I was going to go there with the Clarke reference, you saved me the trouble...

(I'm talking about changing terms of contract without the consent of the signatory)

The fact that you clicked "I AGREE" with that clause in place mitigates any claim you might have against them.

I have found such clauses in paper contracts; what I tend to do is put a line through them and initial next to the strikethrough, to indicate that I do not consent to such clauses. Covered. Yes, Virgin Media have/had such a clause, they also have/had a clause that said that the customer was still liable for service charges even in the absence of service and to the end of the initial contract period (24 months!) in the case of early termination of contract! Oh yes, that bitch got a line through it!

(more difficult to do in the case of electronic contracts, but there again you do have the option of shopping elsewhere...)

actually, as each choice beats one and either ties or is beaten by the other two, the odds of winning any random round of RPS is 33%.

Rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock!

Scissors cut paper
Paper covers rock
Rock crushes lizard
Lizard poisons Spock
Spock smashes scissors
Scissors decapitate lizard
Lizard eats paper
Paper disproves Spock
Spock vaporizes rock
Rock crushes scissors

yeah it's doable but I can't be arsed going to the roof and realigning it to the nearest digital ground relay (which is about 140 degrees off from where it's pointing now). With the switchover here came the news that the analogue relays were being shut down and the sites abandoned, which was bad news for TV owners but great news for cable and satellite companies.

not even that. I live not many miles from the Prime meridian, and to align my satellite dish (done it several times, most notably after I had to replace it after my south wall fell off the back of the house), all I did was point the thing South and elevate it about 20 degrees. 65% average signal strength on the Astra constellation - enough to actually decode - a full channel list on my 5K receiver (Fortec Star 4400). I'm pretty sure if I used a satfinder I'd get better than 90% signal strength, but that doesn't bother me too much if I can pull enough signal to lift it above the noise floor and decode it, I'm golden. :)

I use my analogue antenna as part of my HF radio array now since there's no analogue TV in England anymore.

get two of them and weld them together, make a hang drum. They make a wonderful noise. :)

Fortec Star receiver with a handy USB port for channel programming and the facility for adding a hard drive (or SSD, flash, whatever) off a standard Sky 90cm dish.

Outlay: £50 for the receiver, £0 for the dish. 5,000 channels and nothing on.

tried several bottom-shelf Lexmark inkjets, a couple of the Canon portables (BJ-10e and a BJC-80) and an HP Deskjet 320 as well. Ended up hooking up a Brother HL1030 (laser with manufacturer-supplied CUPS driver) and a HP Officejet 6210 MFD (ran through HPLIP), the other gear is gathering dust and spider colonies in a closet somewhere - can't even give the bloody things away...

they probably won't be seeking permission, they'll more likely be tasking the system as the political landscape changes. Exchanges switching to IP-PBX from traditional PBX would make the task far easier, they'd just intercept the trunk via the Internet and pull the whole lot in one go instead of having to locate a specific physical point to carry out the intercept. This latest revelation sure is a step up from simply logging call endpoints and durations, though. We're into tinfoil territory here (though I do know from observing it myself that the police can access cellular location data - which in 2010 was accurate to 3 metres 24/7 and retained for well over a year - for use in evidence, and they apparently don't need a warrant to do it (R -v- Stafford A (arson, attempted quadruple murder))).

I love Zipslack... still use it on a positively ancient Dell CP (Pentium MMX) laptop. It's handy when all I want to do is type and don't need to be hearing the fan (which hasn't worked since ever and that isn't an issue anyway as the processor barely gets warm).

Yeah, most of those popped into my head one second after I hit "send"(!)... but speaking from my own experience, I've never been able to get a Winprinter working under CUPS (maybe I'm being 'tarded about it). As to graphics, I wasn't even going to pick up the whip if it wasn't an ATI/AMD or NVidia chip (OK, the drivers are proprietary for both, but I'm not bitter - I even managed to get Beryl running on an upgraded Rage Pro). Trying to get anything near "accelerated" on any other graphics chip was for me, like pushing a cow backwards up a staircase.

it's called reference frameworks. By the time you get to Userland, a Creative soundcard looks to the software identical to a Turtle Beach. This would be impossible without a reference. One obvious example is DirectX. What you want out of the arse end of the driver layer is a device interface that's compatible with DirectX. What happens between the driver layer and the hardware is entirely up to the manufacturer, but the DirectX compatibility is a certain requirement for even the slightest hope that you'll even get a peep out of it in Windows. And one of the reasons why the Linux driver model, at least from my own personal perspective, is horribly broken. Is there a reference framework for *anything* in Linux?

The problem is one of the continued and rampant upward flow of monetary wealth and the specious notion that everybody has to earn a living - read: "everybody who is not moneyed should be employed in drudgery for drudgery's sake". One day those exploited workers who are still alive will down tools and give the fat lazy cunts the biggest finger the world has ever seen.

I look forward to that day.