Probably loosely translated as ...

"We have ordered a backup server, but they're on backorder at the moment".

And conveniently forget to mention that maybe they ought to have thought about getting a backup server long before the problem arose.

So, instead of getting a printout saying "Joe Bloggs was suspected of ... " it will say "The suspect was suspected of ..."

Great, that will sure keep his information private.

For all of ten minutes while it sits in the printer tray, maybe. And then, the person who created the report will add the handwritten caption "Joe Bloggs" and circle it because its important.

But Joe Bloggs' privacy will be ensured, because he isn't mentioned *IN* the report.

... to see Exchange banished from the planet, or preferably from the whole universe.

There can't be many people who haven't at some time received a mysterious "winmail.dat" that displays nothing whatsoever on good, standards-compliant mail readers.

Once again, it was that arrogant Microsoft trying to foist its "sub-standards compliant" rubbishware on a community where it was never welcome. If Google can replace microsoft email (with, I presume, standards-compliant mail messages) then well done to Google and lets have some more of microsoft's gates well and truly lowered.

Yes please. Sites shouldn't need plugins to work.

"... for rich internet applications"

Hmmm, what's actually needed, on MOST web sites, is LESS "richness" and more functionality.

You do that by going back to plain HTML, making them less flashy, cutting out most of the unnecessary animation and distraction and concentrating on content rather than presentation.

Richness shouldn't be part of the intention. Just make sure they work -- without spyware going via third party sites or unnecessary annoyances.

That would *NEVER* work here.

Neither ASA or Ofcom understands what honesty means, and therefore almost *ALL* advertising (broadband or otherwise) is unnecessarily but intentionally dishonest.

We have, for example. headlines such as "broadband for only £7 per month" and its only when you read all the small print that you find it doesn't include compulsory line rental (even though it's a criminal offence to show a misleading price to a consumer) and worse still, its only an introductory offer, and it's conditional on a contract which lasts for far more than the offer period, so in practice its not possible to get it at the advertised price.

Which is of course why both ASA and Oftel need to be replaced by properly elected ordinary people with the mandate to put their feet firmly down and absolutely prevent all misleading headline prices.

That rule OUGHT to be applied to ALL domains.

Domains ought to be registerable only on a plausible "need to have" basis, and once that need ends the domain should revert to nominet for sale, not held as ransomware to make bogus profit for somebody who probably should never have been allowed to register the domain in the first place.

Like Cheesed Off by Big Cheeses.

Many sellers, especially business sellers on ebay, don't know their legal obligations and have blatantly illegal terms and conditions.

OFT and Trading standards aren't helping a lot here. They do try to inform buyers of their *additional* rights to return unwanted goods, but explain that the seller can (if they make the right statements) require return carriage to be paid.

What they fail to adequately state is that Sale of Goods Act rights apply too, and that a seller cannot make the buyer pay return postage of DEFECTIVE OR INCORRECT goods, even if they have said they will for the return of purely-unwanted goods. The buyer can instead notify rejection of the goods, and the seller is entitled to collect if they wish, but the seller has to refund whether or not they collect the goods.

Nor can they make the buyer responsible for loss or damage in transit, Sellers are 100% responsible for loss or damage of goods in transit to a consumer.

Ebay of course takes no notice of reports, but there's no legal obligation on ebay to ensure its sellers don't make unlawful statements in their listings. Its Trading Standards not ebay that needs to be enforcing UK law.

A good start would be for OFT to set up a web site where buyers could report web sites with unlawful restrictions such as the above. Prosecution shouldn't usually be necessary. Instead, enforcers should check the site contains the stated phrase, confirm that the phrase is unlawful and notify the site owner of the problem -- initially by email, with a follow-up by recorded delivery if the offending content hasn't been removed. A sample of persistent offenders would need to be prosecuted as a deterrent to others, but in the common case (that the seller doesn't understand the law) it would achieve its aim with just a few minutes of the enforcer's time.

"the receiver must have a very highly tuned clock to know the difference between the time signals broadcast by the satellites."

No, a time *DIFFERENCE* is exactly the same regardless of the base line you choose to use to measure the two points from. Add a day, a month or a year or decade into the equation and it makes no difference because what you add you also subtract too.

In any case, I suspect that the device receives a correct date from the satellites, but in a coded form and it is the decoding of the date data (purely for display and logging purposes) where the error occurs.

That shouldn't really be the aim at all. The aim should be not to NEED a legal agreement in the first place.

If I go to a cafe and buy a bacon sandwich, I'm not required to read and sign a legal agreement waving the supplier's legal obligation not to give me food poisoning. And even if I did, it would be null and void because the law prohibits unfair contract terms. Nor is my purchase conditional on not reselling it, not looking inside to see what ingredients it contains or subject to the requirement I must eat it in a designated place that shows adverts for cheese and tomato sandwiches.

That's exactly the way it should be with software too. Subject only to standard law that prevents sellers imposing their own conditions, permits the company to use my contact details for support but not marketing and prevents it from being given to others (including parent and sibling companies) at all, regardless of any claim to "agreement".

A nice idea. But better still if google could incorporate the idea into its own searches and let you right click on a result and say "omit this host from future search results".

It does currently have that "show me less shopping sites" option but shopping sites are easily recognised and probably less than half the problem. The real timewasters are spam sites that have tricked google into indexing pages of little more than keywords and no real content.

Not only that, but google could spot when a significant number of people have opted out of a particular domain, and have a look to see if it merits global demoting.

Right, you should start by making two things VERY clear ...

a) Companies that want to use words like "unlimited" must be required to consult a dictionary, and use the word only if their service is genuinely both capable and permissive of unlimited traffic, and

b) Companies that want to use meaningless phrases like "up to" must also, in the same breath and with equal prominence, state their guaranteed MINIMUM value.

Until such time as Ofcom proves it can get its head round enforcing the above two elementary concepts, we cannot believably give Ofcom any credibility in getting its head round other, more advanced concepts.

They certainly are.

US patents are completely worthless ... to anybody *except* US lawyers, that is.

Yes, and even more important, remove those rubbish pages that consist of saved search results of umpteen prescanned keywords -- and especially those which say "We didn't find any results for" whatever keyword you were searching for.

Sounds a bit slow for an avalanche.

And no doubt by then, microsoft and the like will have managed to produce even more bloated bloatware, so it will *STILL* take more than five seconds for a PC to boot up.

"director-general Mark Thompson will admit in March that the Corporation is bloated"

INTERVIEWER: So, can you tell us how many people actually work for the BBC ?

DG: I don't have an exact figure, but I'd guess its about half of them.

... when a computer company can't make even its OWN computer services work properly.

" ... of local, regional and national governments are in the process of switching to ODF "

Glad to hear it.

Now, its high time that all colleges and other educational establishments instructed their students and staff to create documents only in ODF format. Maybe that means they should be working in Open Office too, maybe not -- but if they use a MS product they should at the very least be checking that their documents are "proper" ODF with nothing missing.

Otherwise, we perpetuate exactly the problem that we had in the days of IE4, with webmasters creating sites that only worked properly *in* IE4.

I'll drink to that.

*IS* that graph taking inflation into account?

And if not, can somebody *please* urgently revise it so that it DOES !!!

Possibly because it does it at the wrong time.

Mine has an option to display a message when it starts -- so I could put my name and maybe even my landline number, in case its found by somebody honest (a few of which genuinely DO exist) who would be happy to tell me they had my phone.

It also has an option to require a PIN so that if somebody finds it, they can't make lots of calls to exhaust the credit.

Unfortunately, it doesn't display my message until AFTER the pin is displayed. So if I use both options, they won't see the message that would tell them whose phone it is.

Anyway, to perform its intended purpose, the PIN needs to be asked before making a call, and at the moment it only does that if the phone was switched off before being lost. So, I've got to know in advance that I intend to lose my phone, and remember to switch it off before doing so.

All in all, some good ideas but badly thought through such that they don't really achieve what was intended, let alone what is actually needed.

I've replaced it with Foxit reader. Seems OK so far.

Took only about two seconds to download and installed it is 9Mb instead of 143Mb.

Depends.

"Doughnuts, 99p" is (possibly) just about fine if it is a statement on its own -- but I'd still argue that it could more properly and more honestly have been stated as "Doughnut: 99p" or as "99p each". It most certainly is not, by any sensible interpretation, "correct" to misleadingly list them in the plural without making it perfectly clear that the price was for the singular.

However, if the "Doughnuts, 99p" statement was made alongside a photograph of more than just one doughnut, or if the 99p price is conditional on ordering more than one doughnut, then that surely ought to constitute "advertising a misleading price to a consumer", which is a CRIMINAL offence and ought to be brought to the urgent attention of both the ASA to prohibit the practice and the local Trading Standards Office for prosecution "in the public interest".

That's stretching the imagination more than just a little.

Most webmasters are happy that Google accesses their content, because without it they would get far fewer visits.

Any webmaster that doesn't want Google accessing their content can set up the appropriate entries in robots.txt and Google will not bother them again. Nor will Google's customers.

Very few webmasters exclude Google, though almost all webmasters know they could if they wanted. That speaks enough by itself.

... then some company has taken those calls and passed them on to another number, which ought to be traceable.

If the companies operating the 0845 redirection are too stupid to have permanently recorded the numbers they have forwarded the calls to, or have forwarded to a mobile without positively verifying the identity of their customer, then those companies really ought to be prosecuted for aiding and abetting -- because that's exactly what they have done.

HTML-only, no javascript and static images only would be extremely welcome by those who want to view for functional reasons rather than be besieged by wholly unnecessary nuisanceware.

... to preinstall Open Office ?

Apart from the fact that it needn't cost either them or the customer anything, they would be helping to encourage the use of genuine open standards.

They have just used a lower case L.

I would be one of them, if it wasn't for the fact that my site logs show that people frequently reach it by unexpected types of search queries.

One of the common ones is that people have set google as their default search page, so that it opens automatically. They have then typed my domain name, complete with preceding www prefix and trailing .co.uk suffix, into the google search instead of the address bar.

Those people clearly aren't aware of the intended difference between the address bar and a search query ... which in turn has prompted the various authors and ISPs to provide default settings so that both boxes can be used interchangeably.

In turn, it becomes increasingly difficult to persuade people that those two apparently-interchangeable boxes are intended for two different purposes, and that very occasionally but SOMETIMES, its best to use the correct one for the job.

If removal is requested but an offence cannot subsequently be proved, then the company that requested the removal should be required to pay a substantial sum in compensation .

Such payment is necessary not just to compensate the innocent party, but also to act as a deterrent to premature and unwanted removal of material based purely on suspicion and not on proper, irrefutable evidence.

The aim has to be that a company that gets it wrong occasionally nevertheless loses substantially more than they sought to gain by its imprudent action.

... than the stupid one they have with fluorescent tubes, which merely allows the seller to put up a sign saying unwanted tubes can be taken to a site ten miles away and isn't open all day every day.

Now, lets have a rule that sellers must freely take back used packaging -- bottles, boxes etc.

Party political calls are in no way different to other types of marketing calls, so party callers should not under any circumstances be able to improperly consider themselves exempt from TPS.

Any legislation which implies otherwise is incompetent legislation and needs to be changed.

Most text to speech sounds like it has been recorded by somebody with very limited vocal ability, and most google translations look like they've been written by somebody with very limited grasp of the destination language. So, why not dispel the doubt and put the two together, leaving no doubt whatsoever about the competence of the person who mistakenly relied on the translation service.

And for those who don't quite understand what the problem is, here's what happens when you allow google to translate my first sentence into German then into French and then back into English:

Most of the text in a speech as the sounds recorded by someone who has very limited capacity voice, and watch most of the Google translation, as has already been written by someone with very limited knowledge of the target language.

Understandable yes perfectly very, n'est ce pas? And that's without even trying to synthesise it as speech.

I suggested that a LONG time ago -- long before ebay had even the *capability* to sort search results by price including P&P. Which it still only partially has -- only the "advanced" search form has the capability to display the initial results properly sorted by P+P&P. You can't make it the initial default with the standard search.

Don't show the "goods only" value at all, not even as an option -- except in the rare case where the seller allows free collection and the seller is within a buyer-specified distance. The buyer doesn't need to know how much of the price is goods and how much is postage. Though the user ought to be able to specify "I will want 5 of them" and have the sort order determined by the seller's postage discounts rather than the price for posting just one of them.

Making bids postage-inclusive isn't a problem. Ebay knows what the postage is, so can subtract it from the bid price.

Yes, but rarely to the benefit of the end user. Mostly, flash conveys adverts, unnecessary annoyances which distract from the written material the user is trying to read and the output of idiot web designers that have used flash for a button where a static image ought to have been used instead.

Firefox and flashblock circumvents most of the above. Its not obvious why *everybody* doesn't install firefox and flashblock, making *most* of the problem go away (and, ultimately, forcing idiot web designers to redesign their pages using pure HTML only).

"Why do you need more than 10 presets?"

At a guess, its so that you can store the details of more than 10 radio stations.

You wouldn't ask "why does a browser have to be able to store more than 10 bookmarks", would you?

Oh, perhaps you would.

Of course, it is slightly rhetorical at present. Probably most people cannot get more than 10 DAB stations at an even remotely listenable quality. But that's Oftel's fault for allowing the multiplex operators to squeeze in too many stations for the allocated bandwidth.

"“There is no evidence that moving from the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer to other browsers will make users more secure."

Typical Government response. We avoid researching things that we think we might not like the answer to, so that we can say "there is no evidence".

But maybe the government should research advocating firefox together with flashblock and noscript. They should be advocating a browser that at least tries to comply with standards instead of inventing new substandards.

I bet you found them to be ... a load of Berks.

No wonder he's worried.

Governments, schools and colleges should NOT be pumping out documents in what, despite the allegedly-dubious opinion of ISO, is a "de-facto" proprietary format.

As every firefox+noflash user knows, most web pages look a LOT more user friendly without the unnecessary annoyances such as flash.

99% of web pages will be IMPROVED by dropping the flash. And if it forces a few idiot web designers to check that their site remains fully usable on a noflash reader, that will be a very POSITIVE improvement for everybody, not just iPad users.

Lets hope they also bring out a NOSCRIPT version. There are far too many sites using scripts unnecessarily. Javascript is never necessary for a search form, or in links. Just code the form properly so that scripts aren't necessary.

"using a customer credential, then downloads Software and Support Materials in excess of the customer's authorization"

If the support site allows the a logged in customer to download unauthorised material, that's surely the fault of the webmaster and not the third party that's installing software on its behalf.

Not even to say "This Page UnIntentionally Blank" ???

A story about people buying a product like this is only totally believable if it is posted on 1st April.