Really? Ouch. (I'm in the UK btw, so that's news for me) So they cannot even explicitly do it in the license/instructions? In that case Panasonic's actions kinda make more sense - bad batteries can cause nasty damage. Hmmm, maybe I change my tone a bit. But I still do not like it at all. Its the same argument as printer cartidges.

A better solution would of been "This firmware update identifies the use of 3rd party batteries and alerts the user to the risk of using them. It monitors the voltage output and shuts down the camera if it determines that the battery is insufficient or possibly dangerous. And invalidates the warranty too". This would of left open the choice to the user - after all there are a great many very good 3rd party batteries and they have saved my bacon in the past.

By monitoring the voltage I mean the camera can detect an abnormally fast voltage drop against its usage that might mean a defective or damaged battery - naturally it cannot detect if the battery is about to get white hot and set fire to the camera, but hey the user was warned and the warranty invalidated. I would expect the manufacturer to check the damaged camera EEPROM and say "aha! according to our data log you used not panasonic batteries, thats no repair for you!".

By removing the element of choice they raise the natural suspicion that this decision was taken on commercial grounds, not safety and risk a consumer backlash and dissatisfaction.

My first thought was to laugh myself silly with a touch of indignant rage.

But actually I take this a bit more seriously.. There is a well known phenomenon (that I am sure somebody else knows the name of) where people tend to believe what they read and we are not the target audience of this advertising tripe. Many people who will read this (and do not know better) will believe it and follow it and pass it on. And that irritates mes.

In this fraternity we all sit back and mock the ridiculous claims and statement in their FUD and sales - but at the end of the day they are quietly winning the war with one ill educated person swayed towards their cause after another.

I sure have no answers, but I do not feel like mocking this kind of crap anymore.

At work I use FF - but I am forced to use IE for the corporate portal because apparently only IE can possibly work on the portal, so they paid somebody to edit the script to reject all "non-approved" browsers. That is the end result of ill informed high up decisions based on fluff like this.

Are the conservative estimates an example of the Scotty factor. In other words if the team is 90% confident that the mission will last 5 months do they then quote 3 to management - that way if they mission carks it after 4 then they are still covered? I would imagine even the scientists and engineers are very concerned about managerial aspect like project tracking and meeting specification now.

More to the point, how do they estimate such a difficult and unpredictable mission parameter anyhow? I mean somethings like battery life, wear and tear and so on must be quite well understood, but others like the stress of launch, damage, and the great "other" option must be much harder to predict.

What I notice is that the primary mission has finished and I just bet that the men in suits are circling the project with their budget cutting shears - but then we get new data, stunning imagary and confirmation of old predicitons.

This just goes to show that given the cost of assembling and launching this missions it makes absolute sense to supply funding until the mission carks it. What would of happened if the budgets for the two Mars rovers was removed after the (very short) planned life cycle was finished?

So, does anybody know how long term budgets are assigned, reviewed and extended to cover missions that exceed their predicted life span? I'm kinds interested.

I'm not dead! I feel fine! I think I'll go for a walk! I'm getting better! ..

Honestly, its like the monster that will not die, nothing works - garlic, holy water, silver bullets, stake, decapitation, fire and even the BFG9000 could not finish it.

Just stay down, everybody will be much happier and we are all waiting for the party.

I wish them the very best of luck - thats a very powerful business lobby with a lot of politicians in pocket that they are going after.

Still, its very clear why he chose to represent her - the publicity on this high profile case could make him and give his career a hell of a head start.

Its sad that my first thought was this: the very first private venture to the moon will probably sell the Apollo and unmanned probes as the ultimate collectible artifacts to the highest bidder - and there is nothing that can be done about it. of course, I then started thinking more about the logistics as lifting a landing module off the moon and retuning safely and realized it was not going to happen yet, or any time soon. but the point remains that they could and there is nothing that can be done to stop them.

Sadly not!

I was ~12 and I had just understood looking ahead - so in my naivety I made something that was capable of looking ahead for pretty much the entire game.

it annihilated me.

Still it amused my family who mocked my pain as much as they could. Still, I was heartened to see that none of them could defeat Frankenconnect4 either.

I'll ignore the shameless plug.

Ever since I wrote my first connect 4 game in the 80s - and was totally thrashed by it, I never beat it - its been clear to me that the trick is to degrade a computer player in most circumstances to the level that it appears to have human flaws and play in a more human fashion.

Of course this logic only goes so far and some games require a search space so vast or a completely different programming model that even now a computer cannot beat a competent real human (Go is an excellent example of this).

The point is that it is easy to program a computer to win, the hard part is to program is lose convincingly.

did we try holy water and a stake yet?

I used to loathe IE6 - I used Opera until FF rescued me with an ad free alternative.

Don't worry it says it only reports the installed .NET framework versions so websites can decide what version of garbage they can spew to your browser.

After all, we all know here on /. that we can trust that description implicitly given Microsoft's past history of 20 years of good karma, open and friendly practice and just nice old fashioned values.

Gah, I find the mere concept of this nauseating. It further illustrates that even now the idea of a standard web experience across operating systems and browsers is a pipe dream, because nobody codes to the lowest common denominator and the standards are too fragmented.

His philanthropic accomplishments are certainly praiseworthy, but it's worth remembering that his vast wealth was mainly accumulated with some really unpleasent business tactics.

See "A History of Anticompetitive Behavior and Consumer Harm"
http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepaper.pdf

Whilst I congratulate the man for subsidising research and giving to worthy causes I have to wonder if he would do so much if he was not one of the worlds richest man.

oops, did I say 1989? I meant early 1990s - my bad.

Ok, I'm showing some age here.

Remember in 1989 the Stacker disk compression fiaso?

I think that was one of the original examples of this kind of behavior, in this case Stac electronics were able to get some money from MS - but it was a sour victory as MS has effectively removed them from the market place in the process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics

nearly 30 years of watching MS I have no faith that the firm will *ever* play fair, and as a business trying to please their shareholders it is very naive to expect them to do so. they have a monopoly and will abuse it to their benefit as long as they can get away with it.