I have a Note 2 and depends on the ROM you install. Some support all the features, some not. Eg Paranoid Android won't, but Jedi X will. There is also a Note3 ROM for the Note. Flashing a new ROM takes about 10 mins to root and reinstall. Very easy indeed. I highly recommend trying some of the ROMs, they blow away stock in terms of security and features. You should root the device anyway so you can run Adblock Plus.

Phillip.

I span the NAS down as soon as the hard drive went, but booted it up just for 1 day as it was also the shared print server. I thought 24 hr only would be safe enought :-(. On the other hand if the drive was about to fail would a failure during rebuild be any better?

Phillip.

I have RAID 5 with 4 x 3TB seagate drives. 1 drive failed after a year and the 2nd in the same NAS failed a couple of days later before a replacement could come in the post. So far 3 / 8 Barracuda drives failed in just over 1 year. After just losing 4TB of data, including my entire photo collection, I've sadly realised RAID 5 isn't enough.

Phillip.

Plenty of good advice here, especially having a central cupboard where you can run your wiring and have your media centre and putting Cat5e everywhere. I would add:
* put the cupboard not next to a bedroom, the whirring can get annoying
* run HDMI and speaker cables to your media cabinet
* tvs you don't include in above, put 2 plug sockets behind so you can power a Roku/mk802/etc
* run light switch cabling and lighting cabling back to your switch cabinet rather than in series, then you can connect how you want
* you can put IR control light switches in, Google "livolo", then make sure your controller (android tablet) has IR blaster
* for my next project I will definitely buy from here for controllers, including dimmers and sensors
* you can put IP cameras rather than motion sensors, or you can combine with IR, but placement is important
* might want to put cabling to above windows should you decided to have curtain controllers

Like others, I would put insulation as a top priority. Heating is one of the major costs in running a house.

Phillip.

What about construction zones? What about school zones? It's not the movie Speed where if the car goes below a certain speed it explodes. It's about well trained operatives driving as appropriate to the situation. The limits are so ridiculously low in the UK the population could drive 2x the speed limit without problem.

If an MI5 agent is following a suspect, it seems a bit absurd that the suspect could get away because they were driving 35mph.

Phillip.

It's legal to flash your headlights in Britain, except for purposes of 'intimidation' and 'alerting other motorists to police activity'. You also cannot clog the passing lane. Not only that you can get a fine for driving too slowly. Bretons are French people from the western region called "Brittany". Perhaps you mean the British? They are also one of the few countries where cars drive on the correct side of the road.

Phillip.

It depends how you crash. You can crash at 250kph and be fine as long as you don't hit any solid objects head on too early, ie pretty much only on the motorway, but yes your odds are not great. I've driven 250kph down the autobahn and it's quite comfortable if you have the right car. It's not at all dangerous in Germany as the drivers are so courteous. In residential areas, however, you never know when some idiot is going to step out between parked cars without looking.

Speed limits are now so low that few people heed them any more. It's just a money-making machine, you just accept the fact and pay the additional road "tax". You could remove speed limits and things wouldn't really get any worse (driving fast is not the same as driving dangerously), much as removing the 11pm licensing law didn't plunge Britain into booze-ridden chaos. It doesn't make economic sense to do so though as commuters and school mums are high-income hostages you can bleed regularly to fill the coffers.

Phillip.

Well it has some facts quite easy to check. For instance is Childline really being blocked? The Cameron-filter was touted as stopping children "accidentally" coming across images of hardcore pornography. In which case why are "Web blocking circumvention tools" censored? There is too much of a discrepency between what Mr Cameron described to us why it was needed and what it actually does. Either Mr Cameron lied or the ISPs have radically over-reached in the level of national censorship. Some investigative journalism should dig it out, though the only paper brave enough to print the truth these days is the Guardian and you would consider than a well known left wing newspaper.

Phillip.

All that would be needed to complete the coup would be for India to announce Elop had been secretly lined up to be India's Minister for Communication at some exhorbitant salary a year ago, and the long game of establishing TNC (Tata Nokia Communications) has finally fallen into place.

Phillip.

"No sane system" is your opinion and that's fine. "Only in the US" is a mistatement of fact. That's not true.

It's not just my opinion, but that of most of the world. And even then that of many within the USA. The only exceptions I think are Japan and South Korea (well that's what Wikipedia tells me).

The law is that new machines can be patented and it doesn't matter if the multiplication operation is done by a lever, a gear, on an X86 instruction.

There is a difference. A lever says apply force at this vector and this physical object will produce X result. An X86 instruction, which is just an abstraction of machine code, simply toggles 0 and 1s and is completely generic.

Don't think about it as "changing the law", think about it as harmonising it with the rest of the world. As for the consequences (or traps), you can see that Europe has actually benefited rather than suffered since the inception of software so you don't need to worry that much.

Phillip.

"Most games are 95% art, 5% math, and 100% software."

You know it should add up to 100%? The game is generally a user taking the part of a character in a story. The storyline cannot be protected, but the diaglogue can be copyrighted. The art is also copyrighted so nobody else can copy the characters you created. The math cannot be protected, but your actual bytecode implementation of that math can be copyrighted.

No patents are necessary for software, and haven't been since software was invented.

"Gravity isn't patentable. An elevator is."
"Momentum isn't patentable. A brake system is."

As long you have a novel mechanical effect that nobody has ever thought of. However, the important bit is the "including mathematics"

"Division isn't patentable. eBay's feedback system is."

No sane system would allow such a patent. Only in the US.

"Light reflection isn't patentable. The way Blender simulates reflection is, if it's novel."

Again it breaks down into two parts: the mathematical algorithms used and the software written to implement those algorithms. Neither should be patentable. The latter is copyrighted and protected under the GPL.

Phillip.

Why isn't this comment already rated -5 Troll? Pathetic even for a troll, 1 second Google search shows it is BSD licensed.

Phillip.

So true. Whilst companies put in draconian DRM there will always be superior pirate versions out there, and the risk to the companies is that otherwise legitimate users then 'forget' to then buy a copy to put straight into the bottom of their cupboard. Remember those games where you had to have the original CD in to play it? A real pain. Or the one that tied a game to a specific CPU, meaning if you put in a faster processor you had to buy a new copy of the game? Or the one where you needed to be connected to the Internet to play offline games, meaning you can't play on your laptop on those long boring travels. 9/10 the pirate version is better.

This is where Steam got it right. It's easier to buy the game officially than it is to pirate it. Click click, play. If I change computer then one click on my games library and it's installed again. It took a while to earn people's trust but now they have it I hope they continue.

Phillip.

Exactly. 14 years, as envisaged by everybody that put in place the framework for copyright, is perfect. I don't think Origin would have a problem having exclusivity on Battlefield 4 for the next 14 years. Valve might still be selling the original Counterstrike 1.6 in a box set but it hardly sustains their company any more.

The perversion of copyright law is quite tragic, and definitely detrimental to our society.

Phillip.

Unity is getting slow. I get crash errors ever 10 mins, no idea what is crashing but it doesn't affect my usage apart from having to keep closing those error boxes. I would LOVE to get involved and try the latest Ubuntu but I really don't want to install spyware on my machine.

Remember all those Ubuntu apologists before? "Why worry about it, it's as simple as apt-get remove somewierdname". Next version is suddenly more integrated and you can no longer simply apt-get remove the package. Gullible fools.

However KDE looks awful. It is so unpolished. And there are loads of UI bugs that make it unpleasant to use. The final straw for me was double-clicking on a movie residing on my NAS, and KDE deciding to spend 5 mins copying the whole thing to /tmp before attempting to play it.

So far XFCE is shaping up to be the next popular desktop. I've moved several people to it and they love it. It feels a little basic for me but then what is the alternative?

The best things that could happen:
a) Canonical back-tracks and decides not to screw over its user base
b) KDE has a massive sprint to fix UI, and forgets trying to aim for QT 8.0 which works on smart watches
c) developers shift from Unity to XFCE and it starts to take over
d) a new contender emerges

So far (d) looks the more likely, despite so much time and effort already sunk into and currently wasted in (a) and (b).

Phillip.