Posts by Nick Rutland

EU gets bashed lot...

... but isn't the two-year warranty thing one of the EU achievements? I thought this was EU -wide, not just Italy.

Happy to be corrected...

Someone said 'Website needs polishing up a bit'

... so they've made a start with the t-cut.

Next, the wax and buffing.

Patron saint of ...

... Barcelona as well.

Olay!! (phonetic, because I can't do accents)

If Al-Q could be persuaded to buy AOL ...

... then all our terrorism worries would go away. I'd worry about what a shiny new AQOL CD would do to my system but otherwise I reckon that the whole organisation would go broke and flounder.

Not even Disney would be interested.

Keeping track

What intrigues me is that they say they've sold 1-2 billion. That means they're not sure of whether they've sold a billion cards or not, in my view.

Would you trust a card from an outfit like that to keep track of anything at all? (I have to: got an Oyster for daily commute)

@speakers

Actually this seemed to be the preferred sales channel for this particular brand of speaker. A friend of mine (in our contractor days - too much money) bought a pair and took them home. Thye were fine: not special, but the value was about ok. We did a search the next day when he told us, and got a reference to a guy in Berlin who'd had exactly the same experience - same brand, same spiel. A bit more poking around got us to a collective site about this brand. The general opinion was that the deal was OK: you got a receipt, and people who turned up at the address to return unwanted speakers got their money back (cash, natch). No questions asked. There was even one guy who, ah, 'upgraded' the amount he'd paid, and got that back.

Honest people get villains a bad reputation, I say.

Shape-shifting and elusive

I can't help feeling that something like this will end up dripping through a hole in my pocket.

They might be useful ...

... in Swedish coach stations, of course.

Ring tones, anyone?...

...(sorry about that)

Crystal ball time ...

I suppose the real difficulty is guessing how long fibre will be the dominant comms technology. The water outfits can invest in expensive replacement of Victorian mains and pipes because essentially they have a guaranteed revenue stream for at least the next 150 years (and if that fails, everybody's got problems anyway) so they can raise money against that. Doesn't stop 'em charging us all now, but that's a different issue. If an enterprise could be guaranteed anything like the same sort of deal for fibre, it ought to be able to raise the dosh in the same way. Trouble is, no-one knows if wireless or some other (quantum?, witchcraft?) technology will become more feasible or when this might happen.

Sounds like an opportunity for a mass bet of some sort: set up a market, that sort of thing...

So we were right all along ...

... with the vindaloo after the gallon of beer.

Third rail v overhead catenary

Only problem here: tunnels and bridges. I understand that these make overhead power supply unfeasibly expensive, so southern England will stay third-rail for the foreseeable future.

Thameslink (now called something else - First Central?) trains switch from third-rail to overhead when they stop at Farringdon station. It used to take ages, but now they manage it in a standard stop time.

No-zero roulette story ...

... refers I believe to John Maynard Keynes. He knocked on a friend's door in Cambridge to announce that the casino at Deauville had removed the zero.

"I suppose you want us to go there at the weekend" said the friend.

"On the contrary, we take the six o'clock train from Victoria this evening" replied the great economist.

I don't have a citation for this but this was after all a guy who gambled on wheat futures to finance King's College Cambridge when he was in charge of such things.

Multidimensional Audis

Did anyone spot the advert for the new Audi a few months ago?

Boot space was something like 11 cubic litres. As opposed to the usual sort of litre.

I'd be worried about opening it up and finding a load of Daleks.

Or Cardiff.

Another would-be villain, this time re-oriented by booze

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2126129,00.html

Read the Guardian ...

... Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column, to be exact. He had a very funny rebuttal of the wifi panic on Saturday.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2093724,00.html

French suffer same as Spanish

The French use 'standing' the same as the Spanish. 'Tres grand standing' means 'high reputation.

Don't know how they arrived at this, though.