When I heard about the RPI I was very enthusiastic. The premise of cheap computers, give kids a possibility to tinker, maybe spark a whole industry of these kind of things. Maybe even ending in cheaper and more faster RPI'like systems kicking the boundaries away.

But every f*cking time somebody comes up with a cheaper, faster, ... board they take a very aggressive stance and everyone that comes up with an ARM board is trying to steal their customers away. It is as ridiculous of complaining about holes and a 40 pin connector, you can bet this board will be branded as a rippoff.

I thought the whole idea was of giving children a cheap way to tinker with hardware, so what is the problem with cheaper / faster boards that come on the market ? The whole premise seems to be a lie and I have the feeling the whole RPI thing has more to do with personal ego's than al the fluffy spin... .

assumed that they could land the probe on a comet just like they land a probe the size of the Moon or Mars

Which is factually incorrect. Saw a documentary about this project yesterday and they were fully aware of the difference hence the harpoon and screws to try to keep the lander intact.

They even described the "what if" scenario if the harpoons would fail, but it doesn't help if the lander rest in a place where there isn't enough sunlight. That is just plain unfortunate.

They only use the RealSpeak TTS (text to speech) engine... . This is really a non story because they can easily switch to another TTS vendor. The only possible impact is that siri would sound different... .

Disclaimer: I'm a developer that worked for Lernout and Hauspie that originally developed the ASR/TTS engine that have been sold to Scansoft/Nuance.

PS: Good luck for Samsung because when we bought certain American companies that also did Pentagon contract work, some Americans weren't that happy about it. I'm even personally convinced that they had some hands in the rapid downfall of Lernout and Hauspie.

Maybe because news in those countries regarding the Palestian-Israeli war is not one sided ? Even as a non muslim I sometimes have questions how that state operates. Like this week annexing >400km of land for settlers as a form of punishment or a documentary that I saw about a 6 years old boy that needed to go to a military court because a settler saying he threw a rock to him. The story about a brave Israeli that escort palestian children on certain routes so they don't get attacked by settlers.

And the reality is that there are hundred of those kind of stories and it is just completely nuts and a good breeding ground for terrorists... .

I have the feeling that 80% of the hatred for the "west' is targeted to the US and the UK. For the US that has a lot to do with the fact that is some kind of lapdog for Israel. The Uk's problem is that it is the lapdop of the US.

You can believe all the fluffy stories that is because of the "hatred for freedom" or that we in Europe are all anti-semitic, but the reality is that for 9/10 homegrown terrorist the US position is the enemy because it is mainly driven because of a wealthy influential lobby from the us.

"You do realize that most Christian congregations in the US are decedents of the Church of England. It's not like they have a foreign doctrine"

There is a saying "Holier than the pope" and I think this is a good description of religion in the US. Here in Belgium we even have a catholic university doing a lot of research regarding stem-cells. Even embryonic !

To be honest the most relaxed teacher that I had was my Catholic teacher where in his classes we mostly learned about poverty, other religions and more philosophical stuff about being good to others. Don't had a lot of Jezus, God or bible studies. Let alone no "you shall not do X, Y or Z". I found those classes refreshing.

I think the extreme religious stuff is more an American thing. I don't have the feeling that people who have a religion are my enemies. The only group ranting here against abortion or gay rights are mostly the far right political parties and that has nothing to do with religion but plain bigotry.

I haven't seen MS distributing rootkits with its hardware products. So definitely less hostile.

But remember kids when Sony opens their bootloaders for Android it is the Ericsson part. But when Sony BMG does something stupid it is the whole company that is at fault.

But yeah trying to strip consumer rights to the bare minimum, wanting to have a system that is 24/24 connected and knowing that you are part of PRISM (but I forgot its OK because it only invades the privacy of us non-Americans/Untermenschen) isn't really the signs of a company that is hostile. The whole f*cking box was original planted as one big ROOTkit.

I swore to never buy anything from Sont again since the rootkit fiasco, and have kept to that.

So you don't have any products with for example a camera sensor ?

We already have switched to the use of OSM/Mapbox/Cloudmade for mapping services and seeing you can't use the results of the Google Directions API on for example to plot on a OSM map, we are also in the process of looking for an alternative for a routing api.

It's not even the case of getting a free ride, because we absolutely don't mind to pay for the service but nowadays Google is really all about restrictions. The only thing that speaks in their advantage is that the limitations are very clear, not like the Bing REST services TOS that is plain lawyer speak.

There is also no transparency in Google offerings. Alternative providers are very upfront in what you can get for the money, Google commercial offerings is behind a big wall of mist.

and all it means is that your app adjusts parametrically, so you don't have to customize it for every possible screen pixel dimension.

Yeah with android it just some parameters that you need to adjust and everything works fine. You really don't have any real world experience with Android haven't you ?

I develop Android Apps as a part of my job (I don't even do the iOS ports) and there doesn't go a day by without being faced with some problems. Fragmentation, low quality dev tools, bugs , ... it all adds up. Android is the Windows of the mobile world in my book. Yes it has the biggest marketshare, but it doesn't tell a lot of the quality of the platform as a whole.

The notion that developers/companies would rather prefer to be apple fanatics instead of making money is ridiculous. The problem is that for some apps Android has an extremely low ROI. I sometimes see really cool stuff being developed on the other side where the client doesn't want to invest in an Android version.

raising questions over American influence on the British agencies

I find it strange that this is a question that still need to be asked. Maybe that is because I'm living in Europe, but for years I have the feeling the American influence on Great Britain is big in everything. So big that I personally see the British politicians as some kind of American trojan horse within Europe.

Some europeans even joke that it isn't a country anymore, but the 51st state of the US. Really in all honesty, this article doesn't surprise me one bit.

(Former L&H developer speaking here)

Nuance bought the speech technology from Lernout & Hauspie when the latter went bankrupt after a fraud scandal. I don't have the feeling that they developed the technology a lot further it seems that it still is the "same" as a couple of years ago.

Doesn't surprise me as they bought the software, not the talent behind the development.

For years games was a big argument to have windows installed on a machine. But the arrival of the 360 made it for me so easy to dump windows for linux on my desktop and buy a macbook pro for on the go.

The majority of the people in Belgium speaks Flemish (which is related to Dutch) and dialects. The french and germans are a smaller language group. The dialect that I locally speak (West Flemish) is even more related to the languages from Northern France then the Netherlands.

But what bothers me the most with Belgian mistaken identity is that a lot of American companies or websites serves everything in French when it detects I'm from Belgium. It is like if the rest of the world would detect that you are from the States and serve everything in Spanish because there is a big Hispanic community.

It took Microsoft years to get it in their head that most people here speaks Flemish. For years everything on Xbox live (that had a french localization) was served in French.

It is funny how there are many definitions of Sony . When they opened the bootloader for Android the Slashdot crowd reasoning was "it was the Ericsson part" (even if the Ericsson was dropped) that is the reason they play nicely. But the Sony - BMG rootkit scandal was Sony doing, even if you can seed the same doubt. I think when they opened up their smartwatch (http://developer.sonymobile.com/services/open-smartwatch-project/smartwatch-hacker-guide/) is also Ericsson doing I presume ? Companies can change you know especially if they did some wrong in the past, the world isn't always black & white.

That being said, I don't know if you are aware that a lot of the older people (that made the PS3 decisions) with regarding the SCEE are out of the picture. The PS4 wasn't even developed in Japan or by a Japanese, hell it will even be released earlier in the US and Europe. If you follow the news a bit you will see Sony has a massive attitude change regarding the PS4. You just need to look how they are handling Indie's these days. You must read the humbling interviews with a guy like Cerny, what a chance in comparison with the arrogant Sony.

With regarding the OS a lot of people seem to forgot that Sony also supported linux through the PS2 lifetime (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_for_PlayStation_2) and they never took it back. So it may be that the removal of the OtherOS for piracy reasons was more valid then the so called hatred for Linux suddenly. There are strong opinions about linux, but does opinions never involve the fact of the possibility of that method being abused as an easy way to pirate. Or what should be the real reason that they removed OtherOS support anyway ? Because they hate linus or RMS ?

You are right there should be other mod options like "living in the past" that I would gladly reward you with.

This opinion piece holds up Belgium as an example other European countries are trying to emulate, but Internet service there is incredibly expensive and has tiny monthly bandwidth caps, worse even than Australia. Almost any European country is doing better.

I must be living in a parallel Belgium it seems. I have 60Mbit/s down with no bandwidth cap (FUP) for 55 euro. That also includes cable/decoder + telephone with free calls within Belgium and free calls to mobile/European countries for certain hours. If I would bump that to 24/24 then it will set you back another 5 euro. My mobile internet costs me 15 euro and that includes 2Gb of traffic.

The cheapest internet on cable (which is available everywhere) will set you back for 25 euro and that includes 30Mbit/s and a limit of 100Gb. VDSL2 that is available in most places : 35Mbit/s including unlimited bandwidth and that for the price of 35 euro.

It is what you call incredible expensive and tiny bandwidth...

Not everyone lives in a country where shrinkwrap licenses are a legal contract. I think this is the case in most European countries. That being said the backslash would be bigger then the removal of a feature that the majority of the users wouldnt care about. As a linux box it also sucked a lot...