Unfortunately overhangs don't always protect you from spills. Liquid can cling to the underside. Even worse you can't see it happening from above.

You might want to consider conduit in future. It's ugly but you can reconfigure it easily to add, remove or move sockets. You can get it in the shape of skirting board (or kick panels or whatever they are called in the US) which can look reasonable in a home, or DIY your own version.

The average wage in the UK is a lot lower and falling. The government is trying really, really hard to drive down wages at the moment. Businesses simply want to pay their staff less, and the government supports businesses. They call it "removing red tape" and "making it easier for businesses to employ people", which translated means "removing employee rights" and "making it easier for businesses to fire people or give them short term rolling contracts instead of a real job".

Really depends on what software you are writing. If it is a vertical app that a company relies on and you screw it up then it could cost you a lot in both reputation and lawsuits. If you create a suite of products where each is dependent on the other (e.g. CAD/CAM/CNC) one bad one can scupper the others.

The prosecution were attempting the censor the information by making it difficult to access. Censorship doesn't have to be absolute to be effective. Now the barrier to reading these documents went from £350 to £0 and the electronic format is easier to handle (searching etc.)

The point is that they don't. They find ways to avoid it, so we have to pay for it instead.

I used to play D&D with this guy who had pretty much memorized the rule book. The DM would say "lose 3 HP" and he would find some obscure interaction of multiple rules none of us had even considered that meant he only lost 1. Google is that guy, and the DM just needs to tell them to pay the hell up in the spirit of the rules.

I guess you haven't been following it as closely as you think you have because Vince Cable's excuse was that Google is not doing anything illegal.

The simple fact is that the Tory party does not want to close these loopholes because many of their friends make use of them. They make some noise about it, go on Radio 4 and Newsnight and announce it in the Commons, but are careful not to really do anything.

The problem with only paying what the law requires is that these companies then arrange their corporate structure to avoid paying almost anything, against he spirit of the law. It then becomes a game of cat and mouse, except that parliament moves so slowly the mouse always finds a new hole to dive down as soon as there is talk of closing the old one off. You can't easily legislate to make them pay more tax, although it looks like the EU might have found a way to do it if every country acts simultaneously.

Maybe the last line of any tax law should be "no funny games".

Oh, and don't forget Google did actually lie. They said there were no sales done in the UK, yet most of their staff list sales as part of their duties on their CVs and in their job titles.

It's a question of damage limitation. Most people think that either the Republicans are Democrats are less bad for the country, so they can either vote for the lesser evil and try to keep the greater one out or they can piss their vote away on some alternative candidate who will never amount to anything in the foreseeable future.

Independents CAN have an influence on policy and politics, just not by being elected. Look at UKIP in the UK. Little chance of getting a single MP, let along into government, but they managed to make one of the main two parties commit to a referendum over EU membership. Totally undemocratic of course, but it is the only way since our system is basically designed to make it a two horse race.

It is the fault of the government. If the UK just insisted that Google pay its taxes or leave then Google would pay because the UK market is worth a lot to them. Billions a year in sales.

As it is the EU is trying to do exactly that, forcing companies that do business in Europe to pay up regardless of how clever their corporate structure and tax arrangements are. Naturally our government is trying to block it because they want to "support" business.

It's not about class at all. People either have enough money to live comfortably but bitch about it anyway, or they don't and and have no voice to bitch about it.

People tend to end up where they started. The main cause of poverty is your parents being poor. If your parents were doing okay they could afford to live near a good school, so you will probably do okay. If they are rich you are made in any case.

Shipped where? Do they sell it in shops now?

Look bro, I know it sounds cool to say "shipped" because that's what Apple and all the other hipster outfits do, but this is a god damn technology news web site for nerds.

The stupid thing is that NFC is well beyond the experimental stage. Japan has been using it for going on a decade now and it works really well. They have stored value cards that you can load money on to, they have phones where the payment appears on your monthly bill and they have debit/credit cards. They don't have problems with payment terminals having too much or too little range, they don't have problems with fraud or skimming. It all just works really well and is very, very convenient. No messing about looking for change when you just want to buy a couple of items on the way home or hop on the metro.

Somehow I knew that we would find a way to fuck it up though. Instead of getting some Japanese companies with experience in we went for the lowest bidder bunch of cowboys we could find who thought that MOAR PWR to the NFC field was a good idea. They were probably proud of the 30cm range they got out of the damn thing.

This is why we can't have nice things.

In the UK the card issuer is liable for all the losses due to fraud or clerical errors.

The £100 rule is that any item worth over £100 and paid for in whole or in part on credit card makes the card issuer liable as the vendor. In the event of a problem they have the same responsibility to sort it out as the seller does.

The card issuers certainly do care because they want contactless payment to become popular. If it is abused or doesn't work people will carry on paying for small items in cash instead of generating revenue for the card issuer.

The confirmation is supposed to be that you bring the card within 2cm of the payment terminal. The flaw is that the payment terminal has a range much greater than 2cm.

The amount that can be authorized this way is limited to £20. A person could not use a special long range to rob people walking down the street because the transaction still needs to be authenticated with the card issuer, meaning they would be caught pretty quickly. That's why criminals who steal cards use them in shops and ATMs instead of setting up their own card payment terminal and sending the funds directly to their bank account.