Actually, that a little over-simplistic, and fails to take into account the impact wealth has on those who surround you. In many cases our wealth is the direct cause of their poverty, insomuch as the actions we have taken to secure the continuance of our wealth have removed their opportunity to develop and progress to our level

Poverty outside the Western hemisphere is vital in maintaining our wealth. If everyone on the planet had the same standard of living, and wages, as the average American, the cost of the raw materials we import would cripple us.

How, for instance, could companies like DSG - the UK's largest electrical goods retailer, make a profit without cheap far Eastern labour, and it's only cheap because they're poor.

Anything to do with Timothy sharing nationality with Vendor B I wonder? Either way, one mjst ask the question - Timothy, why did you name vendor A but not vendor B?

Maybe I'm just getting cynical in my old age

Me 2 please

You plug the entry points the vermin are using. For some reason they dislike the feel of the stuff and shy away from it.

It's effective when you're running cables in closed ducts, but in my experience you'll be plugging entry points forever, and always be a dozen or so holes behind the rats.

Cut off the food supply, spend more on extermination, these are the only long term effective solutions

The key to ANPR success in the UK, and why it would be much more difficult to achieve in the US, is contrast.

The typeface, size, letter spacing, text and background colours are rigidly defined in law. Front only black on white is permitted, rear only black on yellow.

OCR is so much easier when you don't have to read purple text on a blue background, or yellow text on a white one

You can buy blank cards with mag strips on the back for making key cards for mag strip operated door locks.

There's a jig available for the Epson printer CD caddy for doing the credit card sized mini-cd. I use an R200, and the jig hold the CD by its edge, doesn't use the hole in the middle, so doesn't matter of there isn't one

You'd be surprised just how convincing the output from this combination can be.

If you need one with a chip embedded, for visual effect, then there are may suppliers of printable smart cards out there. I got some lovely unprinted Atmega 163's off eBay for playing around with cable TV - they worked a treat for this purpose too.

LMAO

That would be the America where everyone of every race and origin is treated with love and acceptance, where there has never been any kind of discrimination of any kind, and where migrant workers are loved like long lost brothers and sisters. That would be the America populated by people who know about the world beyond its borders, which doesn't have "World" series' for all kind of sports that exist only within its own borders, that doesn't imprison people without trial, that doesn't torture prisoners of war, that obeys the Geneva conventions, that doesn't have the highest per capita murder rate in the Western world, the highest incidence of narcotic abuse in the Western world, and the highest per capita prison population in the world.

Do please tell me where this America is, me & my Korean and Arab friends would like to visit for a vacation.

Haha,

You got to love the moderation on here

Troll = someone who posted other than official US version of an event.

Lol, welcome to the club antique geekmeister

I couldn't agree more

The ribbon is such a bug bear to users here that I routinely remove Office 2007 from new PC's bought with it bundled and replace it with 2003. Users hate it, they feel they haven't got the time at work to be learning a new user interface when they could (and should) be just doing the work

Cool, hip and trendiness have no place in business, and especially not in a time of global recession where we need above all to be maximising productivity. What we need is a sensible Microsoft producing evolving series' of software in a predictable and incredibly boring manner. I want each new version of Office to be the same, but better. If it's completely different from the user's perspective, as Office 2007 is, then it's really not Office any more, it's something else, and if I wanted something else, I wouldn't have been using Office all these years.

Isn't this trust issue the core reason why, despite the hype, the cloud concept is unlikely to succeed?

We're a UK company, with big US competitors, much bigger than us, and as the recession bites I can envisage trade and industry departments of all countries wondering what use they could make of anti-terror legislation to gather information which would help their own domestic companies. It's no great leap of the imagination to see a situation where my bids and costings for my primary customers leave Google's servers and end up in the hands of my US competitors.

It's not just a US problem, but primarily the cloud will be controlled by US companies such as Google, and for those of us outside the US that has to be a worry, or at the very least inject a note of caution.

I suppose all good sysadmins have a degree of paranoia, but the cloud is all about trust, and I just can't see why anyone would.

In most of Europe that would now be illegal

My outsiders perception is that California leads the US in environmental legislation, and certainly it has enacted laws similar to the WEEE directive of the EEC. Our press says that similar laws are being enacted by other states and on a federal level, hence the idea of environmental legislation rooting in California and spreading across the US.

But surely that makes the assumption that people dispose of product at end of life, which is not the case. People most often dispose of working tech product because technological advance makes them obsolete long before they reach end of life.

Cellphones are a great example, they must have quite a few years service life, 10 or more, but I always change mine every year, and I expect most people do the same.

But from the point of view of lead content, plasma screens can be thought of as an array of pixel sized CRT's - the lead content by weight is similar. Disposing of lead containing articles such as CRT's in the UK is a costly nightmare and I was somewhat surprise by the analysis, and then cost of disposal, of our waste plasma screens.

There are lead free plasma screens now commonly available, but the first of these was only developed in late 2006 by Panasonic, and their adoption has by no means been universal.

LCD's are mostly lit by cold cathode fluorescent lamps containing elemental mercury, i.e. not just mercury salts, but some mercury metal too.

The change to LCD/Plasma has not eliminated the toxicity of e-waste, merely changed the nature of the toxins. It's work in the EEC such as the WEEE & ROHS directives, and similar regulations brought in primarily by California then spread through the rest of the US to some degree, that are making areal impact.

So if I toss my garbage in your garden, or pick up my dog's mess and put it in your mailbox then it's your fault for not preventing me from doing so?

Poor people desperate for money will accept extraordinary levels of personal risk in order to earn a living. At the beginning of the last century in the US it was often the case that low paid workers had appalling and dangerous working conditions, suffered crippling industrial disease etc. Then regulators stepped in and said that no man should be subjected to such conditions and enacted health, safety and welfare legislation to make it so. Child labour was common, and the wealthy factory owners ruthlessly exploited their workers whose poverty forced them to accept this exploitation. Society became more civilised and such exploitation is now regarded as morally wrong.

Exploiting the poor of other countries is no less morally reprehensible than exploiting the poverty of US citizens as was done in the Victorian era.

Why mod this guy's comment as flamebait. That's real petty. Gun availability in the US is something that seems amazing to many of us outside the US. American's are surely aware of this, and of the different perceptions of their constitutional right to bear arms.

I disagree != flamebait, it's been said many times before, and no doubt it'll be said many times more.