Posts by zb 238 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Nov 2010
Here in Brazil the 16GB iPhone 4S costs R$2000 which at today's rate is almost £600. Apple appear to be too ashamed to quote the prices of phones with more storage
http://store.apple.com/br/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iphone4s
The good news is that it includes free shipping!
It costs about £5 and takes 5 minutes in any number of small phone repair and computer shops around where I live. There is even one bar where the owner does it while you have a beer.
I can see that it might be entertaining to join in a multi-billion dollar class action but there is an easy solution to the perceived problem.
I saw it tonight on the BBC World. A rough approximation of the interview went as follows:
Q: Are you waiting in the queue to buy a new iPhone?
A: Yes
Q: Do you know how much it will cost?
A No.
Q: Do you know how big the screen will be?
A No.
Q: Do you know what new features there will be?
A: No
Q: Did you buy the new phone last March?
A: yes
Q: If they sell a new version next March would you buy it?
A Probably
... Sky do not care.
For years every tourist pub in Spain has had Sky TV, also most British residents there. They are domestic licences for UK use only. This is totally against the terms of the contract and is prejudicial to the owners of Spanish broadcast rights.
Sky do nothing about this because they are receiving a substantial revenue from selling something they do not own. If you call Sky ask for support and say you are in Spain they will cut you off. They operate a "don't tell and we won't ask" policy.
I had Sky in my house in Spain for many years so I cannot claim any moral high ground here but Sky make me want to vomit when they get all self-righteous and object so someone else doing something they themselves do and make millions out of it.
In the works of Corporal Jones "They don't like bayonets up them"
Whenever I have had personal experience of something that is in the press the report has little resemblance to anything I experienced. Most stories are a little bit boring and they cannot resist sexing things up. The punters demand it and they flock to the more disreputable papers.
PS Naturally El Reg is exempt from this accusation as it is a well known fact that all its stories are accurate, well thought out and rigorously checked for facts.
It is a while since I have been involved but in the UK the tellers are bank employees who are junior enough to want to earn a few extra quid. They are supervised by the returning officer (often the Mayor) and his staff of couciol employees.
Your friends sound like tellers who are unofficial volunteers from the political parties who sit outside the polling station and invite to voters to identify themselves. The candidates' representatives use this information so that they can identify their probable supporters who appear not to have voted yet.
Each candidate is entitled to be present at the count and is allowed nominees to watch each table. It is open to the press but the public are not allowed in.
There is a more detailed description here http://www.helium.com/items/1798154-counting-the-votes-in-a-uk-election It took me at least ten seconds to find that so I guess your were not that interested to hear how it works.
"Protectionism is never a good thing, there may be short term gains, but they are always outweighed by the long term consequences."
Like after WW2 the US government supported their aircraft industry in a big way and the British industry could not compete and died. Then Lockheed and Boeing ruled the roost. Once the opposition is destroyed there are long term advantages to a short term subsidy.
Economics Nobel prizewinner Paul Krugman discussed this in his book "Peddling Prosperity"
There could be a long term advantage in aggressively supporting open source in the UK thus helping build up the software industry.
Why do I have to log in separately to each domain? As far as I am concerned I am visiting El Reg and do not care if it is www.reghardware.com http://www.channelregister.co.uk or whatever.
My other gripe is that every time I give the thumbs up to a post (after I have logged in again for the umpteenth time) I am dumped into a stupid page telling me how happy/unhappy you are that I liked/did not like the comment. I must then scroll to the bottom to click the "back to where I was " button. Why can it not just accept up/down vote and not take me from the page I am reading? Plenty of other sites do that.
It is a useful site but you have to read between the lines. I tend to ignore the very best and the very worst reviews and look at the middle ones. If there are not at least ten reviews they are not reliable.
It is like eBay and Wikipedia: you have to think a bit while you click. That does not invalidate them.
This all started under Tony Blair and New Labour. I thought that Brown would sort it out as part of his "I am not not Tony" new broom. Then the Tories took over with the help if the Lib Dems. Finally, i thought, now someone can tell the Americans to bugger off. Wishful thinking :(
This whole case is so fantastic that I have great difficulty coming up with a logical explanation for the behaviour of British politicians. Just about everyone I know agrees that all that McKinnon needed was a rap on the knuckles and his computers confiscated.
I cannot believe that the UK will allow the deportation of one of its citizens for a fairly trivial crime with a sentence many times higher than could be exacted here. This is regardless of the fact that there is no real reciprocity. Being a little more cynical than I used to be I now do not find it so surprising that our politicians will allow the destruction of the life of one of the little people for no particular reason other than kissing the arse of Uncle Sam.
It all makes me wonder if maybe they are really all lizard people.
"Acer calls it "Green Instant On" - allows the machines to come awake in 1.5 seconds and "ensures battery life that lasts several weeks","
I expect I will be marked as an Apple fanboi (which I am not) but this seems to describe my vintage Macbook Pro which is five years old. I just shut the lid and walk away. As soon as it re-opens it works. I have never timed it but it feels like less than 1.5 seconds. Is Acer going to be sued?
As a Brit living in Brazil I do not have options 1, 2 or 3. I do run a virtual server in London and watch iPlayer via a socks proxy. There are not many films for sale or rental in the original language and the choice is minimal. The mail is not very reliable and customs duty is extortionate so mail order is out.
So I buy and rent what I can and use torrents for what I cannot and don't lose too much sleep about it.
Actually, possibly, a sample size of 2000 is very good.
Provided that it is a carefully selected representative sample. The typical "survey" quoted in press releases consists a PR junior assistant asking a couple of people in the pub a loaded question.
There is a pretty good short description here
http://www.osra.org/itlpj/bartlettkotrlikhiggins.pdf
"Quite who’ll develop this isn’t known – El Reg can’t see the power companies being thrilled about it."
As a wild guess I would say maybe the battery manufacturers?
A silly season article. As dale321 hinted, it would have been much more interesting if it had compared the predictions with those of five years ago. Or ten.
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