You some how manage to think you have four billion Euro's in an account, and then find that it's a forgery and someone has done a runner with the money, makin Enron and Worldcom look like the good guy's and you don't even get mentioned!!!
Sorry but none of the listed things come anywhere near the business dealings of Parmalat for shameful, dishonest and dumb business moments of 2003.
You have not the faintest clue what you are talking about do you.
They may not use regular transformers, but they still use transformers. All offline (i.e. connected to mains) SMPS use a transformer. They have to for safety reasons. The transformer provides galvanic isolation so if there is a failure in the electronics somewhere you don't end up with live mains on the output.
Low voltage DC-DC SMPS do indeed use a small inductor as a charge storage device, and you could even do the same with rectified mains, it is however just not safe.
Utter rubbish. I have plenty of region 2 disks that have no other language but English. As for subtitles they manage to do that live on TV here in the U.K. I would further point out that live translations seem to be little problem at the UN or the EU etc.
Frankly the map sites that serve the USA suck
rotten eggs. They are of an utterly inferior when compaired with the quality of the maps you can get in the Great Britain
Yep, by far the best mapping site on the entire internet, serves full resolution digital 1:50,000 scale Landranger data as licensed by the Ordnance Survey for the whole of Great Britain. In addition to this it has half resolution Bartholomew road map data for the whole of Great Britain again, and after than there is also high quality half resolution Bartholomew streetmap data for Greater London. The rest of Great Britain is served with a automatic street level composite of varying quality.
The Ordnance Survey themselves also serve up maps at a variaty of scales, most noticable a half resolution 1:25,000 version of the Explorer maps.
After that the next best map site on the internet is the ViaMichelin site. This has excellant quality road maps that cover all of western and northern europe, with street level mapping of superior quality to anything that I have seen served up for the USA. However recently they have updated the map browser and made it much less friendly.
Which was utterly useless as a clinical device. It was not until 1980 and a number of other breakthroughs that the first image of a real live (now dead) patient was taken.
Really so all those patents held by the British Technology Group are a figment of my imagination then? Those critical patents that allow an image to be acquired in a clinically useful period of time that is.
Who the hell gets on the Nobel committee and how the hell do they come up with this crap? Another case of where the people that made the real discoveries are unrewarded.
What happened to the people from the team at the Department of Biomedical Physics at the University of Aberdeen who made the critical breakthrough to make all this practical, and produced the first whole body scanner to take an image of a real live patient?
Further if fast imagining was "discovered" by Sir Peter Mansfield, how come the two dimensional Fourier transform methods used in all scanners worldwide and known as "spin-warp", the real breakthrough in MRI (yes the warp is because the person who came up with it was a Trek fan), where discovered by someone else?
Without the spin warp technique MRI would have remained an interesting but clinically useless technique. One has little faith in the ability of the Nobel committee to award prizes to those that should get them.
Except when the ISP has it's routers set to force all outgoing port 25 traffic through it's mail servers. At least one large ISP in the U.K. does this. I saw hundreds of delivery failure reports of Sobig.F because of this.
I've seen a lot of discussion on various mailing lists concerning that, but it seems to generally be agreed that this isn't really feasible - especially with emails from some of the large providers. It simply isn't possible to say whether a message legitimately came from the email address stated at the moment. And no, the sending mail server and/or domain gives no real clue.
This shows breath taking level of cluelessness. The point its that when the virus scanner identifies the virus, a flag in the virus database says Sobig.F this uses forged email headers don't send out a warning. It is actually less work for the email server. There is no need to determine if the sender is valid, you work on the basis that the virus is known to use forged headers.
If you don't believe the bounces are a problem you are have not suffered from them. There are unfortunate soles like myself that are getting hundreds of bogus bounces a day. What is worse it is several orders of magnitude harder to filter these than the actual virus, which is easy. When your email becomes almost unusable you will take a different
attitude to these things.
Perhaps, they might start looking in their own backyard and have their National Institute for Space Research (a goverment backed organization) open source the excellant SPRING GIS package from what is already a free download, but no source. Works on Linux/Solaris and Windows, and is rather easier to use than GRASS.
This depends on your machine. For example my Tecra 780DVD (an old model) gives you the option of restoring the partitions, and if not just makes a filesystem in the first partition and copies the data over. However my latest laptop a Tecra 8200 simply resets the entire hard disk with one huge FAT32 install. Trust me I have *just* had to use this when Service pack 4 left Windows unbootable even in safe mode.
However it did not stop me making the machine dual boot and the person complaining is a whining idiot, and the people running with the stories are clueless idiots.
Sorry but audio books are relatively cheap to produce. First off a full recording studio is massively excessive and totally unnecessary, all you need is a quite room and a quality microphone. You record it directly onto hard disk via a proaudio sound card. Cool Edit 2000, is more than enough to do all the required post production.
Quite rooms are ten a penny, you just need a house in the countryside. In fact more important than a quite room is a room with good accoustics. Ultimately it does not matter if an airplane goes overhead because you can just record it again. In fact you are going to have to record stuff more than once anyway, due to mistakes, coughs etc.
The equipment necessary costs only a few thousand dollars at most, is easy to come by and is already owned by thousands of people around the world.
The only hard bit is finding someone with a good speaking voice. However these are not the reserve of expensive actors.
The actual manufacture of audio books is dirt cheap, the gross profit margins are obscene.
The maps don't take up as much space as you are making out.
A raster based road map of the whole of Great Britain at 1:200,000 with a pixel size of 40 metres, in a 16 colour paletted image (you don't need more than 16 colours for maps) compressed using LZW (it's in GIF format) comes to just over 16MB. A raster street map of Greater London at 1:10,000 pixel size of 2.6 metres again in 16 colour paletted is a little under 60MB.
Now lets also check what a 128MB MMC card costs, a mear 35UKP or around $50. So that would leave me with some 52MB of memory for other maps. So I could add in a road map I have of France the Iberian penisula and Austria, and over view map of Europe, a nautical chart of the British Isles and still have about 20MB left on this 128MB MMC card for some raster topo maps of the UK.
If the phone could deal with SD memory cards they are available in 512MB size. That is enough to hold one quarter of Great Britain in the OS 1:50,000 Landranger maps with a 5m pixel size.
So as far as I can see all they need to do is provide a MMC/SD slot somewhere on the phone. They are barely bigger than a SIM card.
The same happens with most high street shops, your credit card is not charged until long after you leave the shop. Consider payment via a cheque in the high street to make the comparison even more stark.
I think you would have a hard time arguing that the consideration only takes place when they charge your card, and not when they take your card details and send you a confirmation. However I don't believe that a legal precidence has been set yet.
Not really, a basic check would be if retail is less than wholesale complain loudly to the person setting the price and require confirmation from them that is more than a simple click on a button.
It does not stop you making any mistake, but it does limit the size of any losses you are going to make. Besides which you could change it to retail having to be more than wholesale plus 10%, or whatever is relevant.
The Kodak things was far more complicated. It was not obviously wrong, because in the first place it was advertised as special offer on the website. Secondly the mistake was made sometime on Friday afternoon, and surely it would have been fixed first thing Monday morning. Not so as I placed my order around 9:40am on Monday morning so I had good reason to believe that the price was genuine.
The decision by Kodak was clear, they could fight dozens of battles in the small claims courts around the country at a cost greater than selling the cameras at the advertised special offer price, face loosing at least some of them, and get lots of bad publicity, or just sell the cameras to thoses people who ordered them and don't risk setting a legal precidence.
I don't believe there has yet been a legal precidence set in the U.K. on this matter. However it is clear from the customers point of view that there has been offer, acceptance and consideration so it is a contract.
It is not clear exactly how the consideration (handing over of credit card details) differs between a website and bricks+morter shop, as a normal shop frequently does not deduct the money from your credit card the instant you make the purchase at the till (check your next bill if you don't believe me). Further more shops accept cheques and clearly the money does not leave your account until well after you have left the shop with the goods.
Therefore one can clearly argue that the consideration is handing over payment details and these being accepted by the website. Sending a reply out by email to say your order has been accepted further strengthens your case that consideration has taken place.
Clearly the websites defence is that consideration does not take place until they actually charge your credit card. However it is difficult to see how this can stand up when we compare it with a normal shop, where clearly the consideration does not take place at the time the card is charged but when they take the details.
The only difference is that in a shop you will have left with the goods before they realize their mistake, where in a website they still have them.
There may be some relevant precidents set if someone has purchased an item for home delivery, left the shop and then recieved a phone call the next day to say sorry we made a mistake with the price you can't have it until you pay us some more money, and they have taken to court to enforce delivery.
The basics remain that there is no legal precident been set in the UK on this matter yet. Until there is we can be sure that websites will probably choose not to supply the goods. However in the meantime the exact legal position is far from clear.
Really it amazes me that web systems allow such mistakes to be made. I am sure most./ers can think of a dozen ways you could design the system to make it difficult for the mistakes to happen in the first place and detect them automatically in the second place and suspend the items until investigated. In the first place if you can enter a retail price that is lower than the wholesale price without large warnings comming up requiring multiple click throughs to set the price at that level then the system is bust and they deserve to be out of pocket.
The situation was so bad at one point in the early 1990's that British Aerospace even designed and tested bomb proof bins. The idea is that they acted like a gun barrel and directed the force of the blast straight upwards, so that the only people to get hurt would be those actually sitting on top of them.
However the IRA ceasefire put an end to the development.
They are using cadmium, a nasty horrid posionous heavy metal that causes polution and soon to be banned from use in the European Union. Even lead in solder is to be banned shortly. Mercury another posionous heavy metal has already been banned.
Hire someone who has done a computational physics degree. They will have a good grounding in mathematics including numberical analysis. There should be plenty of them that would be happy with that sort of job.
Of course it is against EU rules, but only with respect to EU member states. This means if you try to import the DVD from the US then they can make it illegal. However if you try to import the exact same DVD from the UK then they would be in big trouble trying to enforce it.
That said the biggest problem with the European Court is that it takes years to get a rulling out of them. Take for example the export of British Beef, the French have been flouting EU directives for over a year and the court case will take at least another year to bring.
Slashdot Mirror
You some how manage to think you have four billion Euro's in an account, and then find that it's a forgery and someone has done a runner with the money, makin Enron and Worldcom look like the good guy's and you don't even get mentioned!!!
Sorry but none of the listed things come anywhere near the business dealings of Parmalat for shameful, dishonest and dumb business moments of 2003.
The transformers in a offline SMPS also step the voltage down as well as provide the galvanic isolation required for safety purposes
You have not the faintest clue what you are talking about do you.
They may not use regular transformers, but they still use transformers. All offline (i.e. connected to mains) SMPS use a transformer. They have to for safety reasons. The transformer provides galvanic isolation so if there is a failure in the electronics somewhere you don't end up with live mains on the output.
Low voltage DC-DC SMPS do indeed use a small inductor as a charge storage device, and you could even do the same with rectified mains, it is however just not safe.
Utter rubbish. I have plenty of region 2 disks that have no other language but English. As for subtitles they manage to do that live on TV here in the U.K. I would further point out that live translations seem to be little problem at the UN or the EU etc.
The region coding scheme is a sham - period
Frankly the map sites that serve the USA suck rotten eggs. They are of an utterly inferior when compaired with the quality of the maps you can get in the Great Britain
Yep, by far the best mapping site on the entire internet, serves full resolution digital 1:50,000 scale Landranger data as licensed by the Ordnance Survey for the whole of Great Britain. In addition to this it has half resolution Bartholomew road map data for the whole of Great Britain again, and after than there is also high quality half resolution Bartholomew streetmap data for Greater London. The rest of Great Britain is served with a automatic street level composite of varying quality.
The place to go is http://www.streetmap.co.uk
The Ordnance Survey themselves also serve up maps at a variaty of scales, most noticable a half resolution 1:25,000 version of the Explorer maps.
After that the next best map site on the internet is the ViaMichelin site. This has excellant quality road maps that cover all of western and northern europe, with street level mapping of superior quality to anything that I have seen served up for the USA. However recently they have updated the map browser and made it much less friendly.
Which was utterly useless as a clinical device. It was not until 1980 and a number of other breakthroughs that the first image of a real live (now dead) patient was taken.
Er, these people are physicists. They may be winning the Medicine price but they are not medical doctors.
Really so all those patents held by the British Technology Group are a figment of my imagination then? Those critical patents that allow an image to be acquired in a clinically useful period of time that is.
Who the hell gets on the Nobel committee and how the hell do they come up with this crap? Another case of where the people that made the real discoveries are unrewarded.
What happened to the people from the team at the Department of Biomedical Physics at the University of Aberdeen who made the critical breakthrough to make all this practical, and produced the first whole body scanner to take an image of a real live patient?
Further if fast imagining was "discovered" by Sir Peter Mansfield, how come the two dimensional Fourier transform methods used in all scanners worldwide and known as "spin-warp", the real breakthrough in MRI (yes the warp is because the person who came up with it was a Trek fan), where discovered by someone else?
Without the spin warp technique MRI would have remained an interesting but clinically useless technique. One has little faith in the ability of the Nobel committee to award prizes to those that should get them.
Remember that system that ESR reported on just a few weeks ago???
Except when the ISP has it's routers set to force
all outgoing port 25 traffic through it's mail servers. At least one large ISP in the U.K. does this. I saw hundreds of delivery failure reports of Sobig.F because of this.
I've seen a lot of discussion on various mailing lists concerning that, but it seems to generally be agreed that this isn't really feasible - especially with emails from some of the large providers. It simply isn't possible to say whether a message legitimately came from the email address stated at the moment. And no, the sending mail server and/or domain gives no real clue.
This shows breath taking level of cluelessness. The point its that when the virus scanner identifies the virus, a flag in the virus database says Sobig.F this uses forged email headers don't send out a warning. It is actually less work for the email server. There is no need to determine if the sender is valid, you work on the basis that the virus is known to use forged headers.
If you don't believe the bounces are a problem you are have not suffered from them. There are unfortunate soles like myself that are getting hundreds of bogus bounces a day. What is worse it is several orders of magnitude harder to filter these than the actual virus, which is easy. When your email becomes almost unusable you will take a different attitude to these things.
Perhaps, they might start looking in their own backyard and have their National Institute for Space Research (a goverment backed organization) open source the excellant SPRING GIS package from what is already a free download, but no source. Works on Linux/Solaris and Windows, and is rather easier to use than GRASS.
http://www.dpi.inpe.br/spring/english/This depends on your machine. For example my Tecra 780DVD (an old model) gives you the option of restoring the partitions, and if not just makes a filesystem in the first partition and copies the data over. However my latest laptop a Tecra 8200 simply resets the entire hard disk with one huge FAT32 install. Trust me I have *just* had to use this when Service pack 4 left Windows unbootable even in safe mode.
However it did not stop me making the machine dual boot and the person complaining is a whining idiot, and the people running with the stories are clueless idiots.
Sorry but audio books are relatively cheap to produce. First off a full recording studio is massively excessive and totally unnecessary, all you need is a quite room and a quality microphone. You record it directly onto hard disk via a proaudio sound card. Cool Edit 2000, is more than enough to do all the required post production.
Quite rooms are ten a penny, you just need a house in the countryside. In fact more important than a quite room is a room with good accoustics. Ultimately it does not matter if an airplane goes overhead because you can just record it again. In fact you are going to have to record stuff more than once anyway, due to mistakes, coughs etc.
The equipment necessary costs only a few thousand dollars at most, is easy to come by and is already owned by thousands of people around the world.
The only hard bit is finding someone with a good speaking voice. However these are not the reserve of expensive actors.
The actual manufacture of audio books is dirt cheap, the gross profit margins are obscene.
The maps don't take up as much space as you are making out.
A raster based road map of the whole of Great Britain at 1:200,000 with a pixel size of 40 metres, in a 16 colour paletted image (you don't need more than 16 colours for maps) compressed using LZW (it's in GIF format) comes to just over 16MB. A raster street map of Greater London at 1:10,000 pixel size of 2.6 metres again in 16 colour paletted is a little under 60MB.
Now lets also check what a 128MB MMC card costs, a mear 35UKP or around $50. So that would leave me with some 52MB of memory for other maps. So I could add in a road map I have of France the Iberian penisula and Austria, and over view map of Europe, a nautical chart of the British Isles and still have about 20MB left on this 128MB MMC card for some raster topo maps of the UK.
If the phone could deal with SD memory cards they are available in 512MB size. That is enough to hold one quarter of Great Britain in the OS 1:50,000 Landranger maps with a 5m pixel size.
So as far as I can see all they need to do is provide a MMC/SD slot somewhere on the phone. They are barely bigger than a SIM card.
Personally I would like to see one of these fitted with a mobile PIII or P4. It would be a bit more expensive but would pack a bigger punch.
The same happens with most high street shops, your credit card is not charged until long after you leave the shop. Consider payment via a cheque in the high street to make the comparison even more stark.
I think you would have a hard time arguing that the consideration only takes place when they charge your card, and not when they take your card details and send you a confirmation. However I don't believe that a legal precidence has been set yet.
Not really, a basic check would be if retail is less than wholesale complain loudly to the person setting the price and require confirmation from them that is more than a simple click on a button.
It does not stop you making any mistake, but it does limit the size of any losses you are going to make. Besides which you could change it to retail having to be more than wholesale plus 10%, or whatever is relevant.
The Kodak things was far more complicated. It was not obviously wrong, because in the first place it was advertised as special offer on the website. Secondly the mistake was made sometime on Friday afternoon, and surely it would have been fixed first thing Monday morning. Not so as I placed my order around 9:40am on Monday morning so I had good reason to believe that the price was genuine.
./ers can think of a dozen ways you could design the system to make it difficult for the mistakes to happen in the first place and detect them automatically in the second place and suspend the items until investigated. In the first place if you can enter a retail price that is lower than the wholesale price without large warnings comming up requiring multiple click throughs to set the price at that level then the system is bust and they deserve to be out of pocket.
The decision by Kodak was clear, they could fight dozens of battles in the small claims courts around the country at a cost greater than selling the cameras at the advertised special offer price, face loosing at least some of them, and get lots of bad publicity, or just sell the cameras to thoses people who ordered them and don't risk setting a legal precidence.
I don't believe there has yet been a legal precidence set in the U.K. on this matter. However it is clear from the customers point of view that there has been offer, acceptance and consideration so it is a contract.
It is not clear exactly how the consideration (handing over of credit card details) differs between a website and bricks+morter shop, as a normal shop frequently does not deduct the money from your credit card the instant you make the purchase at the till (check your next bill if you don't believe me). Further more shops accept cheques and clearly the money does not leave your account until well after you have left the shop with the goods.
Therefore one can clearly argue that the consideration is handing over payment details and these being accepted by the website. Sending a reply out by email to say your order has been accepted further strengthens your case that consideration has taken place.
Clearly the websites defence is that consideration does not take place until they actually charge your credit card. However it is difficult to see how this can stand up when we compare it with a normal shop, where clearly the consideration does not take place at the time the card is charged but when they take the details.
The only difference is that in a shop you will have left with the goods before they realize their mistake, where in a website they still have them.
There may be some relevant precidents set if someone has purchased an item for home delivery,
left the shop and then recieved a phone call the next day to say sorry we made a mistake with the price you can't have it until you pay us some more money, and they have taken to court to enforce delivery.
The basics remain that there is no legal precident been set in the UK on this matter yet. Until there is we can be sure that websites will probably choose not to supply the goods. However in the meantime the exact legal position is far from clear.
Really it amazes me that web systems allow such mistakes to be made. I am sure most
The situation was so bad at one point in the early 1990's that British Aerospace even designed and tested bomb proof bins. The idea is that they acted like a gun barrel and directed the force of the blast straight upwards, so that the only people to get hurt would be those actually sitting on top of them.
However the IRA ceasefire put an end to the development.
They are using cadmium, a nasty horrid posionous heavy metal that causes polution and soon to be banned from use in the European Union. Even lead in solder is to be banned shortly. Mercury another posionous heavy metal has already been banned.
Hire someone who has done a computational physics degree. They will have a good grounding in mathematics including numberical analysis. There should be plenty of them that would be happy with that sort of job.
Of course it is against EU rules, but only with respect to EU member states. This means if you try to import the DVD from the US then they can make it illegal. However if you try to import the exact same DVD from the UK then they would be in big trouble trying to enforce it. That said the biggest problem with the European Court is that it takes years to get a rulling out of them. Take for example the export of British Beef, the French have been flouting EU directives for over a year and the court case will take at least another year to bring.
There will be soon, some time in October, it's either part of the Human Rights act or a Disability Discrimination act comming in to force.