not a big deal, in quite a ew countries of the euro-area anything under 5 cent is hardly used and everything is rounded to 5 cents. Works fine...

Regardless of the law being accepted or not, the combination of the resistance amongst the public and the politicians agains the telco plans and the proposal of this law had a significant effect: the telco's withdrew their plans. And they are slowly switching to a different pricing model, where data is the main component. And in one case, already the new phone subsidy has changed into a phone lease, for which you pay separately if you want it.

This does mean that the price of data becomes a significant amount of the price of your monthly phone bill. It doesn't magically mean that data is now free and unlimited, and not even that things like price differences within and outside of your data limit will disappear. You will not suddenly pay less in all cases, telephone companies still need to make money. But it does force them into a more fair pricing plan.

I'm sorry, but people really had to dive into emergency cooling water to release a valve. Not in the reactor, but in a pool under a reactor. Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Steam_explosion_risk if you want to know more.

Google for 'Adrian Cheok chicken', or the poultry internet. Without kinect, but with a plastic chicken...

Spend money for software for remote work with laptops? You need very little money for this purpose:

1. A VPN, with a public/private keypair per user. Please use an open standard, or it'll be horrible for anything but windows. And then there's no software to buy, you can use free software.
2. full disk encryption that locks automatically after some inactivity, or at least the parts that contain user data. You can get this for free as well.

If anyone steals the laptop, the user data will be useless without the encryption key and you can just no longer accept his key for the VPN. Done!

the article mentions this program is unique as it only uses electrical cars.

The autolib website has a lists of cars you can rent. It contains many cars, none of which are electrical.

The article mentions this is 12 euro a month. The website mentions 12 euro a month, plus an hourly price and a price per kilometer.

(and the thing about them not being the first, but i think this may have been mentioned in other posts :))

I get a robot call every time the company that owns the house i rent makes a repair. They present me with some questions about how happy i am with the repairs, on a scale from 1 - 9. Never heard of debt-collectors doing that around here.

But you can block all telemarketing calls to your number here in this country, and at the end of every call they have to tell you how to block it. That helps :)

not to listen? They refused all claims except a rather trivial one that can be easily fixed. You should definately listen to us :)

The software patents are probably 'a device that uses specific gestures to browse through photos.'

The european parliament is democratic and has elections every five years, since 1979. Check wikipedia. There may be lots of things wrong with it, but not that...

This plan is actually very old, from 2001. They tried again in 2005, then again somewhere in 2009/2010. The plan is discarded by the current government. One of the few good things they have done in my opinion. The road trail the article cites is from february 2010. Over one and half year old.

The plan would be a horribly complex technical solution, just to solve the problem of being able to buy gas in another country and charging more for busy roads during peak hours. Also, the plan was a major privacy concern because you would have to be tracked continually.

Clearly you Americans haven't seen, heard or driven a Diesel engine in recent times. A modern diesel:

- does not emit black clouds when accelerating (the filters work great and clean themselves)
- does not smell bad
- does accelerate quite well
- does not make lots of noise, although when cold more than a gas powered car
- starts even in rather cold weather
- doesn't need to be 6 or 7 liters, you can use a 1.4 or 1.6 liter turbodiesel engine on smaller cars, up to a 3 liter if you really need over 200 horsepower.
- has a very good mileage (70 mpg is possible with some of the smaller cars)

however, they are a lot more expensive to buy. Around here with a diesel, you pay less tax on the fuel (diesel is 1.28 euro a liter, gasoline is 1.60 euro), but more tax anually. So it's only interesting if you drive enough kilometers a year (i think around 18.000 km a year is enough). And the ones with very good mileageare tax exempt, so that's different. Of course, this tax bit does not apply to the US, or even other countries in Europe.

That's why you get one with a filter installed. No more black clouds, and the filters clean them self in regular usage.

I'm not saying i have a solution for the problem. I just wonder how long before it will be unacceptable that you can do so much more with your own equipment at home faster, easier and at a lower cost than you can do at work.

It could just be more flexible and more user friendly. Make something you can just install your own software on, but lock down the enterprise part, so only authorized programs can access data or network services that should be locked down. I think that may already be possible with the ipad in combination with the apple enterprise deployments, but i'm not really sure how strict their security model is. And if system administrators trust the security model enough to allow this.

ah, they have made the tablet fit for the enterprise and followed a simple recipe:

- make it great for the system administrator
- put outdated heavily modified software on it that likely will not be updated with a newer version
- put in the option to limit it severely, which the administrator likes, but the end user will hate
- make it extra bulky with a small screen
- make it more expensive
- add a particularly ugly docking station

So, make something less convenient to use for more money, and it'll sell very well in the enterprise world.

Put in your cabinet of curiosities of course, and show to visitors. What else would you ever do with it? The title Prince of Orange is held by the crown prince of the Netherlands. It refers to the french city called 'Orange'. The title still exists, but is not a claim of any sort on the city of Orange, which is part of France. See wikipedia for the rather strange history of the term