Ah right, I sit corrected. No minimum that I was affected by :)

There's also the Farnell-owned CPC, which is a lot more open to consumers (they even have a recently expanded shop now in Preston that you can wander around and browse in) and I note that they're using the "register to express an interest" model for those who prefer that to pre-ordering.

I pre-ordered from Farnell with no issue at all. No minimum amount, no company details (it's geared at that, but I ignored it), and "Home / Hobby" was even an option in the list of job roles.

Indeed.

Got to find it amusing that it takes in-depth research to prove the bleedingly obvious, and quite surprising that it triggered debate IMO

People rarely (if ever) get rich by being fair, honest and following the law to the letter. They get rich by being "go-getters" and not letting anything stand in the way.

It's all in getting away with it. The more someone can get away with trampling on people, breaking laws / morality etc without repercussions ("getting away with it" includes internal sense of guilt/remorse), by nature, the further they will succeed in getting what they want while others who get away with it less hold back.

You could go right the way back to cave men. The one who knocks everyone out and has the meat to himself isn't *nice*, but he's still the one who didn't go hungry.

eBay.

And the reason everyone uses eBay is because everyone uses eBay (biggest audience - can't really get out of it because who wants a smaller audience for the thing they're trying to sell?)

Since eBay own Paypal and receive some nice additional fee payments from it, they tend to ban other payment methods (try even saying you accept Google Checkout - they will block your listing) and so Paypal thrives.

Now, why they don't get bitten by some sort of anti-competitive law of monopoly abuse like MS with IE I don't know, but there you go.

Showing people that we care about each other should happen all the time, that's true.

Don't know about the gift-giving thing. There are ways to show that you care that don't involve how much money you throw at someone (and sometimes even if you do care about them a great deal, some are difficult to buy things for). To me, some nice words and a bit of time together are worth hundreds of the "things" we exchange.

... as like the things that fly through them (planes).

On average and statistically, the safest (it's got true industry experts in safety and security behind it precisely because their business relies on it - in-house usually hasn't)

But when something does go wrong, it affects a lot of people and makes a mess.

Watch out for the Kazon. And the Vidiians. And species 8472. And the Borg.

Yeah it's that point about lack of demo for me. That seems to be the norm now that we have all the "app store" distribution models (iTunes Store, Steam etc). You're supposed to just "know" if a game is any good, that it will work well on your PC properly etc and gamble £30-50 on it. No thanks - if they can't be arsed to make a demo, I'll make my own.

Of course, once you've got a pirated version working it's up to discipline and morals to buy it. I would, but tend to be in the minority (I'm the sort of person who drives the speed limit. Almost no one does that). Maybe writing demos would help reduce it a little, or maybe there's not enough "pirated it for a demo and now I have it I might as well keep it" activity to justify the cost of making one which is their choice.

Whether this is the "real" Anonymous or not (how can something that has no set identity be real or not?), they're kind of getting out of hand.

Sometimes they have an agreeable cause (in my opinion, but that's just the thing, it's an opinion) but all the people calling for regulation and full traceability of the internet will be pointing at this "Anonymous" lot and saying "That's why".

They like to make themselves feared, but it's just going to drive more people towards wanting to do anything to protect the internet / their children / etc from them.

Is to search for what I actually ask for. Don't search for what you *thought* I meant. Don't search for all those synonyms unless I ask you to. Just. Search. For. What. I. Typed. In. Dammit.

I shouldn't have to force that by putting quotes around everything - it should be default, or at the very least a cookie.

And also ban boardreader.com and all these other crappy sites that overtake the real discussion search results with their ads and middle man tactics.
And those spam sites that somehow read your query and come back with "searching for {whatever I typed in}? Click here!"

Please and thank you, and I will stop with my increasing habit of resorting to Bing (though that suffers from some of these things too but seems marginally better) to get my work done.