Whether it exists doesn't correlate to whether it's used.

My girlfriend had an argument with her doctor only the other week because he hand-filled out the prescription, gave it to his medical receptionist, who took it upon herself to post it to the local Tesco's (whose pharmacy staff really are a waste of space) without ever asking.

The Tesco's couldn't fulfil it so she had to fight to get the paper prescription back, take it to Boots herself (who could only fulfil half of it, and did so without asking first, and kept her paper prescription telling her she could collect the other half "next month" - when this was supposed to be an out-of-cycle prescription so she could take her medication on a long holiday that would mean she'd normally miss her prescription filling date).

Some places might have them, but for sure nowhere near all, or even most. And to be honest, there's an awful lot of problems with them that they can't cope with that even getting humans to cope with can be tricky (obstinate cows in your local GP's reception office aside).

Are we out in the middle of the sticks? No. Greater London, major town. Similar experiences with the same things in other parts of London and Essex, too. We're a long way from any automation. I know, I sat and read through my entire medical records a few years back because they're still in the same envelope (that I can recognise amongst all the others), still the same pieces of paper, and still have to be pushed by post/courier to every doctor I deal with (fortunately, I hardly deal with doctors at all in the last 10 years unless something is dropping off...).

Would someone please back up my claim that when I came back from Tenerife once, having decided to blow all my spending money, all that remained in my pocket was:

1 single coin - One half of one cent of one Euro.

Everyone I've spoken to who's familiar with the Euro says that it never existed. Wish I'd kept the damn thing now. It was so worthless but I kept it until I'd got back to the UK (because it was funny to say, when my parents asked, that I had come back with money - and show them the most pathetically small denomination of Euro coin I could ever have found) and eventually threw it away.

20,000 % is 200 times. That's not a lot when you're considering total data, and not just maximum theoretical speed. For a start, if I use something everyday now that, five years ago, I only used one a month, that's 30 times more data already.

But it would be a lot in speed capability. The mobile I had when I was a kid years ago could only handle GSM data (i.e. 9600 bps at best at the time). If that speed had increased 20,000%, I'd have a 230Gbytes/s phone today.

I'm sorry but it's just poor planning. You know exactly how many customers you have and are likely to have. You know exactly what the theoretical maximum of those phones are. You know exactly what the average person will do (slowly use it more as time passes and upgrades pass by). Yet you still sell an unlimited package.

It's just bad business, but they don't want to admit that, like the small businesses that let Groupon sell 20,000 coupons for a free cupcake, etc. You didn't plan. You didn't extrapolate. You didn't price your products properly. You didn't expand the capability of your network. You didn't do anything that I would expect a large business like AT&T to do.

Ramp your prices up. Then wait for your customers to see all those Japanese telco's that give everyone huge allowances at top data rates for manageable prices on both mobile and fixed-line broadband. I don't care about your bad business planning, all I look for is value-for-money. If you can't provide it, I won't buy from you. If I do buy from you, I expect to get what I bought without any wording-tricks and revisions of the contracts. How hard is this to understand?

So it's Windows CE then?

Thanks for the clarification but I'd suspected that all along. Windows is only "Windows" on your PC. No change at all, to anything, then.

Submitter blocked from ever appearing on my front page again.

One step closer to removing this site from daily bookmarks.

And I *paid* to get rid of advertisements once already. Sure, we could argue about definitions of that in court but it's easier to just never come back here.

You want money? Ask for it. Don't alienate your regulars. I consider this "article" an utter betrayal of your geek cred, to be honest. Do it again, and I won't come back.

The last year, I've found myself doing nothing but finding reasons NOT to return to this site, if I'm honest, and have had to use my filters whereas before I never used them once. If you were actually *doing* anything, like making in Unicode compatible, or providing new features, then some things could be excused. But you are just doing nothing more than Yes/No and a little editing on user submissions. How well is that going to go when all the users bugger off because of abuses like this?

Sort it out, Slashdot.

Social search? No thanks.

One person I know only buys what Which Magazine recommends. Everything he owns is "top" of Which's ratings. And they all have some pretty killer problems or cost the earth, and he gets nothing more done than someone who buys the cheapest things out of Tesco.

And just how many of my friends know what an indexable skiplist is, or the correct invocation of a particularl Windows API function, or a system for library cataloguing that integrates with AD, or the name of that guy in the film with that other guy? Precisely zero. If you've stopped tapping things into Google and are instead tapping them into Twitter or Facebook then, let's be honest, they probably weren't really worth asking in the first place. And anyone that answers will use Google to find the thing they read about that topic last week, etc.

Not only do I not believe it, I think that it could only be a good thing to stop Google having to deal with "Who saw Eastenders the other night? Did Jack find his long-last father?" when it could be dealing with my queries which need a mite more data and research.

Actually, it's more akin to a rubber seal manufacturer being in a phone call with Ford and saying "You know that car you're about to release? We think that possibly one of our engineers may have identified a problem."

Then Ford saying: "Okay, is it something we should recall the car for or not produce it?"

And then replying: "No. Hold on. Whisper, whisper, whisper. No, it'll be fine. It's no problem at all. Sorry to have bothered you."

The guy that the article is about was the engineer. The company he worked for took it through several levels of management and hushed it up. NASA are hardly completely to blame - they queried it and were told it was fine by the people who engineered that component.

What that has to do with taking risks I have no idea - sure, it was "potentially" avoidable but do we know how many times things like that happen over the decades needed to plan a shuttle launch with some millions of components and thousands of outside company, which employ collectively millions of people? And how many times they were "right" and how many times they were just paranoid, or even how many times their paranoia led to problems itself? No.

Spaceflight is high-risk, even with every control in the world. There hasn't been a space traveller yet that hasn't been made aware of that, private, military or commercial.

When you push the boundaries of capability and science, there are bound to be accidents, oversights and, yes, casualties.

And just because this guy did spot the problem, it doesn't make NASA any less dangerous a place to be in even today, knowing about it. Thousands of cranks and scientists probably doubted every section of every component at one time or another. How many people *thought* there'd be a slight risk of an accident with the numerous things they were responsible for but there never was? It doesn't mean it was right, or he was any more wrong, but it's a HUGE project pushing every capability to the maximum so it's always a risk.

This is what gets me most about modern warfare. One soldier dies and it's front-page news. Do you have any notion of how many died just a generation or two ago in wars that involved much fewer countries?

It's a matter of perspective. For those 17, it was tragic. For their families, it was awful. For anyone who knew that it was incredibly sad. For everyone else - they were fecking military test pilots flying something completely outside the normal historical bounds of flight.

Just how many lives do you think have been claimed by things like land-speed records? Is that tragic? How many by Arctic expeditions just to say they set foot on the pole? How many by people trying to climb Everest for charity? All *completely* avoidable - so long as we don't want to try to do anything like that.

They still died, of course, and were still human. But, in context, that many people die EVERY WEEK just in ordinary car accidents. These people were on the cutting edge of science, propulsion, flight, control systems, and on one of the hugest amounts of flammable fuel every collected in order to blast off into the most inhospitable environment that humans have ever been in. It's not exactly a shocking amount of deaths, no matter what the circumstances (more people die every time a train derails because someone forgot to check it).

You can either take it into account and move on, or you can abandon spaceflight entirely because someone might die. One of those progresses science and one doesn't. One of those would shut down CERN, nuclear reactors, etc. overnight and one wouldn't.

They knew what they were risking, and that's part of *why* they signed up. They didn't *need* to die but the fact that they, or someone doing the same things, died is hardly shocking to even themselves - and shouldn't be to us. Remember them, but don't "blame" them by proxy for us never wanting to put another human on a rocket again.

So your next-door-neighbour rape-victim who wants to remain completely anonymous because of the intense psychology damage it would do her to have that information be public doesn't get a choice?

In my country, it's hardly ever been possible to listen in on police radio (encrypted analog radios for decades even, I believe). I'm not sure if it's even legal to listen in, to be honest. And probably for good reason. You have *no* more reason to have that information public than victims and "alleged" criminals have to keep it private. Do you not have a right to a private life for innocent people in your country?

And what an incredibly stupid idea: "We've had an accusation of a man living at address .... interfering with children at the local playground" - and before you know it, John Smith is dead in a ditch somewhere because his ex-wife wanted to cause him hell by falsely reporting him and some vigilante with a scanner took it upon himself to be judge, jury and executioner. Giving the media access to it and not others is even more hilarious a concept.

If you want transparency and access - get it how you get any information out of a public office. Go to court and obtain the legally-required recordings of everything that happened.

If you even think for a second that you have to monitor your police force personally, you're living in the wrong country or you're more paranoid than a meeting of the OCD society.

That's not to say there isn't corruption and abuse of the system but in my country, the UK, police still are put behind bars when they use their powers incorrectly, recordings are still released when appropriate, courts have total access to use as evidence against corrupt individuals, incidents like beating rioters who then collapse of a heart attack *can't* be covered up because everything recorded is subject to court order and absence of it is a failure of duty that's punished more seriously than anything else, and the people put their trust in the ONLY people who are required to come to your aid if someone threatens you with violence.

No wonder the US police I've met have such a disdain for the American public and a love of the tourist - we actually respect them, not accuse them by default.

Not everything is as blanket-simple as "Free Speech and Open Access". Anyone who trots out arguments like that is really just clinging to some principle they think exists in a form *THEY* want it to.

Say your daughter is abused by her teacher. Yeah, sure, you want to see him go to jail or worse. But do you really want *ANYONE* with a scanner in range of where it was reported (e.g. her schoolmates, their parents, the people who go to her clubs, her neighbours, etc.) to know exactly what was done to her and who she is? Or would you prefer that to be reported by the officers discreetly over a covert channel (not even necessarily by radio)? As soon as you put the police under surveillance, you put every victim under surveillance too.

Perl.