True, but even that wouldn't electrically damage the camera. The charging circuits are current controlled so even they wouldn't be damaged by such an event.

Leaving marketing mythology aside for a moment, what damage could a third party battery do?

A battery cannot overvolt, so the only condition where it could supply too much current would be in the event of a fault inside the camera shorting it out. Exploding, leaking etc shouldn't be a concern to Panasonic since to claim against them you'd need both the camera and the remains of the damaged battery, which if not a genuine Panasonic item wouldn't be their liability or warranty expense.

This is surely just a ruse to get us to buy a new camera every couple of years since the battery will need to be replaced after a year or two and will be "obsolete" and unavailable by then.

Traditionally the UK military have had very little faith in GPS. Perhaps it's the selective availability controlled by a (sometimes hostile) foreign power which makes it look less than attractive from this side of the Atlantic. That's why they pushed ahead with development of ring-laser-gyro based inertial nav clusters even after GPS became a reality in the mid to late 80's.

Most modern systems such as Eurofighter Typhoon use the two devices in tandem, but since, if align settled before use, RLG IN systems can even track the wobble of the Earth's orbit, they should be adequate in the event it was felt useful to scatter a few thousand GPS jammers around a particular theatre.

The great advantage of GPS is not needing to nav align it before use, it's almost instantly available. Still, like all systems, errors in it's use can have disastrous consequences.

Now might be the time to switch to lead free, more environmentally friendly ammunition then.

At the time of its inception I wondered, but never dug far enough to find out, if the EU RoHS directive would make lead-free ammunition a reality

In my experience though that's more a big company problem, than a small company with a one man IT department.

Having done both, and currently being a one man IT dept, it's a completely different relationship with users. I think I am much more likely to be helpful and flexible towards our users here in this smaller more intimate company than I was in the super large corporation I inhabited before.

Users also are different, in the large company software and network access policies were much more respected by the user base, or it was considered a waste of time in that situation to fight against them. In this small company sometimes it seems every user considers themselves a special case and wants a policy written just for them.

User behaviour can be part of the problem. We've all come across users with 40 apps open whining their pc is slow. It's just not practical to give every user the latest greatest PC on the market with a super fast processor and oodles of memory - economics dictates that in business good enough is good enough.

In the world of the one man IT dept, managing expectations is perhaps the greatest skill of all.

And because we give them away free to secondary school children.

Been doing it for two years now here in Hartlepool, in NE England, all secondary kids get an Acer Eee-PC

Free Wi-Fi at McDonalds and lots of other places, and enough people like me who make a slice of my residential bandwidth available on unsecured Wi-Fi, mean there's very few places they can't be used.

It still looks strange though, loads of kids silently munching the junk food they've bought at the shops opposite my house to escape the diet-nazi's new school meal regime, each with a burger in one hand and a net book in the other.

And the lack of Windows seems to be only a problem for the school's staff, the kids learn Linux in no time.

It's already mandatory in the EU (and Japan I believe) for auto manufacturers to make all diagnostic code information which affects the "function or efficiency of the vehicle" freely available.

Now, while the EU obviously has no bearing on the US, auto manufacture is a global industry, standard parts abound, and most US manufacturers have one or more European brands in their stables. You'd have to have some kind of Canute complex to think that if you were to try and charge the US drivers for this information, they wouldn't just turn to the net and ask their European associates for it.

Of the roughly $8 a gallon we pay here in the UK for gas, $7 of that is tax

Mine's way lower tech than that, and yet is fine to run 4 VM's all day every day

2 x 1 gig Xeon's on a dual processor workstation motherboard bought off ebay, 4Gb RAM because that's the max the motherboard will address, two x 250Gb IDE drives. Cost of all this, under US$250

If you want a rig for "experimentation" then you don't need much more, it's about running and configuring software for me, a bit of functional testing etc, not high volume data throughput. It scales nicely too - I virtually model my server room setup on this rig, and run some data through it - the response is the same as running x1000 as much data through the real thing because each component is effectively strangled slightly by low system resources, as opposed to by sheer workload, but they are analogous from a performance assessment viewpoint.

They do. That's why you see such low quality video feeds in a lot of news reports now - they're being sent by webcam/mobile phone standard transmission methods over the net

And what made you think? Even scallop dredging is still big business (even in the US), and they're even less selective than trawling

20% of my bandwidth is made available to anyone who wants to use it through an open wireless connection. I do this because it doesn't cost me any extra money, and at the time I installed the equipment there were no free access hotspots in our area.

I think I'd be pissed though if some unconnected third party started charging people to access it, which is effectively what Inner Fence has done - found a way to make money from a third party's free service.

I don't regard it as immoral, just making the point that our wealth does affect/impact the poverty of the world's poorer peoples. While I agree with this

it is unfortunately true that short term thinking is more the norm than we realise. For companies the important thing is year on year dividend to shareholders, while long term plans have to be made to ensure this happens, focus is short term - next year's AGM

I cite DSG because they are just a retailer, so their business model depends on a relatively large gap between the wages of the manufacturing country and that of the end customer

Anyway, as for (im)morality, I wasn't making that judgement, merely make the point to the previous poster that to suggest that the wealthy's affluence, and what they do to maintain it, doesn't in turn directly affect the affluence of the poor is nonsense

Not only that, it's criminal. Or at least the Nuremburg war crime tribunals would have us believe so, since the charges of atrocities against civilians in occupied France cited many instances of the Nazi's destroying whole streets or villages in response to the actions of one "terrorist", apparently this was a "crime against humanity"

But c'mon, be realistic, nothing is going to change over there as long as the US is incapable of levelling any kind of criticism under any circumstance. It's an unfortunate truth that if the Israeli army command got up one morning and decided it was going to put every Arab child under 12 through a garden waste shredder alive and broadcast it on national TV then the US administration would still be silent. We've watched TV pictures of them shooting at an unarmed child on a rooftop, seen them machine gun a BBC cameraman at point blank range live on CNN, watched them bomb the UN, rake hospitals with machine gun fire and said/done nothing.

You are looking for some kind of morality, some universal right/wrong philosophy that governs the actions of the Western military powers, and there just isn't one. Currently the decision has been made for whichever reason you care to believe that whatever they want to do they can get on with it, and until the White House changes its mind nothing will change.

If you want to change the world, begin with something you can realistically impact - Iraq, Afghanistan, 3rd World debt.................