"I wonder what % of their takings the average cabbie actually declares for tax purpose? hhmmm..."
All of them other than tips as they're recorded by the meter.
130 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Feb 2008
"Surely GPS means we dont need drivers with the "knowledge" anymore."
Actually you do. One thing that I learned over 10 years of using Satnav, half of that as a lorry driver doing 100,000 miles a year, was that it was only really any good for someone driving as a living for the "last mile" or so and that even with things like Tomtom Traffic IQ it couldn't route for certain times of the day as good as someone with knowledge of road conditions could. There were plenty of times it'd route me a way I would never ever consider given the time of day I would be at a certain point.
Satnav will 100% get you from point A to point B, that there is no doubt. Whether or not the route is the best that it could be is a different question entirely and usually the answer to that is no.
No wonder they're shafting sellers even more than they usually do. The new TSR rules coming into force in August punish sellers who reclaim fees when idiot buyers buy things without reading the descriptions or idiot buyers buy the wrong thing then file a "not as described" claim.
So they have to take a photo of a perfect finger print from either the digit in question or from the screen of the phone.
Look at the screen of your phone. Tell me how many complete fingerprints you can see on it. The answer will be somewhere between zero and none because you typically use the tip of your fingers and then it gets smudged as you swipe your fingers across the screen.
Personally I'm not worried by this.
Except BTs network was originally provided by the tax payer.
That has long since been retired and replaced. The original network provided by the tax payer was old electromechanical exchanges, long since replaced, mechanical phone boxes long since replaced and copper cabling virtually all replaced barring the odd "pole to property."
Broadband didn't exist when BT was privatised and all of Openreach's network which OFCOM applied the limits to were entirely funded by the privatised BT so your argument about the original provision is irrelevant.
"Sky signal around my parts is utter pants, as is anything via aerial."
Sky uses satellites so as long as you're within its footprint and with nothing in the line of sight you should have no problem receiving it. The only people who would get a poor signal are those living outside of the UK on the fringe areas of coverage.
The piraters are the biggest users of bandwidth and bandwidth is Plusnets biggest expense so it makes sense to them as a network to reduce piracy over their network as much as possible.
You can't price a service at the price they do if you have everyone on it downloading 500GB a month and still want to provide a usable service during peak hours.
"Getting a signal anywhere but outside in a built up area is ridiculous."
As someone who has travelled all over the UK as a truck driver, lives in a county one and a half times as large as the inner M25 with 1/20th the population of London and been on Three for several years I can categorically say your claim is rubbish.
"Do you really want to knacker an expensive games console playing legacy formats when there is a CD/DVD/BD player six inches away from the PS4 in your AV stack?"
My PS3 is my CD/DVD player as it is for many people. Many of us used the fact the current gen games consoles could play CDs and DVDs as a way to get rid of another box under the telly.
"You’ll also frequently find yourself outbraking opponents and taking three or four drivers at the first few corners of races. An unrealistic element that’s more Outrun than Formula One, and simply doesn’t gel with the sport as we know it."
That is exactly what the top 10 drivers do on a regular basis. I can only assume that the author didn't watch the Japanese Grand Prix this weekend.
"0) You could learn about Malaria and how to avoid catching it from the internet.
1) You could use the internet to ask for medical assistance.
2) You could use the internet to help you find the nearest clinic.
3) You could use the internet to discover how to treat malaria and acquire appropriate treatments.
"
I've not seen this much ignorance and and detachment from reality posted in four lines for quite a long time. You really do believe the internet is the answer to everything don't you?
The frequencies they're wanting to move people off are barely used at all so it was inevitable that this would happen. There is very little interest in the GHz stuff other than a very small group of people and even fewer people using it - its not cheap with even a short 3ft patch lead setting you back £10. In my county I doubt the number of active users is barely more than low double digits in number. The Amateur TV repeater on 2.3-2.4GHz has been off the air for some time.
If you don't use it, you lose it and the 13cm and 23cm bands are a perfect example of this.
The power quoted for transmitters is peak power. The nature of analogue signals is that the peak is rarely reached, and the average power is 5 or 10 times lower than the peak.
Oh dear. The analogue TV signals were FM `as far as I remember - the audio certainly was. As such they were transmitting at maximum power all of the time. If they were AM you would have a point as that varies the amplitude of the signal but they weren't so you're wrong.
They already existed. We had the Dell Latitude D400 series, the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad X series. However they' weren't cheap being typically £1200+.
But you can buy them used today for a little over 1/10th of that price. Because so many were used in business there are many on the used market that probably haven't been used at all.
I use a 2007 Dell Latitude D430 I use which cost me £100 to buy and £60 to upgrade to SSD. Core 2 Duo 1.33GHz ULV CPU, 12.1" 1280x800 screen, 64GB SSD. Various capacity batteries available including ones that will do all day. A 5200mAh battery can be bought for under £15 and will easily do 5+hrs.
Asus Transformer Prime from a hardware point of view seems to have it about right. A tweak of that so you can choose to boot into Android or Linux but with both having common shared folders for user files would be great. Even better if you could get it to auto switch from Android to Linux when you attached the keyboard.
"It's amazing how little you can get on a 40MB hard disk, when it's already half full of DOS and Windows 3.1."
HAHA. I remember those days. When Doom came out I had a choice of having Windows or Doom on so I got very good at installing Windows. I actually still have that 40MB Hard drive. I tried killing it once by driving over it in a 38 tonne lorry several times but it lived and worked perfectly. They dont build them like that any more.
Exactly. I have a VHF repeater on a tower on a very high hill. I can talk through that repeater from 30 miles away with a 5 watt handheld radio using the stock rubber duck antenna. That repeater which itself is using only 5 watts can be heard from nearly 60 miles away.
So they've discovered what amateur radio users and broadcasters have known for nearly a century? Why the hell did they think that repeaters and TV transmitters are put up on the highest hills in an area?
And how much money did they spend investigating something they could've got the answer for by walking into their local amateur radio club and asking even a newly qualified amateur?
"The fact the issue popped up suddenly on Wednesday would suggest that engineers at Google had been fiddling with SSL certificates"
I wondered why a site I use went offline for a few hours...
So OpenDNS system saw the SSL certificates as potentially dodgy and took action to protect its users from sites using SSL certificates it didn't see as authentic? I'd call that proof that it is doing what it says on the tin and its one of the reasons I use OpenDNS.
I am an amateur radio op. The general concensus of this solar cycle is "nothing to see here, please move along". It is absolutely abysmal with the numbers barely higher than they've been for the past 3 years and activity on the HF frequencies remaining low. Considering we're nearly at the maximum you should be able to talk to someone thousands of miles away on a wet piece of string by now.
I worked out ages ago that the only way to get the best out of Ubuntu is to stick to the LTS. All other interim releases are rushed out to meet what I feel is a stupid deadline. I treat them in effect as BETAs for the next LTS release.
As for the comments about apeing Mac OS X, I would say Gnome did that more than Unity and Unity is some kind of bastard child of Mac OS X and Windows 7 UI elements whilst adding things in an attempt to make it look like it isn't.
Also there's a well reported power management issue for both desktops and laptops which still isn't fixed as its a mainstream kernel issue.
Its a shame that with every new release of Ubuntu they always seem to break something important which worked before.
"Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours." - Err I think that Apple will find that Nokia had smartphones with touch screen interfaces long before Apple did. As for inventing technologies instead of stealing them, thats rich coming from a company that stole the GUI from Xerox...
Difference between gas and gshp is £190 a year. So say it costs you the least amount for the installation. Assuming no repairs whatsoever, it'd take THIRTY FIVE YEARS to break even compared to running gas. If you're looking at the top end of the installation cost, you are looking at a SEVENTY YEAR period before breaking even. Obviously these are variable depending on the cost of gas. You're still going to need a gas boiler anyway to top up what it can't supply. And as the climate changes, are you actually even going to need it?
Yet another "money saving" idea pumped by the eco-mentalists which doesn't actually save money.
Multiply that figure by three for people not browsing every day? Surely they'd be able to do a count up of each unique install. If not, how do they know the orginal ten million is accurate?
In short, as much as I love Firefox, this smacks of the same kind of bullshit bigging up of numbers that Sony did for the PS3.
I'm self employed and have accounts going back 3 years and thus can prove my income.
Self certification is saying that you earn £xxxxxx without providing any proof. Anyone who is self employed will have accounts and these count as proof.
For those newly self employed without accounts, how is that any different from someone who has just started a job? An employed person can be sacked without any reason given for the first 12 months of a new job so a bank wouldn't take that job into account until you'd been there over a year and as a self employed person, you'd have a set of accounts after 12 months anyway.
Where's the problem other than people not being able to lie about their income and those fiddling their books getting screwed?
Another non-story.