batou

Incidentally I play the piano, guitar and clarinet... Perhaps that's the problem. I will reflect upon that.

I'll give you another one. Most creative work is crap and distinctly not tied to the return of investment.

If I buy a book for £6 I get a few days if not a couple of weeks of enjoyment out of it. This is good. Well done authors.

If I buy a £1 music track I get perhaps 20 minutes a week out of it for a few weeks before I burn it out.

Run this in your browser's console window to make it actually scrollable without playing find the sodding scrollbar:

   document.getElementById("contentpane").style.width = "100%"

65% of my pre tax income disappears on tax through income tax, NI and VAT so yes it's already happening.

Also we can afford to pay them more if we don't spin all our cash on distribution top slicing and go to the gigs etc.

You should steal much more if you've already paid for it.

Sell them, not that they're worth anything now, keep the rips, steal all the new stuff and don't feel guilty about it. You've been milked enough.

As someone dipping into physics very late after a long journey on mathematics, this thread is both depressing and terrifying yet at the same time strangely motivating.

I think there are some big questions without answers still. I want to have a bash at them.

Whatever. Zero fucks given. I have no physical media and never will again. Not playing these games any more. I'll continue to steal stuff. If it is good, I'll buy the mp3 or go to a gig.

What about those newly defined criminals Amazon with AutoRip?

Fair point!

At a basic level, this is also why I still drag my TI83 around. 99% of the functions I need in one little box that is always ready for action.

I spoke to someone a few years ago who has an asymmetrical transit cost agreement between two companies. He joked that it may have been lucrative to just pipe /dev/random to their echo port 24/7.

I suspect that is one of the many reasons that is a dead protocol.

This happened to me a few years ago. The activation blew on my Win7 machine when I was without internet for about 6 weeks. I phoned it through in the end which was an eye opener.

If I had to sign in to use software I'd be fecked in this situation again. Made me re-evaluate things pretty sharpish.

Absolutely no idea. AFAIK they just disappear into a void.

Used to be like this on Demon, Virgin Media and Easynet. The latter fixed their stuff circa 2007 however.

Why?

Simply to assert their self-assigned rights over everything that you write, think and do and to line up ready to easily collect the drip feed of cash they want from everyone.

For this they trade you semi-functional software, vague promises that are usually broken and marketing hype.

That's how all "ecosystems" work.

Which is why I'm not in one for my personal stuff. At work however, they're lining up like good cows for the next milking. They've forgotten that SQL 2014 cost and the Azure price rise already...

Good publicity is a good return if you're a lawyer and probably cheaper than marketing so it doesn't always work like that.

Otherwise, yep.

GRE tends to bugger off down a hole in a lot of ISPs in the UK from experience. Very annoying.

Yeah well the lawyers in question will probably look like shit if they lose so they want money so it's not a complete loss.

Horrible but probably true.

There are a number of companies that shift a good selection of parts in kit form to start with. This is the one I tend to recommend:

http://www.bitsbox.co.uk/index.php?main_page=product_info&cP...

That plus side cutters, pliers and a multimeter.

Dave Jones.

The only killer value here is the material and there's little of that on display at the moment. What appears to be there is stuff you can find for nothing on the web with a little googling ( http://allaboutcircuits.com/ http://electronicsclub.info/ for example)

The parts are worth little to nothing; less than $30. You can get bagged kits from bitsbox.co.uk with everything you need for $24.

I can't see the value proposition and it seems to be an attempt at monetizing something.

I get that you've got to eat, but you'll only manage that if you keep that material flowing.

Here you go :)

http://www.boulder.swri.edu/pkb/ssr/ssr-ralph.pdf

They're still good here in Europe. In some countries WP is outselling iPhones and is second in line behind Samsung (CZ)

Slack off and do something more interesting than work.

Friction and drag coefficient may have removed all the feathers in the boost phase :)

Sounds like you're broken. I was once too. Couldn't focus on anything. This is a good cure from experience:

http://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/learning-how-learn/c...

I genuinely agree with you here.

I've gone back to a desktop mail client (Thunderbird) and moved away from the web for this sort of thing myself.

As far as the web goes, I am very impressed at openstreetmap. That is fast, accurate and has more useful mapping data than anything else rather than fancy overlays and imaging.

I came up with the same answer many years ago at school. I was told I'd make a good engineer but a bad philosopher by my teacher :)

That's nothing. I have 5 windows and 2 actual bedrooms although one is debatable and that commands an extra £1100 a month on top of that.

Going back to 2002 my first flat was a place under a betting shop in Islington and had a door that we couldn't open and had no idea where it went to and that was £600/month. Oh and it smelled of piss and shit.

Apparently a number of engineers I used to work with were actually scientists!