
Dom Joly - the thinking mans futurist
Hello? HELLO!!
521 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Sep 2009
The previous post greatly underestimates the Sherman. It was a good medium tank for its time and about the maximum size you could conveniently get a tank across the Atlantic, fit in landing craft and drive over most roads and bridges of Western Europe.
It was easily a match for the Panzer IV which was its real main opposition, and fairly close to the Panther. Tigers, especially the Tiger II, were an extreme rarity on the Western Front. Reliability, Servicing and repair of any German tank was much harder than the Sherman.
Even the reputation of the Sherman for burning up is an over exaggeration, especially once wet ammunition storage was implemented.
Some Shermans (upgraded) were happily kicking T-55s in the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict.
1. Go to Tescos (or other places presumably)
2. Buy the Tesco PAYG version which is often sold at a £30+ discount to the unlocked version
3. Unlock it by contacting your friendly unlocker on eBay for £1.50 or so
4. Profit!
I have 5 of them as they're great value for money. Through Clubcard vouchers and the above, I've paid less than £100 for all of them.
So ICANN thought they were onto a winner by extorting $185,000 from everyone applying for a TLD, and are upset by the fact that someone has outsmarted them.
Quite honestly $2500 is probably small change to most companies that wish to pre-register. I quite honestly believe that no real company should be able to own its own .sucks domain.
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The main thing that really annoys the anti-copyright crowd is not that copyright exists. I can live with and respect the right that an artist/producer has the right to have the obtain money in exchange for his work and copies of it. I also have no problem in protecting user produced digital content.
What really annoys is the duration of copyright, partly thanks to what seems to have been a copyright arms race between Europe and the US. If I invent a magic potion that cures all known ailments, I am able to obtain a patent on it for 20 years and after that anyone can copy it. Copyright duration should be roughly similar.
There are occasions when Google has been wrong and a little over enthusiastic in their desire to get data on everything (and everyone). I'm not sure that they have crossed the boundaries into being evil
In this case Hood was not so much doing a service to Mississipians but copy/paste lawsuiting for the MPAA which is not a popular organisation at the best of times.
In actual fact if the council are unable to offer you a smaller home, then you are allowed to use that as a legitimate reason not to pay the bedroom tax.
Incidentally, you can rent out your spare room and earn up to about £5k a year tax free. Obviously some of this will be subject to benefits clawback, but the net effect will be positive.
As for moving home, there are discretionary grants available to assist in this sort of activity.
This raises the question of whether a charity is an activity to gather money to fully pay professionals to do the job, or whether the professionals being paid to do the work by the charity should also work for a charitable wage?
I do think the salary level of Save the Children is taking the p**s though.
Even better, you can buy a 4G LTE locked to Tesco Mobile for £20 less than the unlocked version and then pay £1.50 to £3.00 to some eBay guy to unlock it for you.
If you have Tesco Clubcard vouchers, you can get these for a substantial discount as your vouchers are doubled against electronic items. I paid £75 for my last Moto G 4G as a result....
I used to use some eye drops for a period of about 12 months afterwards after which it was no longer needed (the eye drops are similar to/the same as contact lens solution anyway, so its not much of a hardship). Because my correction was about the maximum of which they were capable of at the time (-9.75, -10.50) I expected some issues, but the advantages of not having to wear two substantial lumps of glass on my nose are substantial, and the cost of the operation has repaid itself many times over in the saved cost of glasses/contact lenses.
Eye surgery does not work out for everyone, but personally I think the small chance of something going wrong is worth taking for the benefit of 15-20 years without need for glasses.
"Climb a remote mountain or sail offshore - at night"
If you're thinking of something less risky, you seem to have forgotten the recent deaths in the Himalayas and the numerous deaths that occur when boats lose their battle to stay intact against a pissed off ocean.
*cough* Tom Bower *cough*Geoff Daly*cough*Carolynne Campbell from some organisation we'd never heard of till now.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11203634/Branson-spaceship-explosion-The-missed-warnings.html
Obviously there may be another issue which needs looking at, but everyone seems to be pointing their fingers in the wrong direction.
PAYG providers give you locked phones at a significant discount to unlocked versions (often £20-40). Thanks to the wonders of eBay, mobile phone shops and those nice chappies on a market stall, you can get an unlocked phone to use on Giffgaff or a similar MVNO quite easily for anything from £1-10 depending on who you ask.
..and not the El Reg sort.
I see Tom Bower has suddenly become an expert on rocket propulsion.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11203634/Branson-spaceship-explosion-The-missed-warnings.html
The fact is testing aircraft is dangerous, and this especially applies with respect to space going craft.