Please note - I make no comment on the quality of bagged vs home-baked bread - merely that our "suspicious" consumer can quite easily see what goes in to bagged bread to make it last.

Quick heads up - they put the ingredients on the side of the bag.

Which negates my answer to the AC's question how? I care about man-made global warming since it means that people I care about may have worse time of it in the future than we have. Historically, the trend has generally been that the next generation has it easier in some way (less disease, less violence, etc.).

Saying "we're all doomed" is indeed cold-hearted, short-sighted and defeatist. If you use it as an excuse to do nothing, to change nothing that's in your control to change, then it's selfish as well, FWIW.

I mean, seriously, why do you care if Earth becomes another Venus?

My twin nieces, Ruby and Winnie. My nephews Leo and Max.

Sorry to appeal to emotion, but I find your attitude a little cold, a little remote, a little shitty.

Me - eldest - degree in Agricultural Business Management, then an MSc in Computer Science (didn't want to admit I was a geek at first, thought I'd want to take over the family business one day - see below). I now work in the financial industry, having previously risen to the dizzy heights of Systems Manager at a large University in London after 17 years of broadly-enjoyable slog.

My sister - education degree. Taught for 10+ years, was getting ready to take over as headmistress, then our Dad died. Once everything settled down, she took over as manager of the family farm (a chunk of arable land, quite large-scale by UK standards, but not a full-blown agri-business type thing), a role that she has totally made her own, despite the lack of any relevant training (other than years of walking the fields with Dad, as a then-bored observer).

Brother 1 - too many degrees started for me to remember the details. I think he finished one of them. He now owns a hedge fund and works for a video production company and lives in splendid style in Whistler.

Brother 2, much younger, still at Uni, reading Earth Sciences at Durham, having dropped out of another University before the course even started. Who knows where he'll end up. Lives to travel at the moment.

Yet you use the quote to argue that they have claimed the Pi is open. The quote has no merit in that regard. They wanted and needed to provide open access but they couldn't. They don't claim the Pi is open and they're frank about the reasons why they can't make that claim.

It's not Open, get over it and move on. Use the board, don't use the board, use one of the totally open ones out there if you want. But don't make claims on the Foundation's behalf, then complain that they aren't matching them.

"Because our remit is education in the broadest sense, we wanted â" needed â" to provide completely open access to the hardware."

You provided a one line quote from a broader article in which Pete Lomas explains some of the background to why they couldn't take the fully open route, but did release all that they could. I don't think an article of this sort, written around September of this year, counts as "claiming that the Raspberry is open".

The Foundation seems to have taken a pragmatic line - as open as possible - rather than a religious one. Sorry if that's upsetting, but I for one am glad that I've got a cheap computer to work with, and I'm delighted that today's schoolkids might get to experience the excitement I had when the ZX80 first appeared.

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.