I personally think it is not that the technology of Ceefax has finished, it is more the content. Digital Terrestrial TV services in the UK also offer various text-based services in a much more modern interface, however, there is just not the same quantity of content that Ceefax carried. Ceefax was a bit like a condensed newspaper, whereas the current "Red button" services are more like just the front page of a newspaper. But then again, if you are receiving BBC digital transmissions you also have access to far more channels than when Ceefax was launched, including a 24-hour news channel, so maybe it is not necessary. But for me what is more telling is the BBC have not thought it necessary to completely migrate the Ceefax levels of content onto the digital "red button" services. There was nothing on there that nowadays could not be found on the internet, after all.

Which therefore makes the enforcement of it ridiculous. We do not have a licence, and just to avoid arguments with the TV licencing stazi, the only TV we have in the house is disconnected from the aerial, all the channel presets de-tuned, and wrapped up in a bag where it cannot be used. But if I did have a set for watching DVDs etc, how can they possibly tell whether I use it for live TV or not?

TV Licencing do go round with "TV detector" vans, but I genuinely have no idea whether they really can detect TVs in operation or if it is just a deterrent.

It would be a lot simpler if there were some kind of technical means to stop non-licenced households watching TV - ie encryption with an access card, PIN code or something. I do not really understand why this is not done.

It also seems madness that I can completely legally listen to ad-free BBC radio, which is funded from the TV licence as well.

Anyone who went to school in the UK in the 1980s grew up on it.

A couple of weeks ago I bought an OSX Lion USB stick from Apple online. I was staggered when I received a large-ish (A4-sized) jiffy bag, which when I opened it, contained another jiffy bag, about half the size. Then I opened this up and found my USB stick, attached to a piece of pretty white cardboard with a plastic blister. Yet the USB stick itself is one of the smallest I have ever seen. I wondered if they cut down on this a bit, they could perhaps bring the GBP£55 price down a bit...

Good point, many thanks!

I do that, but it is limited in its usefulness because there is not a simple way of then killing off one of those addresses that you have made up on the spot. Eventually if spam to all these made up addresses becomes a problem, you have to turn off the catch-all address to stop the spam coming through. Which then means you have to actually set up another account or group in Google Apps each time you want an extra address, which is a lot less quick and easy.

In the UK many of the card terminals also allow the user to add a tip onto the amount deducted from the credit card, as the user enters their PIN. Particularly at chain restaurants, I doubt the individual waiters get the tips - though I guess even tipping in cash it might be pooled.

For me personally, for fairly normal browsing requirements on a 2004-vintage Windows PC:

IE7/8: far too slow. Takes about 5 seconds just to open a new blank tab.

Firefox: faster than IE, but still really struggles with lots of tabs are open. Especially annoying that if one tab is slow to load, it slows down everything.

Chrome: Much better performance than either of the above. However, seems to crash rather a lot, and seems to have a bug that means it intermittently does not respond to Windows' "Tile Windows Horizontally" / "Tile Windows Vertically" commands (right-click on the taskbar.) As I use this feature rather a lot, it is really annoying to have to reposition

Opera: Similar performance to Chrome, but doesn't crash and doesn't have the windowing bug.

So I use Opera as my normal browser, with IE or Firefox waiting in the wings if I find a site doesn't work nicely with it.

It did crash on the launch day! But seems to have been running well since.

I managed to transfer some Acorn Electron tapes onto audio CDs once, and was also able to speed up the loading time by reducing the long "padding" beeps between the blocks (which I'm sure have a proper name..)

Oddly enough there was one tape that it just would not work with - though it loaded fine directly from the tape, so goodness knows what strange analogue copy protection had been implemented.

Can power not be cut by putting the gearbox in neutral, thereby keeping the power steering and brakes working?

The real issue I have with the Google word processor is it does not seem to figure out page widths correctly, so when I come to print stuff, I find sometimes what should have just fitted onto one page / one line goes slightly onto two.

The last time I had this issue was when running MS Works 3.0 on Windows 3.1, so this problem ought to have been resolved by now!

Please tell me I was not the only one who was expecting a railway signalling system....

PC World in the UK have recently been running some ads for some Dell laptops (IIRC) with Core Duo processors - the strapline goes something like "run multiple programs with the Intel Core Duo"... blah blah. My non-techie wife couldn't get over this - saying she's never seen a computer where you cannot run multiple programs.