It's amazing the shit these laywers manage to pull off. Instead of an actual cash refund for how much they illegally ripped you off by, you get "credit" to spend at their store.

Since they have their profit margin on whatever you buy with this, they are still making money from you and being rewarded for their bad behaviour. Plus I see people posting about the tiny amounts they are getting, so if you actually want to buy anything, you will need to spend even more of your money to take advantage of it.

Add to that there is a nice time limit on there which will save them even more money, from all the people who don't claim it within the time limit, this is a joke. You might as well just let them off entirely, this as a "punishment" is a huge green light saying "please do something similar again in future, you'll make more money overall".

Back when the UK passed the Snoopers Charter (the one that lets everyone and their dog access your full internet history), those clever politicians made just one important exemption - they themselves wouldn't be subject to the law.

http://www.independent.co.uk/l...

I'd be surprised if the US hasn't done the same thing, but then the UK *is* a world leader in surveillance of their own citizens.

I wouldn't comment on the quality (or lack thereof) of open source software compared to their main commercial competitors, since I haven't enough experience of the former to make a proper judgement.

What I would say though is that just because the software is FOSS, that doesn't mean zero cost.

Sure, you don't have to buy licenses, but you still need all the infrastructure to deploy it, and especially to support it. If your users have more difficulty using the open source alternatives for whatever reason, you will spend more money on staff to provide sufficient support. If your support staff aren't good with it either, you might need to invest in training courses and/or more qualified staff. Heck, you might even need an expensive support contract with another company to provide 3rd line support.

" The company says Stethoscope tracks disk encryption, firewall, automatic updates, up-to-date OS/software, screen lock, jailbroken/rooted status, security software stack configurations of the device."

Fantastic! Which one of those stops the user clicking on the nice shiny link in the email claiming to be from the helpdesk and telling them they need to reset their password instantly or lose their account, then filling in their account details for the nice phisher?

Oh yeah, none of them. Good luck with that.

Amazing that people are willing to buy this from Amazon, even the SlashDot crowd seem to have forgotten this incident:

https://yro.slashdot.org/story...

Up to 1000 Mbps - yeah, perhaps if you have built your house right on top of the cabinet. In fact, not even then.

I was on their FTTC product for a couple of years, the one that's "up to" 80 Mbps. I got 18 down and 0.75 up. I tried reporting the speed to them on several occasions, especially the upstream speed which was very limiting, only to be told they didn't consider that to be a problem - it's within the range of speeds considered acceptable for that product.

Who said anything about a 700W power supply? The PSU is 1050W. 700W (well, 684W peak to be exact) is what I measured at the wall.

Just two 980's in SLI, but your figures only take into account the power consumed at their rated TDP - overclock them and add in an overclocked CPU too and 700W isn't out of reach by any means, when you add in all the drives, fans etc.. and the monitor of course.

That is pretty cheap though - got anything like as cheap in the UK?

Have you checked the maximum output of that $150 UPS in W?

I don't know what the power consumption of your PC is like, but a quick bit of research found that the cheapest UPS I could buy that can cope with my PC (700W or so under load) is around £400, that's about $627.

Obviously that PC cost more than $500, but given that power disruptions in my area occur maybe once in a decade or so, I'll stick with a simple surge protector.