You realise this has nothing to do with the BBC being a government organisation (which it isn't)? It's because the BBC has massive problems getting content providers (mostly US ones) to allow them to broadcast their content, especially in HD.
I believe this is one of the several reasons used to stop the BBC getting the rights to 24 after the first season, they didn't want it aired on the BBC in the UK as it affected their ability to sell it to Europe (as BBC signals can be picked up quite easily over there). Instead they managed to launch their show on the BBC and get a huge following, then move it to Sky. Fox and Sky TV are owned by the same guy...
Channel 4 is not a "public service" broadcaster in the same way the BBC is, you seem to imply that it's a Govt. controlled channel with commercial advertising.
Infact, all terrestrial broadcasters have a "public service remit" which requires them to have certain amounts of public service content such as religious programming, regional programming (such as Welsh language TV) and a variety of culture and arts.
All channels but the BBC are commercial channels, the main 5 also have this public service remit.
Or is there some way to shut off whatever part of the TV is devoted to picking up broadcast signals, so that you can legally have a TV without paying this "optional" fee?
Yes, you can. If you use your TV for watching pre-recorded videos, games consoles, CCTV etc. but do not watch broadcast TV, you don't need a TV Licence. In a strange loophole (because the licence covers live broadcasts etc.) you don't need a licence to watch any BBC iPlayer content, except for items being streamed live (like BBC News).
Technically you're meant to disable the tuner, but as far as i'm aware if they do check your house an untuned telly and no aerial is enough proof.
To check your TV they need to gain a warrant allowing them entry to your house. To get the warrant they need to have a reasonable suspision of your household watching broadcast TV, usually they aren't able to do that. So typically, no warrant and no checks.
I've managed to erase all my apps on iTunes by accident. I re-installed my machine, fresh copy of iTunes with my podcasts set up, plug in, sync.
In that bar up the top "Erasing application xyz...". All my apps, gone, because i didn't re-auth the computer first. Problem is i can't find any form of "Download all my apps from my account again" option. I think i'm going to have to go through my iTunes purchase history, then try to find all my apps individually!
My biggest problem with iTunes is how laggy it's UI is on Windows. Click on it, does nothing, click again and it responds. Did it do nothing because i was selecting the iTunes window from another one, then clicking again on the actual iTunes UI button? Or, if it does work first time, i've double clicked and it's launched another window! Argh!
How about multi-tasking? I'm afraid to do anything else with iTunes if it's syncing, it'll lag / crash / i don't know what but i have to kill it. It's been syncing, i've clicked to browse podcasts, whole thing freezes.
Final gripe, when using an iPod / iPhone you get a drop-down of Photos, Music, Podcasts below the iPod item on the left hand menu. If i select these i get a list of the stuff on my iPod, great. If i click on the iPod link itself i also get the same items as tabs on the top of the main view. Named the same, appear in the same order and seem like they should be the same items, but yet they have different functionality. Why?!
I'd also say Apple has no idea how a File or Right-click menu works. Why do they have both "Authorise" and "Deauthorise" on the same menu? Can a machine be in some unknown middle ground?
I've had an iPod Touch for quite a while, i really do love it and it made me want the iPhone. However, working with iTunes has made me realise i don't want an iPhone, it's going to be such a horrible thing to manage and it's so locked down. I might have a look at the HTC Hero instead now.
Indeed, i'm currently posting from my Industrial Placement and it's a great way to get a foot in the door. The University is able to open doors to places you wouldn't normally look at and you can often get an offer after the placement.
I'm currently working for a large investment bank, wouldn't have thought about this level of work before. The placement takes a bit of time out of my term and erases my Summer holiday, but i do get 6 months of paid work experience.
(I am currently fixing last year's intern's project, i'm thinking of scrapping it and starting from scratch!)
No, all it states is that it cannot prove the program is bug free. It can, however, keep running and finding as many bugs as possible.
If you get to a stage where you don't find bugs after a long enough period of time, you've probably reached the limits of that particular testing method's ability to provide any useful data about the application. That or the bugs are now awkward to find and probably won't be found by the majority of user input either.
On the halting problem basis, users will never find every bug in an application either, so lets not fix them!
Why should a current day software company putting out new products be coding for an obselete machine? Yes, many people may be using those old computers, but often they'll be the people that aren't too fussed about running brand new cutting edge software. That or they'll be the tech types trying to squeeze what they can out of an old PC, in which case you'd probably be running Linux or a more lightweight OS anyway.
The number of cheap and reasonably powerful machines being dumped onto the marketplace now is huge, if these people want to upgrade the software of their PC to the newest and cutting edge versions, then they should upgrade their hardware to match. Granted, this is a web browser, but the web browser is where most people spend their time now. If it's not a fully featured application with plenty of tools & features at hand, which browsers are now giving us, what's the point?
If you're running a PC with a processor older than a P4 and less than 512MB RAM (although i would probably say that it should be 1GB now, esp with RAM prices) then i say don't whine when you can't run brand new (beta) software!
I'm not quite sure how cable works over there, but Virgin Media provide some of the fastest connections in the area, currently they're touting 50MBit and 100MBit in trial areas in Kent / London. In comparison, the fastest non-cable ADSL connection is 24MBit (although our ISP doesn't care what we do with those 24MBits). Why bother leasing a T1 line instead?
I use Windows all the time, i love Vista as a desktop OS and it works great. I find i can find the tools, settings and everything i need fairly straight forwardly. This is using the Start-search box and the Control Panel search dialog for settings. I haven't bothered navigating the settings for so long because i've not needed to.
I've been wanting to give Linux a proper go after the first time i used it failed miserably a few years ago (HDD was dying at the time without my knowledge though). I've been using it at Uni for 2 years as the default OS and am reasonably apt with command line and whatnot for some tasks. We've even botched about coding a basic device driver for Linux too.
The day Husty Heron came out, i gave it half my Windows partition and access to the NTFS data drive. Installed without any major problems (I can imagine the whole swap thing getting a bit confusing, the Vista install is infinitely better than the XP one was too). I've got dual-output, first problem was setting up that.
I go to the settings/admin section, why am i presented with about 15-20 options in a disorganised list? Do i want desktop, resolution or what? I eventually find i can't do dual-output with my ATI card unless i start installing some weird programs, none of which seemed to do what i wanted.
Second, tried to play media. Media player prompted me for downloading a load of codecs, and after a few attempts it seemed to work, except for my sound. After a load of screwing about in that config list i mentioned above, i eventually found something about sound and changed it to ALSA (i'd read about this at some point before). However when i isntalled VLC it refused to play sound like anything else.
I did manage to install flash and those programs through the Add/Remove programs (along with VLC), however it did take a mate prompting me to look at the other repos (3rd party, open source and whatever) to find a few of them. Not a huge biggie, but installing them from the websites from source has never been a smooth process for me. It did detect my wireless keyboard and mouse, with hotkeys, no problem, but Windows also does that without drivers too.
IM, web browsing and whatnot worked great and with the proggys i use in Windows anyway (Firefox, Pidgin), but i think my biggest gripe is the lack of organisation. The programs tabs are categorised at a high level, but from there it becomes a huge list of things (Named kprogram, gprogram or whatever Linux likes to prefix them with) and the configuration menus are terrible. A large dropdown box of random ass launching config windows? Some Palm config in the middle of everything? And i agree completely with this guy's trashing of the filesystem./dev/etc/mnt aren't really very descriptive.
I've found this feature incredibly useful. All my regular sites appear at the top of the list as i start typing, although regular sites aren't the ones that i've found it useful for.
Say i've just found a webpage via a link or a search and accidentally closed it too early, i'm sure we've all done it. I just need to remember a snippet of information such as part of the URL or part of the title and i can usually find it first try. None of this going through your history crap to find it by the limited information available there.
All the sites are pages you've visited weighted by last visit, frequency etc. They're just taking all the stats that are usually recorded and making them a useful feature of the browser. It runs great on an old server machine we booted up after a few years. Celeron 1.1GHz, 256 RAM and XP, i don't see it slowing down or bloating Firefox much either.
Okay, i haven't tried this in a Linux distro but...
There's been a Flash in-browser streaming version available for months (Basically since the official release after the beta). The downloadable versions don't work as they are WMV DRMd, but the flash version is multiplatform with no DRM!
The only story here is that the iPhone version, released last week, is the same as the flash version. All the BBC are doing is re-encoding the videos to WMV DRM, Flash and H.264, the latter two available as streaming versions only, with H.264 only sent to iPhones. There is no iPlayer app for the iPhone, it is all done with Safari and the built in video player which auto-loads on H.264 streams...
iPhones can not download iPlayer content, they can only stream it, same as the multiplatform flash in-browser streaming. I can't get the downloadable iPlayer working right on my Vista laptop, but the flash version works perfectly. Now you can capture the flash using any of the standard flash capture programs, and all this story says is that you can do the same with the H.264 if you spoof the iPhone.
However if she bought an iPod touch or the iPhone she would need to use iTunes. The Winamp plugin doesn't manage my iPod, it doesn't even see it.
The worst thing is that iTunes is incredibly glitchy for me, right down to if i change window to it, half the time the entire interface is black and i have to switch out and switch back again.
I'm afraid you're talking bollocks. It's illegal to promote the Imperial measure over the metric measure in almost all circumstances (supermarkets often have both the same size and that's legal). There are very few products where it is illegal to not use imperial units.
It is not legal within the UK to serve alcohol (by which i mean lagers & beers If etc.) in anything other than multiples of half pints or pints. If you go to a bar and order a litre of your fav. beverage they cannot serve you it. If i went to my local and ordered a litre of my regular they can't legally serve me it.
BTW, this does not make it ILLEGAL to purchase in imperial units. If you buy a pint of milk or a litre of a pint of milk you pay the same per unit, however you cannot advertise the price per pint (or other imperial unit) over and above the price per litre (or other metric unit).
I've already torrented it and am waiting for the UK release of it to purchase a copy, but there's just no mention of it even coming our way. I'm sure it will but it would've been great to have got it coming before Xmas.
From the sounds of it i got the impression it might be the total Vista directory size after you've installed the update, i can't see how else it could possibly ever be 7GB.
I would be interested in finding out what they've done to the copy because i have a strange copying issue with Vista. It refuses to copy any large files over the wireless. With a file over perhaps 150MB it will copy the first part, then the copy dialog will hang and say it's unable to finish copying (as if you've turned off the other machine's networking). Now it does the same thing when being copied to from a Mac so i really want to know WHY it does that. It's the only thing about Vista that actively bugs me as i frequently copy files over the WiFi to play on the telly via the laptop.
Yeah, you can get that crap from PC World, i'm just giving the other point of view that there's a large number of customers that do it themselves.
PC World now don't work on commission anymore, it got phased out about 2 years ago. The management actually tell staff to sell the MS Office & Antivirus as this is far more profitable than the actual PC itself, let alone the fact that the PC doesn't come with these software packages and most people need them. The biggest problem doing this is that the customer thinks that in selling them MS Office you are actually trying to upsell them into stuff they don't need.
(according to PC World (UK) a dual core Pentium and 2Gb of RAM are required to "write letters" and browse the web, apparently because there have recently been upgrades (to the net) and there is a new version coming out soon)
I'd just like to call bullshit on that. Whenever i have tried to sell someone a PC/Laptop suitable for their needs they don't care. Seeing as the average customer won't tell you more than "net, emails and letters" and need stuff like "playing about with digital photos, video editing from their camcorder or even playing games" dragging out of them if they actually do have those needs.
So when i try and sell them our low-end PCs (Celerons / P4 machines which are actually reasonably good) they complain that they don't want a cheap crappy PC and want the £800 ones which do have a Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM and such in.
Read the Wiki and you'll find that it was classic police investigation that screwed up resulted in the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. An address from inside an undetonated bag lead them to the flats that Jean Charles was living in. The fatal flaw was that Jean Charles was never compared to the CCTV images and it went downhill from there.
We used the CCTV network to backtrack the bombers and to find out about their network. We also used the CCTV to capture and prosecute the 21/7 bombers whose devices failed to detonate correctly.
I'm a student attending Imperial College (That's Hyde Park area, really very expensive) and to live anywhere near my Uni is a rip off. To live a good 30 minute tube journey away i need to be looking at at least £140 per week per person for a flat, with this easily going up to £160 and more.
Lets not forget the increase in living expenses such as food costs, cds, electronics and such that not only cost more in the UK but cost significantly more in London. This is why there is the "London Allowance" where a Londoner should be paid more than someone outside London for the same job (basically),
I did my A-levels last year and got As in Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Computing. I just had a look at the Maths section on that website and read through all the stuff mentioned.
Out of the 20 things they listed as being removed from the syllabus i covered every single one of them. I can't remember where the dividing line of doing them in Maths or Further maths was, but they certainly haven't been removed from the syllabus.
I'm pretty sure the BBC wouldn't be allowed to release their stuff DRM free.
The BBC had to delay the release of the iPlayer to allow the commercial channels (ITV / C4) to get their own service up and running. If they were to release their programming for free it would skew the market unacceptably and the BBC would be prevented from releasing their programming for free at all. This is because the BBC are in the special position of having funding no matter what and the commercial channels aren't.
The BBC can't then try and match ITV and C4 at their own game and release a pay-per-view style online download system (with or without DRM) because they are not allowed to charge license payers for BBC content.
So lets ignore all the arguments about how the BBC don't own their content 100%, can't ship their programs DRM free as it will destroy their foreign commercial market and ability to sell their programming, they wouldn't be allowed to release a free, DRM free and unlimited download system.
Re:We already have this in the UK
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Manhattan 1984
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· Score: 1
You can buy them online before you leave at VisitBritain.
Slashdot Mirror
You realise this has nothing to do with the BBC being a government organisation (which it isn't)? It's because the BBC has massive problems getting content providers (mostly US ones) to allow them to broadcast their content, especially in HD.
I believe this is one of the several reasons used to stop the BBC getting the rights to 24 after the first season, they didn't want it aired on the BBC in the UK as it affected their ability to sell it to Europe (as BBC signals can be picked up quite easily over there). Instead they managed to launch their show on the BBC and get a huge following, then move it to Sky. Fox and Sky TV are owned by the same guy...
Channel 4 is not a "public service" broadcaster in the same way the BBC is, you seem to imply that it's a Govt. controlled channel with commercial advertising.
Infact, all terrestrial broadcasters have a "public service remit" which requires them to have certain amounts of public service content such as religious programming, regional programming (such as Welsh language TV) and a variety of culture and arts.
All channels but the BBC are commercial channels, the main 5 also have this public service remit.
Or is there some way to shut off whatever part of the TV is devoted to picking up broadcast signals, so that you can legally have a TV without paying this "optional" fee?
Yes, you can. If you use your TV for watching pre-recorded videos, games consoles, CCTV etc. but do not watch broadcast TV, you don't need a TV Licence. In a strange loophole (because the licence covers live broadcasts etc.) you don't need a licence to watch any BBC iPlayer content, except for items being streamed live (like BBC News).
Technically you're meant to disable the tuner, but as far as i'm aware if they do check your house an untuned telly and no aerial is enough proof.
To check your TV they need to gain a warrant allowing them entry to your house. To get the warrant they need to have a reasonable suspision of your household watching broadcast TV, usually they aren't able to do that. So typically, no warrant and no checks.
I've managed to erase all my apps on iTunes by accident. I re-installed my machine, fresh copy of iTunes with my podcasts set up, plug in, sync.
In that bar up the top "Erasing application xyz...". All my apps, gone, because i didn't re-auth the computer first. Problem is i can't find any form of "Download all my apps from my account again" option. I think i'm going to have to go through my iTunes purchase history, then try to find all my apps individually!
My biggest problem with iTunes is how laggy it's UI is on Windows. Click on it, does nothing, click again and it responds. Did it do nothing because i was selecting the iTunes window from another one, then clicking again on the actual iTunes UI button? Or, if it does work first time, i've double clicked and it's launched another window! Argh!
How about multi-tasking? I'm afraid to do anything else with iTunes if it's syncing, it'll lag / crash / i don't know what but i have to kill it. It's been syncing, i've clicked to browse podcasts, whole thing freezes.
Final gripe, when using an iPod / iPhone you get a drop-down of Photos, Music, Podcasts below the iPod item on the left hand menu. If i select these i get a list of the stuff on my iPod, great. If i click on the iPod link itself i also get the same items as tabs on the top of the main view. Named the same, appear in the same order and seem like they should be the same items, but yet they have different functionality. Why?!
I'd also say Apple has no idea how a File or Right-click menu works. Why do they have both "Authorise" and "Deauthorise" on the same menu? Can a machine be in some unknown middle ground?
I've had an iPod Touch for quite a while, i really do love it and it made me want the iPhone. However, working with iTunes has made me realise i don't want an iPhone, it's going to be such a horrible thing to manage and it's so locked down. I might have a look at the HTC Hero instead now.
Indeed, i'm currently posting from my Industrial Placement and it's a great way to get a foot in the door. The University is able to open doors to places you wouldn't normally look at and you can often get an offer after the placement.
I'm currently working for a large investment bank, wouldn't have thought about this level of work before. The placement takes a bit of time out of my term and erases my Summer holiday, but i do get 6 months of paid work experience.
(I am currently fixing last year's intern's project, i'm thinking of scrapping it and starting from scratch!)
No, all it states is that it cannot prove the program is bug free. It can, however, keep running and finding as many bugs as possible.
If you get to a stage where you don't find bugs after a long enough period of time, you've probably reached the limits of that particular testing method's ability to provide any useful data about the application. That or the bugs are now awkward to find and probably won't be found by the majority of user input either.
On the halting problem basis, users will never find every bug in an application either, so lets not fix them!
Why should a current day software company putting out new products be coding for an obselete machine? Yes, many people may be using those old computers, but often they'll be the people that aren't too fussed about running brand new cutting edge software. That or they'll be the tech types trying to squeeze what they can out of an old PC, in which case you'd probably be running Linux or a more lightweight OS anyway.
The number of cheap and reasonably powerful machines being dumped onto the marketplace now is huge, if these people want to upgrade the software of their PC to the newest and cutting edge versions, then they should upgrade their hardware to match. Granted, this is a web browser, but the web browser is where most people spend their time now. If it's not a fully featured application with plenty of tools & features at hand, which browsers are now giving us, what's the point?
If you're running a PC with a processor older than a P4 and less than 512MB RAM (although i would probably say that it should be 1GB now, esp with RAM prices) then i say don't whine when you can't run brand new (beta) software!
Hence i stick with Be (bethere.co.uk), 24MBit down, 1.3MBit up (can pay for 2.6 or so) for only £18/month and a static IP.
Plenty for BitTorrent!
I'm not quite sure how cable works over there, but Virgin Media provide some of the fastest connections in the area, currently they're touting 50MBit and 100MBit in trial areas in Kent / London. In comparison, the fastest non-cable ADSL connection is 24MBit (although our ISP doesn't care what we do with those 24MBits). Why bother leasing a T1 line instead?
I use Windows all the time, i love Vista as a desktop OS and it works great. I find i can find the tools, settings and everything i need fairly straight forwardly. This is using the Start-search box and the Control Panel search dialog for settings. I haven't bothered navigating the settings for so long because i've not needed to.
/dev /etc /mnt aren't really very descriptive.
I've been wanting to give Linux a proper go after the first time i used it failed miserably a few years ago (HDD was dying at the time without my knowledge though). I've been using it at Uni for 2 years as the default OS and am reasonably apt with command line and whatnot for some tasks. We've even botched about coding a basic device driver for Linux too.
The day Husty Heron came out, i gave it half my Windows partition and access to the NTFS data drive. Installed without any major problems (I can imagine the whole swap thing getting a bit confusing, the Vista install is infinitely better than the XP one was too). I've got dual-output, first problem was setting up that.
I go to the settings/admin section, why am i presented with about 15-20 options in a disorganised list? Do i want desktop, resolution or what? I eventually find i can't do dual-output with my ATI card unless i start installing some weird programs, none of which seemed to do what i wanted.
Second, tried to play media. Media player prompted me for downloading a load of codecs, and after a few attempts it seemed to work, except for my sound. After a load of screwing about in that config list i mentioned above, i eventually found something about sound and changed it to ALSA (i'd read about this at some point before). However when i isntalled VLC it refused to play sound like anything else.
I did manage to install flash and those programs through the Add/Remove programs (along with VLC), however it did take a mate prompting me to look at the other repos (3rd party, open source and whatever) to find a few of them. Not a huge biggie, but installing them from the websites from source has never been a smooth process for me. It did detect my wireless keyboard and mouse, with hotkeys, no problem, but Windows also does that without drivers too.
IM, web browsing and whatnot worked great and with the proggys i use in Windows anyway (Firefox, Pidgin), but i think my biggest gripe is the lack of organisation. The programs tabs are categorised at a high level, but from there it becomes a huge list of things (Named kprogram, gprogram or whatever Linux likes to prefix them with) and the configuration menus are terrible. A large dropdown box of random ass launching config windows? Some Palm config in the middle of everything? And i agree completely with this guy's trashing of the filesystem.
I've found this feature incredibly useful. All my regular sites appear at the top of the list as i start typing, although regular sites aren't the ones that i've found it useful for.
Say i've just found a webpage via a link or a search and accidentally closed it too early, i'm sure we've all done it. I just need to remember a snippet of information such as part of the URL or part of the title and i can usually find it first try. None of this going through your history crap to find it by the limited information available there.
All the sites are pages you've visited weighted by last visit, frequency etc. They're just taking all the stats that are usually recorded and making them a useful feature of the browser. It runs great on an old server machine we booted up after a few years. Celeron 1.1GHz, 256 RAM and XP, i don't see it slowing down or bloating Firefox much either.
As far as i'm aware, yes. I've got a live distro running at the moment and as soon as i can install Flash i'll find out.
Okay, i haven't tried this in a Linux distro but...
There's been a Flash in-browser streaming version available for months (Basically since the official release after the beta). The downloadable versions don't work as they are WMV DRMd, but the flash version is multiplatform with no DRM!
The only story here is that the iPhone version, released last week, is the same as the flash version. All the BBC are doing is re-encoding the videos to WMV DRM, Flash and H.264, the latter two available as streaming versions only, with H.264 only sent to iPhones. There is no iPlayer app for the iPhone, it is all done with Safari and the built in video player which auto-loads on H.264 streams...
iPhones can not download iPlayer content, they can only stream it, same as the multiplatform flash in-browser streaming. I can't get the downloadable iPlayer working right on my Vista laptop, but the flash version works perfectly. Now you can capture the flash using any of the standard flash capture programs, and all this story says is that you can do the same with the H.264 if you spoof the iPhone.
However if she bought an iPod touch or the iPhone she would need to use iTunes. The Winamp plugin doesn't manage my iPod, it doesn't even see it.
The worst thing is that iTunes is incredibly glitchy for me, right down to if i change window to it, half the time the entire interface is black and i have to switch out and switch back again.
I'm afraid you're talking bollocks. It's illegal to promote the Imperial measure over the metric measure in almost all circumstances (supermarkets often have both the same size and that's legal). There are very few products where it is illegal to not use imperial units.
It is not legal within the UK to serve alcohol (by which i mean lagers & beers If etc.) in anything other than multiples of half pints or pints. If you go to a bar and order a litre of your fav. beverage they cannot serve you it. If i went to my local and ordered a litre of my regular they can't legally serve me it.
BTW, this does not make it ILLEGAL to purchase in imperial units. If you buy a pint of milk or a litre of a pint of milk you pay the same per unit, however you cannot advertise the price per pint (or other imperial unit) over and above the price per litre (or other metric unit).
I've already torrented it and am waiting for the UK release of it to purchase a copy, but there's just no mention of it even coming our way. I'm sure it will but it would've been great to have got it coming before Xmas.
From the sounds of it i got the impression it might be the total Vista directory size after you've installed the update, i can't see how else it could possibly ever be 7GB.
I would be interested in finding out what they've done to the copy because i have a strange copying issue with Vista. It refuses to copy any large files over the wireless. With a file over perhaps 150MB it will copy the first part, then the copy dialog will hang and say it's unable to finish copying (as if you've turned off the other machine's networking). Now it does the same thing when being copied to from a Mac so i really want to know WHY it does that. It's the only thing about Vista that actively bugs me as i frequently copy files over the WiFi to play on the telly via the laptop.
Yeah, you can get that crap from PC World, i'm just giving the other point of view that there's a large number of customers that do it themselves.
PC World now don't work on commission anymore, it got phased out about 2 years ago. The management actually tell staff to sell the MS Office & Antivirus as this is far more profitable than the actual PC itself, let alone the fact that the PC doesn't come with these software packages and most people need them. The biggest problem doing this is that the customer thinks that in selling them MS Office you are actually trying to upsell them into stuff they don't need.
(according to PC World (UK) a dual core Pentium and 2Gb of RAM are required to "write letters" and browse the web, apparently because there have recently been upgrades (to the net) and there is a new version coming out soon)
I'd just like to call bullshit on that. Whenever i have tried to sell someone a PC/Laptop suitable for their needs they don't care. Seeing as the average customer won't tell you more than "net, emails and letters" and need stuff like "playing about with digital photos, video editing from their camcorder or even playing games" dragging out of them if they actually do have those needs.
So when i try and sell them our low-end PCs (Celerons / P4 machines which are actually reasonably good) they complain that they don't want a cheap crappy PC and want the £800 ones which do have a Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM and such in.
Read the Wiki and you'll find that it was classic police investigation that screwed up resulted in the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. An address from inside an undetonated bag lead them to the flats that Jean Charles was living in. The fatal flaw was that Jean Charles was never compared to the CCTV images and it went downhill from there.
We used the CCTV network to backtrack the bombers and to find out about their network. We also used the CCTV to capture and prosecute the 21/7 bombers whose devices failed to detonate correctly.
I'm a student attending Imperial College (That's Hyde Park area, really very expensive) and to live anywhere near my Uni is a rip off. To live a good 30 minute tube journey away i need to be looking at at least £140 per week per person for a flat, with this easily going up to £160 and more.
Lets not forget the increase in living expenses such as food costs, cds, electronics and such that not only cost more in the UK but cost significantly more in London. This is why there is the "London Allowance" where a Londoner should be paid more than someone outside London for the same job (basically),
I did my A-levels last year and got As in Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Computing. I just had a look at the Maths section on that website and read through all the stuff mentioned.
Out of the 20 things they listed as being removed from the syllabus i covered every single one of them. I can't remember where the dividing line of doing them in Maths or Further maths was, but they certainly haven't been removed from the syllabus.
I'm pretty sure the BBC wouldn't be allowed to release their stuff DRM free.
The BBC had to delay the release of the iPlayer to allow the commercial channels (ITV / C4) to get their own service up and running. If they were to release their programming for free it would skew the market unacceptably and the BBC would be prevented from releasing their programming for free at all. This is because the BBC are in the special position of having funding no matter what and the commercial channels aren't.
The BBC can't then try and match ITV and C4 at their own game and release a pay-per-view style online download system (with or without DRM) because they are not allowed to charge license payers for BBC content.
So lets ignore all the arguments about how the BBC don't own their content 100%, can't ship their programs DRM free as it will destroy their foreign commercial market and ability to sell their programming, they wouldn't be allowed to release a free, DRM free and unlimited download system.
You can buy them online before you leave at VisitBritain.