You're right, of course.

I was thinking the outside is more predictable, particularly if you keep opening the oven or someone invents a reliable monitor.

The temperature of the oven is irrelevant to the temperature of the food. Replaceable probes that stick into the food and still work at 300deg C (800 LOL) would be vastly more important than anything else.

Likewise, hobs should have thermostats and work according to temperature rather than fixed power.

These things may well exist.

A smoke detector would be nice too but is unlikely to be reliable.

There are old Opera users who agree with your opinion. From what I can see, most don't. Then there's the vast majority of the potential market who don't.

You won't agree with this but with the limited resources from Opera Software and the web again diverging from WWW standards, there was no real alternative.

What all the moaning is about is the slow pace of development. Time lacking features (O15+) goes slower than time where those features were introduced (O10-O12).

What I greatly regret is the end of work on the Presto version of Opera Mobile. Having a tabbed browser that would run in 128MB is a great boon on mobile devices.

Willingness to employ sock/meat puppets seems to be the main one.

... Charles Farr is the worst. Maybe even worse than Blair.

He is the main driving force behind the Snooping Charter, both under Brown.. and resurrected under the Coalition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Remember, these were the powers he was pushing for whilst the NSA was reading our FB accounts and email, had compromised elliptic curve cryptography etc. GCHQ was recording our phone calls and even webcam images.

Whether for happiness reasons or Seligman's optimism ratio, optimism is clearly better for almost everyone. It doesn't matter if you're an idiot who doesn't know any better... or someone who creatively finds an optimistic way to perceive the tragic mess that is life. ;)

With AAC. Last I checked, MP3 even at 320kbps has artifacts.

In other news no-one should care about, Cheney has blamed Ukraine's invasion on Obama and George Zimmerman has released a video about how he's a great guy.

If you come off a diet then it's not really the diet's fault, is it?

Not as I understand it.

Carbs:
1. Boost insulin which promotes fat formation.
2. Make us lazy.
3. Reduce satiety.

Such is the effect, it seems you can eat more calories via Atkins and still lose weight.

A fair point, my friend.

It is possible to:
a) pour water everywhere but the cup
b) overfill the cup
c) put the wrong amount of coffee in ... under my method.

If you're not up to it, who am I to judge.

Re: Starbucks, I think it's more about cognitive simplicity than mechanical simplicity . The less thought that has to go into something, the more successful it is. And perhaps emotional simplicity ie can't deal with the minor discomfort of going somewhere new.

I would say potentially, but it is easily compensated for by using a darker roast such as the one I recommended and more of it. It is notable that if I use the same grounds a second time, that's a piss-weak coffee with negligible caffeine content. Normally, I just add new grounds on top.

More of a perfectionist complaint is that espresso machines produce a deeper, bitter-sweet coffee. This is not true of french press, percolator or dripfeed filter. It is why I prefaced my suggestions with 'if you use milk & sweetener'.

It seems a reasonable proposition that the pressure produced by an espresso machine is somewhat equivalent to a darker roasting. The former may be preferable, particularly if you drink it neat.

Firstly, so many people drink shit coffee that how you make it is irrelevant.

Secondly, if you have half-decent coffee but put milk & sweetener in, paying double for the coffee won't help.
There's nothing wrong with putting milk & sweetener in, just like there's nothing wrong with eating milk chocolate.

If you drink it neat, then yes, feel free to spend a fortune on the beans, hand grind them and use an Aeropress.

Otherwise, here's what I do:

1. Scour supermarkets for decent pre-ground own-brand coffee. Why? Because it will always be cheap and available. If you're in the UK, I can recommend Sainsbury's TtD Columbian Quichia.
2. Buy hot chocolate (or make your own using cocoa powder and sweetener) if you like the sprinkles.
3. Buy decent milk (of the big 4 UK supermarkets, Tesco's organic is the best, surprisingly).
4. Buy a cup-sized steel sieve from eBay.
5. Buy a milk-whisk from eBay.

Serving:
6. Microwave about 75ml of milk for 45s.
7. Put sweetener in the bottom. In my opinion, Nutrasweet and clones are better than even sucrose -- the bitterness improves the coffee.
8. Put a couple of teaspoons of coffee in the sieve and poor boiling water over it.
9. Whisk the milk.
10. Pour in and add chocolate sprinkles.

The sieve doesn't need cleaning. You don't even need to empty the coffee out except after a couple of days or when it's too full. Literally tap against the side of the bin and you're done. No cleaning, no clogging up the sink, no blowing $hundreds on coffee and generating a ton of plastic waste.

My coffee beats the shit out of Starbucks et al. Indeed, unless you drink coffee neat, it beats all the local independent cafes bar who charge 15x more.

I tend to make a whole jug of it in Summer. Can take the first draft after a few hours, top up, another draft after 6 hours, top up, another draft after 6 hours, don't top up and drink the rest after another 6. Of course, sleep usually intervenes.

Make is strong and add lots of milk & sweetener.

And the second biggest is that everyone knows Microsoft makes it.

People want phones that are chic. Microsoft are about as chic as homophobia. Looks, both of the phone and of the UI, are even more important.

Apparent price/performance is another factor. Probably the main reason Android is doing so well is because those phones look good value in comparison to Apple (not hard with their 200% markup). The fact that interpreted Android apps make those quad cores as slow as dual cores doesn't come into the equation.

Lastly, some people really believe they need 100,000 apps.