a touch of guilt! We recently spent three months working in a number of factories in Nanjing. We had a wonderful time with the people and ate well. To honour us when we left, one of them cooked a Yangtze dolphin, so really there should be 201.
Sorry about that.
Yours,
PS Sorry, it was two dolphins - my husband reminds me that he was guest of honour and had the embryo."
There's a Terry Pratchett quote which, loosely paraphrased, goes something like 'Like all uses of the word `community', it gave the feeling that they were using it in a very specific case that does not include you or anybody you know'.
There's also a very active research set that delights in sending out mindless little questionnaires to evaluate this and enumerate the other features of said F/OSS community. Personally, I've long since stopped wasting time actually answering said questionnaires, and so I suspect have many people who, objectively, might be said to form part of said community. Like herding cats, this; or, more accurately, like trying to persuade busy people to fill out endless questionnaires.
As someone who has been known to publish in peer reviewed journals, I can assure you that you should take everything you read in them with as much salt as you can handle!
Peer-review means that it has been checked out by a small number of people, who may or may not have been half asleep at the time (they may not even have seen it; it is common practice to get your students to do your boring paper reviews for you).
I'm not necessarily arguing that the system sucks - to be fair it does tend to get rid of the majority of perpetual motion kooks most of the time - but you should be sure to apply healthy cynicism when reading peer-reviewed work just as in all other walks of life.
Yeah... I saw that advert.
They might as well have just put, 'screw us as hard and as fast as you can, because we'll screw you if we get half a chance'.
I'm impressed! He recognised the value of the metric system :-)
However, if you had a battery replacement from IBM or just plain bought a new battery for other similar models, you will possibly be affected too.
My original laptop battery developed a fault pretty quickly. IBM replaced it. It seems that they replaced a weak battery with an explosive one...!
I have had a similar experience -- laptop suspended and resumed fine for the first six months or so, following which one day on hitting the resume button the thing spends five minutes making painful noises, followed by a message explaining that XP had 'recovered from a serious error'. Following that, it never agreed to hibernate again, although sleep still worked. No weird software involved other than Visual Studio.
I'm inclined to blame hardware for part of it, since the laptop was also the only one I've ever seen to provide a blue screen of death upon plugging in a standard Microsoft PS/2 mouse using the microsoft signed mouse driver. But still, wiping and replacing XP actually fixed the hibernate, so even if it was poor hardware that caused the issue I'm not too impressed with the solution.
Maybe it's a mixture of hardware, drivers and luck.
"Slow down cowboy! Slashdot requires you to wait two minutes before even thinking about repeating what you just said..."
They may have to add something to the lameness filter, too. Assuming that statistic about the average guy thinking about sex every seven seconds on average is accurate, there will otherwise be a lot of interesting if off-topic stray thought comment spam out there.
To be exact, the BPI have stated that they 'will not pursue' consumers who copy music for personal use. Which means that, in an informal sort of way, the UK has suddenly acquired 'fair use'. But that has yet to be codified in law as far as I know.