if you don't know where Philadelphia is and you live in DC you an send one man up each road north untill you find an answer or you can send severl men up many roads and find the answer sooner
Also, if a woman can produce a baby in 9 months, 9 women can produce one in 1 month, right?
THe accident problem is still a problem for any fission reactor - it hardly matters if the accident in question is extremely rare thanx to (admittedly quite extensive and expensive) precautions that we take - if it ever happens and it does it creates havoc and misery among human neighbours as well as great financial problem for the state which (naturally) is going to pay for damage and clean up.
You can't make any industry completely safe. Nuclear power is probably one of the safest, but also so tightly controlled that when something bad does happen is is big news. Much like the crashing of a plane is big news compared to the crashing of a car - this doesn't make planes bad, they are in fact very safe compared to cars.
As an example, coal power has a history of serious disasters - from mining accidents (usually restricted to killing/injuring the miners themselves, but occasionally a big deal for the whole community around a mine), to huge environmental disasters. Even in normal operation, coal power plants are designed to pump toxic and radioactive material directly into the atmosphere.
The difference between the environmental impact of coal and nuclear is largely that the design of nuclear reactors largely keeps harmful biproducts carefully contained whilst coal doesn't. This means that it is considered a big deal when radioactive material contaminates the environment, whereas contamination from coal fired power stations goes unreported (since it happens routinely every hour of every day).
To date, we have had just 3 serious nuclear incidents:
- Chernobyl was the big one, 4,056 people lost their lives. Whilest this is a large number, it pales in comparison to other disasters, such as the afore mentioned hydroelectric dam failure that cost 171,000 lives.
- Three Mile Island is often cited by the anti-nuke brigade, but that demonstrates an inability to read and understand the reports - three mile island is a pretty good example of everything going to hell and basically not much bad happening.
- Fukushima - a serious accident, of course. Low level contamination over a large area. But that's what it is - low level. The fact that the media concentrated on this nuclear power accident instead of the vast number of lives lost through the quake and tsunami demonstrates that nuclear power's big problem is down to image, hype and public paranoia/misunderstanding rather than a substantial level of risk.
Military reactors have a lot to answer for, of course. For example, Dounreay is a pretty good example of how not to run a nuclear facility. This is largely down to the fact that the military pretty much had a free reign to do what they liked rather than being under the strict regulation and oversight that commercial reactors are subjected to.
Stepping away from power and comparing to other large industries, I would much rather live next door to a nuclear power station than a chemical plant. In part because the nuclear power station will be subjected to much stricter regulation, but also because anything that does leak from the power station is likely to be much less of a danger than some of the really nasty substances used in chemical works (even though a nuclear leak will probably draw far more media coverage and protests from the environmentalists than a chemical leak would).
Fission really is one of the safest (if not the safest) method of large scale power generation. As for handling the waste: this can largely be reprocessed, we just need to provide incentives to do this rather than just storing it away. However, it seems unfair to compare the problem of handling nuclear waste with technologies that routinely release their wa
My understanding is that DSDT can contain OS-specific sections. They may only have set up the Windows-specific section correctly.
Correct. There was no OS-specific section in this instance - the code to correctly poke the fan controller simply wasn't there at all.
Or they may have supplied Windows chipset drivers that ignore the DSDT and cause the system to work regardless.
That's possible, but does mean that a wipe/reinstall of windows (hence without their kludge) will result in the same issue.
Also Windows (like Linux) has a method of instructing it to ignore the system DSDT and use one provided by OS configuration;
Yes, suffers the same issue as above.
Acer are, I think, within their rights to assume that if you wipe their OS image and install your own, you are on your own with regards to whether it actually works or not.
There are specifications for a reason. I'm happy to say "not the vendor's problem" if it's just a case of the Linux (or any other non-supplied OS) being buggy. I'm not happy to agree that the manufacturer is in the clear when the _machine's firmware_ provides an ACPI that doesn't work correctly. If you're going to ship some hardware, you either make sure that it works correctly (that includes making sure the public APIs such as ACPI work correctly), or you make it very clear to the customer that it it is "experimental" or "beta release". If you do the former, and your customer finds a bug, it is your obligation to fix it. This obligation is exceptionally low-cost where your customer has actually done your job for you and just wants you to compile a new firmware image.
15 months of daily use = about 400 cycles, which is roughly the minimum expected lifespan of a li-ion battery. I see no evidence of fault.
It wasn't cycled daily. Spent most of its time sat there plugged in (crap chargers can screw batteries if they are left on charge all the time, but that IMHO is an inherent fault with the charger, not "the expected life-span of the battery". I shouldn't have to manually remove the battery from my laptop every time it gets full.
DSDT is an optional feature, unless they are specifically advertising compliance with the ACPI specification (I have *never* seen an end-user PC manufacturer advertise this). Most things (i.e. consumer editions of Windows and most features of most versions of Linux) work acceptably with a broken DSDT, so there is no legal reason why they would have to fix it (the machine is fit for the purpose it was sold for even with such a problem).
I'm not sure you can call the DSDT an "optional feature" given that every modern OS (including the one it shipped with) requires one in order to make proper use of the hardware.
The "legal reason" why they should've fixed the DSDT is that it didn't correctly reset the fan controller after the laptop was returned from S3. This meant that the fan ran non-stop at full speed after coming back from S3 which made S3 somewhat less useful. I never tested this under Windows, but I see no reason why it wouldn't have caused a problem since nothing else is going to reset this hardware after resuming. The machine was only "fit for purpose" if the purpose didn't include standard features such as handling power management correctly.
Before you point out that the literature probably didn't explicitly say that power management would behave correctly, I'd like to remind you that most laptop advertising literature also doesn't mention that the DVD drive will correctly read DVDs, that the VGA output will correctly drive a monitor, etc. These are all things, like power management, that the consumer just expects to work properly. I can accept that software has bugs, but the complete failure of the vendor to provide any kind of support to their customers, especially when their customer arguably does their job for them (debugging the problem, patching the offending code and sending them the patch) isn't acceptable.
(Which brings me onto another reason why I won't be touching Acer kit again - they flatly refused to comply with the Windows licence agreement which says I can return the unused licence for a refund).
I do not think the average person would want to buy 60 terabytes of anything.
It wasn't that long ago when I was running a 286 with a 40MB hard drive. "No one could fill that" I thought... and it wasn't long until I did. Upgraded to a 486 with 200GB drive... Then I added an 850MB drive... "no one could fill that" I thought... within a few months it was full. The list goes on - 1GB, 6GB, 20GB, 40GB, 1TB. Anyone who thinks that people won't want 60TB drives at some point in the future needs to look carefully at the past - in a few years time, they will look as silly as the people who thought, only 20 years ago, that 40MB was fine and 40GB would be an outrageously large size.
in lot's of cases retailers were not covered for the second year warranty by their suppliers.
That's the retailer's problem, not the consumer's. If the retailer doesn't like it, they are free to try and renegotiate their contract with the supplier.
For consumer protection law that works well, see New Zealand.
Nice and simple. Goods and services must be
As described
Fit for purpose
Of merchantable quality
"Merchantable quality" means that while some things might be expected to last less than a year, a PC is expected to last two or three.
Works the same here in the UK (not entirely sure where this "2 year minimum warranty" thing comes from - certainly doesn't seem to be reflected in UK law, which it should if its an EU directive). Basically, the _retailer_ must warrant that the product lasts as long as people would reasonably expect it to last. In the first 6 months, the burden of proof is on the retailer (i.e. if they don't want to repair/replace it then they most prove that it didn't break due to a defect), after the first 6 months the burden of proof switches to the consumer (you have to prove that it failed because of a defect).
Note that redress is with the vendor, not the manufacturer, and it works really well in practice, If your PC breaks after 18 months, you take it back and they fix, replace or refund with barely a murmur (because consumers over the years know their rights).
Here, how well the vendors handle this seems to be variable. For example, my parents recently had a bit of a battle with Karrimor (Sports Direct) over a suitcase. The suitcase's handle fell off during normal use (a screw worked loose) after a little over 6 months. Karrimor refused to repair it, even though it was sold with a 12 month warranty because (in their words) "we don't repair or replace products that are over 6 months old". After some argument they did eventually get it repaired, but it was certainly not "barely a murmer".
Another example, Acer refused to replace my laptop batter after it failed after just 15 months. They stated that it was a "consumable" and therefore refused to cover it. Whilst I don't expect a battery to last the life of the machine itself, 15 months is a tad too short for my taste.
I have had good experiences of vendors and manufacturers taking defective products back (e.g. Seagate and Western Digital have both been excellent at replacing busted hard drives), but it doesn't always go smoothly.
Simply put, if I buy a oLed tablet, the blues going out after a period of time is not covered under warranty since this is to be expected.
I'm not sure about that. If you weren't made aware of this issue when you bought it, could you reasonably have been expected to know? By the same token you could say "if I buy a car made out of cheap low quality parts and it falls to pieces after a period of time then this wouldn't be covered under the warranty because it is expected" - it may be expected by the manufacturer, but whether it is expected by the average consumer is another question.
I guess a comparison needs to be drawn against similar products (not necessarilly identical technologies). I.e. if people routinely buy tablets with LCD screens and they show now degredation in picture quality after 5 years of "normal" usage, then a tablet that does show significant degredation in picture quality after a few years (because it uses OLED instead of LCD) is inherently "defective" because it doesn't match what most consumers are used to for tablets in general.
Rust holes forming after 5 years in a decent car IS covered since this is not to be expected anymore.
A similar parallel can be drawn here. If most cars are built using galvanised steel (inherently rust resistant) and a manufacturer decides to produce one from ungalvanised steel then this can be seen as similar to the OLED example above - the ungalvanised one will rust much quicker than the usual galvanised cars. "It uses a different technology to most other cars" isn't a good defence against why the warranty shouldn't apply - the consumer can't reasonably be expected to know or care about the underlying technology, they just care that their expensive car just rusted through in a few years whilst every other car on the market lasts many times that.
How about a battery that runs out of cycles in normal use after 15 months?
Got caught by that one myself a few years back... My Acer laptop battery died after about 15 months, Acer told me that it was a "consumable" and therefore refused to replace it under the 2 year warranty (notably the replacement battery I bought has now died after a similar length of time, which suggests to me that the fault is in the laptop, not the battery). The upshot of all this is that neither myself, nor my business will ever touch an Acer product and we recommend to our customers that they avoid Acer too.
There were other problems that Acer refused to deal with. For example, the DSDT is broken on this hardware (Travelmate 6413), and Acer refused to acknowledge any fault or release a new BIOS, despite me fixing the DSDT and sending them the fixed code.
Nah. They probably just charge more in the EU to cover the extra year of warranty.
Doesn't work like that. Products are sold based on what the customers are willing to pay, not based on the underlying cost of the product. So unless the extra year of warranty significantly changes what customers are willing to pay, the prices will stay the same.
If you still think that people change their views based on outside feedback, you probably aren't old enough to be allowed to vote yet.
I change my views based on outside feedback. Not directly because I want to change my view to please people, but because feedback lets me see the subject from a different perspective which allows me to realise when my view doesn't mesh well with reality.
If you're the sort of person who never changes their view based on new information, I guess you're some kind of religious nut?
Don't tell them who you're going to vote for. They have no right to know.
There are good reasons to tell them that you're not voting for them (and explain why): If they are able to understand the reasons why people aren't voting for them, they can change their policies to reflect what the public want. If no one ever explains that they aren't voting for them (and why) then the party is left losing the election and having to guess what people want for the next time around, by which time what people want may have changed.
Certainly, there are good reasons to _allow_ people to keep their votes secret, but there are also good reasons for people to opt to waive that right to secrecy.
The proof-of-concept listed only four out of my ten enabled extensions. Among those left out were Google Calendar, UA Spoofer, and Pastebin, among others. I'd say this 'exploit', if we can call it that, has a long way to go...
That's because you only saw the first part of the exploit.
The full exploit procedure is this: 1. Direct someone at a website that lists a few of their installed extensions. 2. Scan slashdot to find that person moaning about how crap the exploit is and look at the "missed" extensions they list in their comment. 3. Combine the results of (1) and (2) to acquire a complete list of installed extensions for that person.
There are a lot of people driving without insurance in the UK. A notable proportion of them are also driving without a license, with a revoked license, while banned, without tax or without an MOT. If you can stop this you make the roads safer and make insurance more affordable (at the moment your insurance has to cover accidents with an uninsured vehicle in most cases). Perhaps the solution isn't perfect, but I think it is a considerable improvement on the current situation and isn't really more invasive. Number plates are already being tracked now.
I wholley support the idea of preventing people driving around without insurance/tax/licence. I'm just concerned that innocent people are going to get badly caught out by this when the DVLA or insurance companies get their records wrong (which _does_ happen with reasonable frequency. A tip I've learned is to make sure your tax disc renewal date is nowhere near your insurance renewal date because it seems that it is common for insurance companies to forget to tell the DVLA that you have insurance until a few weeks after it has become valid. If the DVLA think you don't have insurance, getting a tax disc is a nightmare, even though they are wrong).
Unfortunately the big problem with all these big systems is that it is always assumed that the system is right and it becomes a complete pain in the arse for the member of the public to prove that it isn't (this goes for many "big systems" - DVLA, police, banks, HMRC, etc.) And unfortunately the whole thing is usually set up to penalise the public when they make a mistake but not penalise the institution when the role is reversed. A good example of this is the HMRC - if you accidentally underpay your tax they will fine you and charge you interest; if _they_ accidentally overtax you then you might eventually get it back a few months/years later, after a lot of effort to convince them they were wrong, but you'll get no compensation or interest. Ever tried to contest a parking fine? Don't bother - it's far more costly than just admitting you're guilty, even when you're not.
At the moment you get fined and therefore have some time to work through the (incredibly slow) system for a few weeks if it all goes wrong. *IF* they could arrange a system where it was painless to get incorrect records fixed *right now* rather than taking weeks then the proposed idea sounds reasonable. But that won't happen - if the records are wrong you'll spend weeks not being able to fill up your car (or at least, jumping through many hoops each time you need to in order to convince the petrol station to turn on the pump).
What is actually needed is for the current penalties to be enforced (and possibly increased - I believe it's far cheaper to pay a "driving while not insured" fine than to get insurance a lot of the time), rather than trying to bypass due process entirely.
That's the sound of someone who has no idea how much insurance costs some people. For a new driver with a £100 car, they could well be paying £1500-2000 per year for third party insurance. When insurance is that much, it hardly surprises me that we have an epidemic of people driving around without insurance.
That sounds like someone who thinks driving is a right, not a privilege
I think that if you aren't able to drive then your life is very restricted. This means you may not be able to get a job or generally enjoy life much. In some areas, there really is no alternative to driving if you want to go a reasonable distance (nonexistent public transport coupled with roads that are too narrow and winding to safely cycle on).
Roads are not free and it's not your god given right to drive on them.
No, roads are not free. They are paid for by the tax payer. The taxes collected from drivers in the form of fuel tax and road licence fund are orders of magnitude more than that spend maintaining the road network.
Those of us who have fully paid up insurance and rego do not want to be subsidising people who cant be arsed getting insurance or rego.
Did you actually bother to read what I wrote? None of this is about "can't be arsed", it is about people being priced out of the market.
If you cant afford insurance, even just 3rd party, you cant afford to drive and I dont see why you should be allowed to.
Whether or not you think it's "right" that people drive when they can't afford to insure themselves, when people need to drive in order to get to work but can't afford the insurance are you surprised that they choose to drive uninsured?
If you cant afford insurance, even just 3rd party, you shouldn't be driving. If your premium is 1500 pounds for a 100 pound car, you are clearly too dangerous to be allowed to drive public
If we assume that anyone being quoted £1500 or more to drive a £100 car means you are "too dangerour to be allowed to drive in public" you are basically saying that pretty much _anyone_ with less than a few years experience is "too dangerous to be allowed to drive in public". How then, should inexperienced drivers gain several years of public-road experience if, in your opinion, they shouldn't be allowed to drive on public roads?
(Yes, insurance prices far in excess of £1500/year are *normal* for new drivers, so you are basically saying that no new drivers should ever be alloed on the roads)
I suspect that is the actual motivation behind it all. They don't have the cycle infrastructure in place to tempt people off the roads, so they just price you off instead. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the homicidal bus drivers:)
Wouldn't be so bad if they actually reinvested the money in the infrastructure. Between road licence fund, fuel tax and fines the government collects a hell of a lot of money from the motorists. But the roads are still in a poor state of repair (between the pot-holes, dodgy patching of the blacktop, and speed humps, driving around is pretty unpleasant. I've been informed by garages that they are replacing a lot more suspension components these days. Also, people with back problems can be put in real pain by driving over any of these things). And the provision for cyclists is still terrible. And public transport is still useless (unless I book over 2 weeks in advance, taking the train pretty much anywhere is far more expensive than taking the car, far more time consuming and also leads to problems like how to get to/from the station given that the bus service doesn't run at useful times).
I recently looked at the price of getting from Swansea to Scarborough on train, booking 3 weeks in advance. The round trip was £280 (cattle class) or £630 (first class). It amazes me that anyone would pay that - I could _fly_ there for less! A few years ago I thought that it might be nice to do a weekend ski trip to scotland and looked at the price of catching the sleeper on the friday and sunday nights - it would've been far cheaper to just fly out to the alps.
FWIW, the local bus service runs fairly irregularly (it'd usually be quicker for me to walk to the station from home rather than walk down to the bus stop, wait an hour for the bus, then walk from the middle of the city centre to the station), and not at all on Sunday (and since for weekend trips I'd usually be returning home on Sunday, this makes using public transport pretty downright inconvenient)
Why put so much effort into getting around the system rather than voting the douchebags that come up with this stuff out of office and taking your government back?
We already did that... turns out that all of the candidates are as bad as each other so that didn't work out so well for us.
I'm not sure how the UK has gotten by without separate trailer plates/registration for this long--a trailer can be very valuable depending on make/model/type and not having a separate title and registration seems like it leaves the door open for people to claim they "own" a trailer they've simply stolen.
As if swapping the plates on your stolen trailor/car/whatever to make it look legit is hard...
Nah, any idiot can buy a set of plates in the UK, and most garages have the equipment to make up number plates on the spot. You need proof of ownership (or a dodgy mechanic) in order to get a spare plate made up, but that's easy enough.
Despite the legal requirement for proof of ownership, in my experience this is rarely enforced anyway.
Also wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to just pay for insurance, licensing and registration then to try and fool the cameras.
That's the sound of someone who has no idea how much insurance costs some people. For a new driver with a £100 car, they could well be paying £1500-2000 per year for third party insurance. When insurance is that much, it hardly surprises me that we have an epidemic of people driving around without insurance.
It either a) stops the pump if it cannot approve the number (including non-recognition) or b) stops the pump if it detects an unauthorized number. There's a subtle difference, but only the latter wouldn't be a complete disaster - though the summary describes the former.
The latter requires the DVLA to have their records correct, which they demonstrably aren't that good at doing. I can just see this system stranding perfectly innocent drivers because the DVLA's computer thinks they don't have insurance when they do. I can just imagine the DVLA putting the resources in to fix such problems in the middle of the night when you're stranded with no fuel. (that last bit was sarcasm).
Even if it is an American company, the courts would follow English law.
Wouldn't be too sure, it seems the norm for british nationals to be groundlessly extradited to the US... Basically, the US says "extradite this person" and the UK seems to say "ok" no matter what.
The note about Dell Dimensions is nice, but those are "home" computers, not "professional".
WTF is the difference between a "home" computer and a "professional" one? If anything, I'd expect home computers to be more powerful since professionals don't generally need to play the latest games...
Slashdot Mirror
if you don't know where Philadelphia is and you live in DC you an send one man up each road north untill you find an answer or you can send severl men up many roads and find the answer sooner
Also, if a woman can produce a baby in 9 months, 9 women can produce one in 1 month, right?
THe accident problem is still a problem for any fission reactor - it hardly matters if the accident in question is extremely rare thanx to (admittedly quite extensive and expensive) precautions that we take - if it ever happens and it does it creates havoc and misery among human neighbours as well as great financial problem for the state which (naturally) is going to pay for damage and clean up.
You can't make any industry completely safe. Nuclear power is probably one of the safest, but also so tightly controlled that when something bad does happen is is big news. Much like the crashing of a plane is big news compared to the crashing of a car - this doesn't make planes bad, they are in fact very safe compared to cars.
As an example, coal power has a history of serious disasters - from mining accidents (usually restricted to killing/injuring the miners themselves, but occasionally a big deal for the whole community around a mine), to huge environmental disasters. Even in normal operation, coal power plants are designed to pump toxic and radioactive material directly into the atmosphere.
The difference between the environmental impact of coal and nuclear is largely that the design of nuclear reactors largely keeps harmful biproducts carefully contained whilst coal doesn't. This means that it is considered a big deal when radioactive material contaminates the environment, whereas contamination from coal fired power stations goes unreported (since it happens routinely every hour of every day).
Another example: hydroelectric has the potential for really serious disaster.
To date, we have had just 3 serious nuclear incidents:
- Chernobyl was the big one, 4,056 people lost their lives. Whilest this is a large number, it pales in comparison to other disasters, such as the afore mentioned hydroelectric dam failure that cost 171,000 lives.
- Three Mile Island is often cited by the anti-nuke brigade, but that demonstrates an inability to read and understand the reports - three mile island is a pretty good example of everything going to hell and basically not much bad happening.
- Fukushima - a serious accident, of course. Low level contamination over a large area. But that's what it is - low level. The fact that the media concentrated on this nuclear power accident instead of the vast number of lives lost through the quake and tsunami demonstrates that nuclear power's big problem is down to image, hype and public paranoia/misunderstanding rather than a substantial level of risk.
Military reactors have a lot to answer for, of course. For example, Dounreay is a pretty good example of how not to run a nuclear facility. This is largely down to the fact that the military pretty much had a free reign to do what they liked rather than being under the strict regulation and oversight that commercial reactors are subjected to.
Stepping away from power and comparing to other large industries, I would much rather live next door to a nuclear power station than a chemical plant. In part because the nuclear power station will be subjected to much stricter regulation, but also because anything that does leak from the power station is likely to be much less of a danger than some of the really nasty substances used in chemical works (even though a nuclear leak will probably draw far more media coverage and protests from the environmentalists than a chemical leak would).
Fission really is one of the safest (if not the safest) method of large scale power generation. As for handling the waste: this can largely be reprocessed, we just need to provide incentives to do this rather than just storing it away. However, it seems unfair to compare the problem of handling nuclear waste with technologies that routinely release their wa
My understanding is that DSDT can contain OS-specific sections. They may only have set up the Windows-specific section correctly.
Correct. There was no OS-specific section in this instance - the code to correctly poke the fan controller simply wasn't there at all.
Or they may have supplied Windows chipset drivers that ignore the DSDT and cause the system to work regardless.
That's possible, but does mean that a wipe/reinstall of windows (hence without their kludge) will result in the same issue.
Also Windows (like Linux) has a method of instructing it to ignore the system DSDT and use one provided by OS configuration;
Yes, suffers the same issue as above.
Acer are, I think, within their rights to assume that if you wipe their OS image and install your own, you are on your own with regards to whether it actually works or not.
There are specifications for a reason. I'm happy to say "not the vendor's problem" if it's just a case of the Linux (or any other non-supplied OS) being buggy. I'm not happy to agree that the manufacturer is in the clear when the _machine's firmware_ provides an ACPI that doesn't work correctly. If you're going to ship some hardware, you either make sure that it works correctly (that includes making sure the public APIs such as ACPI work correctly), or you make it very clear to the customer that it it is "experimental" or "beta release". If you do the former, and your customer finds a bug, it is your obligation to fix it. This obligation is exceptionally low-cost where your customer has actually done your job for you and just wants you to compile a new firmware image.
15 months of daily use = about 400 cycles, which is roughly the minimum expected lifespan of a li-ion battery. I see no evidence of fault.
It wasn't cycled daily. Spent most of its time sat there plugged in (crap chargers can screw batteries if they are left on charge all the time, but that IMHO is an inherent fault with the charger, not "the expected life-span of the battery". I shouldn't have to manually remove the battery from my laptop every time it gets full.
DSDT is an optional feature, unless they are specifically advertising compliance with the ACPI specification (I have *never* seen an end-user PC manufacturer advertise this). Most things (i.e. consumer editions of Windows and most features of most versions of Linux) work acceptably with a broken DSDT, so there is no legal reason why they would have to fix it (the machine is fit for the purpose it was sold for even with such a problem).
I'm not sure you can call the DSDT an "optional feature" given that every modern OS (including the one it shipped with) requires one in order to make proper use of the hardware.
The "legal reason" why they should've fixed the DSDT is that it didn't correctly reset the fan controller after the laptop was returned from S3. This meant that the fan ran non-stop at full speed after coming back from S3 which made S3 somewhat less useful. I never tested this under Windows, but I see no reason why it wouldn't have caused a problem since nothing else is going to reset this hardware after resuming. The machine was only "fit for purpose" if the purpose didn't include standard features such as handling power management correctly.
Before you point out that the literature probably didn't explicitly say that power management would behave correctly, I'd like to remind you that most laptop advertising literature also doesn't mention that the DVD drive will correctly read DVDs, that the VGA output will correctly drive a monitor, etc. These are all things, like power management, that the consumer just expects to work properly. I can accept that software has bugs, but the complete failure of the vendor to provide any kind of support to their customers, especially when their customer arguably does their job for them (debugging the problem, patching the offending code and sending them the patch) isn't acceptable.
(Which brings me onto another reason why I won't be touching Acer kit again - they flatly refused to comply with the Windows licence agreement which says I can return the unused licence for a refund).
I do not think the average person would want to buy 60 terabytes of anything.
It wasn't that long ago when I was running a 286 with a 40MB hard drive. "No one could fill that" I thought... and it wasn't long until I did.
Upgraded to a 486 with 200GB drive... Then I added an 850MB drive... "no one could fill that" I thought... within a few months it was full.
The list goes on - 1GB, 6GB, 20GB, 40GB, 1TB. Anyone who thinks that people won't want 60TB drives at some point in the future needs to look carefully at the past - in a few years time, they will look as silly as the people who thought, only 20 years ago, that 40MB was fine and 40GB would be an outrageously large size.
in lot's of cases retailers were not covered for the second year warranty by their suppliers.
That's the retailer's problem, not the consumer's. If the retailer doesn't like it, they are free to try and renegotiate their contract with the supplier.
Customers are willing to pay their own kidneys for apple products. Maybe they'll toss in an extra spleen too.
If Apple thought that their customers would pay an extra spleen don't you think they'd be charging it already?
For consumer protection law that works well, see New Zealand.
Nice and simple. Goods and services must be
"Merchantable quality" means that while some things might be expected to last less than a year, a PC is expected to last two or three.
Works the same here in the UK (not entirely sure where this "2 year minimum warranty" thing comes from - certainly doesn't seem to be reflected in UK law, which it should if its an EU directive). Basically, the _retailer_ must warrant that the product lasts as long as people would reasonably expect it to last. In the first 6 months, the burden of proof is on the retailer (i.e. if they don't want to repair/replace it then they most prove that it didn't break due to a defect), after the first 6 months the burden of proof switches to the consumer (you have to prove that it failed because of a defect).
Note that redress is with the vendor, not the manufacturer, and it works really well in practice, If your PC breaks after 18 months, you take it back and they fix, replace or refund with barely a murmur (because consumers over the years know their rights).
Here, how well the vendors handle this seems to be variable. For example, my parents recently had a bit of a battle with Karrimor (Sports Direct) over a suitcase. The suitcase's handle fell off during normal use (a screw worked loose) after a little over 6 months. Karrimor refused to repair it, even though it was sold with a 12 month warranty because (in their words) "we don't repair or replace products that are over 6 months old". After some argument they did eventually get it repaired, but it was certainly not "barely a murmer".
Another example, Acer refused to replace my laptop batter after it failed after just 15 months. They stated that it was a "consumable" and therefore refused to cover it. Whilst I don't expect a battery to last the life of the machine itself, 15 months is a tad too short for my taste.
I have had good experiences of vendors and manufacturers taking defective products back (e.g. Seagate and Western Digital have both been excellent at replacing busted hard drives), but it doesn't always go smoothly.
Simply put, if I buy a oLed tablet, the blues going out after a period of time is not covered under warranty since this is to be expected.
I'm not sure about that. If you weren't made aware of this issue when you bought it, could you reasonably have been expected to know? By the same token you could say "if I buy a car made out of cheap low quality parts and it falls to pieces after a period of time then this wouldn't be covered under the warranty because it is expected" - it may be expected by the manufacturer, but whether it is expected by the average consumer is another question.
I guess a comparison needs to be drawn against similar products (not necessarilly identical technologies). I.e. if people routinely buy tablets with LCD screens and they show now degredation in picture quality after 5 years of "normal" usage, then a tablet that does show significant degredation in picture quality after a few years (because it uses OLED instead of LCD) is inherently "defective" because it doesn't match what most consumers are used to for tablets in general.
Rust holes forming after 5 years in a decent car IS covered since this is not to be expected anymore.
A similar parallel can be drawn here. If most cars are built using galvanised steel (inherently rust resistant) and a manufacturer decides to produce one from ungalvanised steel then this can be seen as similar to the OLED example above - the ungalvanised one will rust much quicker than the usual galvanised cars. "It uses a different technology to most other cars" isn't a good defence against why the warranty shouldn't apply - the consumer can't reasonably be expected to know or care about the underlying technology, they just care that their expensive car just rusted through in a few years whilst every other car on the market lasts many times that.
How about a battery that runs out of cycles in normal use after 15 months?
Got caught by that one myself a few years back... My Acer laptop battery died after about 15 months, Acer told me that it was a "consumable" and therefore refused to replace it under the 2 year warranty (notably the replacement battery I bought has now died after a similar length of time, which suggests to me that the fault is in the laptop, not the battery). The upshot of all this is that neither myself, nor my business will ever touch an Acer product and we recommend to our customers that they avoid Acer too.
There were other problems that Acer refused to deal with. For example, the DSDT is broken on this hardware (Travelmate 6413), and Acer refused to acknowledge any fault or release a new BIOS, despite me fixing the DSDT and sending them the fixed code.
Nah. They probably just charge more in the EU to cover the extra year of warranty.
Doesn't work like that. Products are sold based on what the customers are willing to pay, not based on the underlying cost of the product. So unless the extra year of warranty significantly changes what customers are willing to pay, the prices will stay the same.
If you still think that people change their views based on outside feedback, you probably aren't old enough to be allowed to vote yet.
I change my views based on outside feedback. Not directly because I want to change my view to please people, but because feedback lets me see the subject from a different perspective which allows me to realise when my view doesn't mesh well with reality.
If you're the sort of person who never changes their view based on new information, I guess you're some kind of religious nut?
Don't tell them who you're going to vote for. They have no right to know.
There are good reasons to tell them that you're not voting for them (and explain why): If they are able to understand the reasons why people aren't voting for them, they can change their policies to reflect what the public want. If no one ever explains that they aren't voting for them (and why) then the party is left losing the election and having to guess what people want for the next time around, by which time what people want may have changed.
Certainly, there are good reasons to _allow_ people to keep their votes secret, but there are also good reasons for people to opt to waive that right to secrecy.
The proof-of-concept listed only four out of my ten enabled extensions. Among those left out were Google Calendar, UA Spoofer, and Pastebin, among others. I'd say this 'exploit', if we can call it that, has a long way to go...
That's because you only saw the first part of the exploit.
The full exploit procedure is this:
1. Direct someone at a website that lists a few of their installed extensions.
2. Scan slashdot to find that person moaning about how crap the exploit is and look at the "missed" extensions they list in their comment.
3. Combine the results of (1) and (2) to acquire a complete list of installed extensions for that person.
You bastard, you made me google "Flinstone porn", and now I dearly regret it. Fucker!
Read that as "nearly regret it"...
There are a lot of people driving without insurance in the UK. A notable proportion of them are also driving without a license, with a revoked license, while banned, without tax or without an MOT. If you can stop this you make the roads safer and make insurance more affordable (at the moment your insurance has to cover accidents with an uninsured vehicle in most cases). Perhaps the solution isn't perfect, but I think it is a considerable improvement on the current situation and isn't really more invasive. Number plates are already being tracked now.
I wholley support the idea of preventing people driving around without insurance/tax/licence. I'm just concerned that innocent people are going to get badly caught out by this when the DVLA or insurance companies get their records wrong (which _does_ happen with reasonable frequency. A tip I've learned is to make sure your tax disc renewal date is nowhere near your insurance renewal date because it seems that it is common for insurance companies to forget to tell the DVLA that you have insurance until a few weeks after it has become valid. If the DVLA think you don't have insurance, getting a tax disc is a nightmare, even though they are wrong).
Unfortunately the big problem with all these big systems is that it is always assumed that the system is right and it becomes a complete pain in the arse for the member of the public to prove that it isn't (this goes for many "big systems" - DVLA, police, banks, HMRC, etc.) And unfortunately the whole thing is usually set up to penalise the public when they make a mistake but not penalise the institution when the role is reversed. A good example of this is the HMRC - if you accidentally underpay your tax they will fine you and charge you interest; if _they_ accidentally overtax you then you might eventually get it back a few months/years later, after a lot of effort to convince them they were wrong, but you'll get no compensation or interest. Ever tried to contest a parking fine? Don't bother - it's far more costly than just admitting you're guilty, even when you're not.
At the moment you get fined and therefore have some time to work through the (incredibly slow) system for a few weeks if it all goes wrong. *IF* they could arrange a system where it was painless to get incorrect records fixed *right now* rather than taking weeks then the proposed idea sounds reasonable. But that won't happen - if the records are wrong you'll spend weeks not being able to fill up your car (or at least, jumping through many hoops each time you need to in order to convince the petrol station to turn on the pump).
What is actually needed is for the current penalties to be enforced (and possibly increased - I believe it's far cheaper to pay a "driving while not insured" fine than to get insurance a lot of the time), rather than trying to bypass due process entirely.
That's the sound of someone who has no idea how much insurance costs some people. For a new driver with a £100 car, they could well be paying £1500-2000 per year for third party insurance. When insurance is that much, it hardly surprises me that we have an epidemic of people driving around without insurance.
That sounds like someone who thinks driving is a right, not a privilege
I think that if you aren't able to drive then your life is very restricted. This means you may not be able to get a job or generally enjoy life much. In some areas, there really is no alternative to driving if you want to go a reasonable distance (nonexistent public transport coupled with roads that are too narrow and winding to safely cycle on).
Roads are not free and it's not your god given right to drive on them.
No, roads are not free. They are paid for by the tax payer. The taxes collected from drivers in the form of fuel tax and road licence fund are orders of magnitude more than that spend maintaining the road network.
Those of us who have fully paid up insurance and rego do not want to be subsidising people who cant be arsed getting insurance or rego.
Did you actually bother to read what I wrote? None of this is about "can't be arsed", it is about people being priced out of the market.
If you cant afford insurance, even just 3rd party, you cant afford to drive and I dont see why you should be allowed to.
Whether or not you think it's "right" that people drive when they can't afford to insure themselves, when people need to drive in order to get to work but can't afford the insurance are you surprised that they choose to drive uninsured?
If you cant afford insurance, even just 3rd party, you shouldn't be driving. If your premium is 1500 pounds for a 100 pound car, you are clearly too dangerous to be allowed to drive public
If we assume that anyone being quoted £1500 or more to drive a £100 car means you are "too dangerour to be allowed to drive in public" you are basically saying that pretty much _anyone_ with less than a few years experience is "too dangerous to be allowed to drive in public". How then, should inexperienced drivers gain several years of public-road experience if, in your opinion, they shouldn't be allowed to drive on public roads?
(Yes, insurance prices far in excess of £1500/year are *normal* for new drivers, so you are basically saying that no new drivers should ever be alloed on the roads)
I suspect that is the actual motivation behind it all. They don't have the cycle infrastructure in place to tempt people off the roads, so they just price you off instead. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the homicidal bus drivers :)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17069235
Wouldn't be so bad if they actually reinvested the money in the infrastructure. Between road licence fund, fuel tax and fines the government collects a hell of a lot of money from the motorists. But the roads are still in a poor state of repair (between the pot-holes, dodgy patching of the blacktop, and speed humps, driving around is pretty unpleasant. I've been informed by garages that they are replacing a lot more suspension components these days. Also, people with back problems can be put in real pain by driving over any of these things). And the provision for cyclists is still terrible. And public transport is still useless (unless I book over 2 weeks in advance, taking the train pretty much anywhere is far more expensive than taking the car, far more time consuming and also leads to problems like how to get to/from the station given that the bus service doesn't run at useful times).
I recently looked at the price of getting from Swansea to Scarborough on train, booking 3 weeks in advance. The round trip was £280 (cattle class) or £630 (first class). It amazes me that anyone would pay that - I could _fly_ there for less! A few years ago I thought that it might be nice to do a weekend ski trip to scotland and looked at the price of catching the sleeper on the friday and sunday nights - it would've been far cheaper to just fly out to the alps.
FWIW, the local bus service runs fairly irregularly (it'd usually be quicker for me to walk to the station from home rather than walk down to the bus stop, wait an hour for the bus, then walk from the middle of the city centre to the station), and not at all on Sunday (and since for weekend trips I'd usually be returning home on Sunday, this makes using public transport pretty downright inconvenient)
Why put so much effort into getting around the system rather than voting the douchebags that come up with this stuff out of office and taking your government back?
We already did that... turns out that all of the candidates are as bad as each other so that didn't work out so well for us.
I'm not sure how the UK has gotten by without separate trailer plates/registration for this long--a trailer can be very valuable depending on make/model/type and not having a separate title and registration seems like it leaves the door open for people to claim they "own" a trailer they've simply stolen.
As if swapping the plates on your stolen trailor/car/whatever to make it look legit is hard...
Nah, any idiot can buy a set of plates in the UK, and most garages have the equipment to make up number plates on the spot. You need proof of ownership (or a dodgy mechanic) in order to get a spare plate made up, but that's easy enough.
Despite the legal requirement for proof of ownership, in my experience this is rarely enforced anyway.
Also wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to just pay for insurance, licensing and registration then to try and fool the cameras.
That's the sound of someone who has no idea how much insurance costs some people. For a new driver with a £100 car, they could well be paying £1500-2000 per year for third party insurance. When insurance is that much, it hardly surprises me that we have an epidemic of people driving around without insurance.
It either a) stops the pump if it cannot approve the number (including non-recognition) or b) stops the pump if it detects an unauthorized number. There's a subtle difference, but only the latter wouldn't be a complete disaster - though the summary describes the former.
The latter requires the DVLA to have their records correct, which they demonstrably aren't that good at doing. I can just see this system stranding perfectly innocent drivers because the DVLA's computer thinks they don't have insurance when they do. I can just imagine the DVLA putting the resources in to fix such problems in the middle of the night when you're stranded with no fuel. (that last bit was sarcasm).
Even if it is an American company, the courts would follow English law.
Wouldn't be too sure, it seems the norm for british nationals to be groundlessly extradited to the US... Basically, the US says "extradite this person" and the UK seems to say "ok" no matter what.
The note about Dell Dimensions is nice, but those are "home" computers, not "professional".
WTF is the difference between a "home" computer and a "professional" one? If anything, I'd expect home computers to be more powerful since professionals don't generally need to play the latest games...