A quick search on the pi forums finds a US user with the following experience:

by skdrowe Â
Tue Aug 21, 2012 4:39 am
Used Newark/ Element 14. Ordered 8/3/2012, Shipped 8/10/2012 Arrived today Calif /USA. (8/20/2012).
Merchandise Total : $35.00
Handling Fee : $0.00
Tax : $3.06
Shipping : $7.65
Total : $45.71

In short, you're spending too much time whining and not enough time shopping around. Feel free to buy one of the many competitive products out there. I suspect your entitlement mentality may hit a brick wall when you seek any support from the no-name manufacturers who ship free from China, but YMMV.

So much hate for a cheap computer aimed at opening the horizons of kids.

As I've said in other threads on this subject: cancel your order with RS, go with Farnells. I just received my second, rev 2.0 board. My first (rev 1) Pi is running the home PBX quite happily using IncrediblePBX. The second one was ordered on 2012-11-06 and arrived on 2012-11-20.

Sorry for the assumption I made about your nationality. I've downloaded the PDF and look forward to finding the time to read it :)

Have the patents that pertain to this product expired? Are they in some other way invalid? If not, the company should still enjoy their protection, since that way the benefit to society is maximised. The company innovates and profits, we get new and better (cheaper, bigger, more effective, whatever - better is a broad term) products. After some time, other companies get to make products using the same innovation and prices decrease, or supply improves or whatever. Rinse and repeat.

We can debate the alternatives if you wish, but in this case the patent holder seems to be behaving "constitutionally" (I'm not a citizen of your fine nation). If you really want companies to behave in a way that maximises societal benefits I think you'll need to change more than the patent system.

Because it benefits us,the people.

At the expense of them, the company.

Not disagreeing about the idiocy of the gutter press and sadly almost every newspaper splashes around in the gutter from time-to-time.

But whether MW was a joke or not (to you and I she was, but my erstwhile evangelical friends thought she had a serious point), she did represent something in our psyche - a puritanical, prudish slant to life.

Somebody brought this to the police's attention - they don't actively "police" facebook, looking for this kind of stuff.

We in the UK have a glorious (sarcasm alert) tradition of being offended and/or taking things personally at the drop of a hat - eg Mary Whitehouse' organisation, or the braying mobs demanding "death to all paediatrics" (sic) whenever a kiddie is murdered (most often by a member of the child's family, it seems, so why aren't they calling for "death to all relatives"?).

I suspect someone, maybe a member of the armed forces or somebody close to them, has seen the poppy burning and rather than thinking "idiot, let's not give them the oxygen of publicity", has instead gone off the deep end and started "shouting the odds", stating that "I'll swing for him, I will", "death's too good for them", "I didn't fight a war for the likes of them" etc. and called the police. Notwithstanding the fact that they would normally the sort of person who decries the wasting of police team and the fact you "never see a bobby on the street these days" and "the streets aren't safe for our kids anymore".

Unsubstantiated hearsay, I know. I'm just blowing off steam.

Doh. Sorry - Colbert Report not Daily Show. Wednesday: The Word - Meducation.

Thanks, reading the paper now. Issues that occur to me so far:

It's mainly for hospitalized patients - how many of these would have died whatever happened? It's hard to tell from the paper directly, since it cites other estimates from around ten years before, and I haven't been able to read them yet.

How many people's lives have been saved or improved by "big pharma"? Same question for illegal drugs and Aurora-style massacres. Yes, it's silly question, but your equivalence between "big pharma" and illegal drugs is why we're having this little debate.

The number of deaths due to adverse effects forms less than half of the deaths from iatrogenic causes - is the problem really "Big Medical system as a whole"? I know a lot of people are happy to posit a conspiracy by the drug companies but are reluctant to blame medical professionals for whatever reason. Recognition that human errors occur, and learning from those errors, is to my mind more important than belittling the work that everyone involved in humand and animal health is doing.

Yup, I'm in favour of pharmaceutical drugs. I've had cause to take several of them in the past, mostly for mental issues (OCD, anxiety, etc.), but also migraines. In all cases except one (a doctor nearing retirement and seemingly a bit out of touch and too eager to hand out the happy pills), the medical professionals have been very reluctant to prescribe unnecessarily, recommending therapies such as CBT before drugs, waiting to see how those therapies progressed and giving me assistance in eventually terminating treatment when its work was done (ie tapering programs for anti-depressants). YMMV, since I'm a happy customer of the NHS and I suspect you don't have a similar system.

Apropos of nothing in particular, I got this story first from the Daily Show, downloaded yesterday, broadcast the day before, and summarising TV news stories from earlier in the week.

Start with big pharma. They kill more people every year than illegal drugs.

1. Citation required.
2. Per user, or in absolute terms?

Not that I disagree with your general point about commercials - I live in a country where this sort of advertising is forbidden.

Whilst public moaning in completely unrelated forums may appear to be the best way to expedite delivery, talking to to RS or Farnell will probably yield better results. If you've been waiting months, and you really have paid, then something has gone wrong. I wasn't charged until despatch, and I received the board within eight weeks of first reserving it (not purchasing, reserving). Registered with Farnell/RS 2012-05-08, pre-ordered from Farnell 2012-06-13, despatched and invoiced 2012-07-17, arrived 2012-07-20.

Of course if you've already talked to the supplier, please disregard my missive. It's merely that every story about the Pi includes at least a couple of people complaining that they've been waiting months. In the early days supply was a problem, now less so.

If you're in the UK, more particularly Kent, more particularly Cranbrook, the kitchen shop at the top of the high street can get you all the sizes of gasket. If I don't get modded up Informative for this widely-applicable message there's no justice.

And a big +5 to Moka. There really are no down-sides, unless you want monster crema.

Note I don't deny that language is mutating. But using that truism to justify why someone yet again has used the unnecessary and nonsensical neologism "virii" is tired and lazy.