Apple is far from the only company affected by stronger consumer protection laws. I doubt they are even the largest company. And it is an area of law they cannot ignore because the regulator has teeth, which is what the top story is all about. Consumer advocate groups have been campaigning for a long time about these rights. If Apple tried to Make Them Go Away, they would find themselves in quite a lot more hot water.

The correct solution, of course, is for them to make sure their products are actually made to last the typical lifetime people expect from them. Which is exactly what the latest consumer protection laws are designed to encourage.

Wade.

Australia uses DVB-T which has different propagation characteristics than 8VSB. DVB-T makes it easier to do SFN (single frequency network) because it resists multi-path interference (ghosting in the analogue world) better whilst 8VSB has a better power dispersal profile, which means larger coverage areas from one antenna.

Adobe's Integrated Runtime. Putting aside the problem that Adobe was behind it, this was actually a truly good platform. Apps could be written with any mix of HTML, JS, CSS and/or Flash (put aside your complaints about that, too, for the moment). And best of all: it was genuinely cross-platform. The .air file for an app would run absolutely flawlessly in any of the three environments. They even had a Linux version for a while.

Of course, the sheer problem that it was Adobe behind it served to undermine its power. I reckon Google are right on the edge of that problem with Chrome. For one thing, it actually doesn't have very many options for controlling privacy. For another, it encourages people to sign-in to their Google account. And Google's own websites are targetted for Chrome first and fixed for other browsers later (maybe). Yet they have spurred on significant advances in browser developments. And there are still a lot of programmers who would like to build a local app but only know browser-based programming.

I have to say the utter arrogance about the Unity Dock exhibited by Shuttleworth drove me away. I imagine it drove a lot of others away, too.

The Opera web browser has had the ability to re-open closed tabs for years. There's even a menu so you can pick which page!

It was news five years ago. It's not news today.

However, only in the most limited of senses. I have a Necomimi, and although it is largely a novelty toy, the brain-wave reading technology is real and works. Trying to control the way the ears move by altering your basic brainwave state is, in fact, a simple form of neuro-feedback.

Old samplers are rather a victim of that. The hardware is often fine and can still crank out some awesome sounds, but they are often diskette based and storage technology has moved on hundreds of times faster than synthesizor technology.

The Ensoniq scene has almost abandoned the EPS series because they used double-density drives and DD 3½" floppies haven't been made for years - and HD floppies aren't reliable in DD drives. Nowadays even HD diskettes are losing their stored bits. *All* the people keen to keep the ASR-10 alive have shifted to SCSI solutions because floppies are just not reliable anymore.

Wade.

That's about 20 tons for those who don't or can't think in terms of thousands of pounds.