Snakebite

Nope it was a South West Cheese Steak Sandwich. Doesnt help that the person that makes your food also handles your money (which could come from anywhere, i.e filthy as hell) when they are short staffed or quiet with the same plastic gloves they use to make the food.

Thats food poisoning for you

I would wait till August if you can as Intel are coming out with new Laptop Processors that should drive down prices a little. If you need it now though, I've had an Advent P3 Laptop for 5 years and it still works, though have had to get it fixed a few times. What ever you do I would recommend an extended warranty on any Laptop purchase that includes accidental damage. As you wont be able to fix it yourself. Had my Laptop fixed a few times under warranty 2 of which was due to accidentally dropping it. You can pick up an Advent Laptop for £349 at PC World. If it's only for checking emails and browsing the internet then you could go for an emachine which is about £300-400. Not sure how good they are but they are cheap. For myself have been looking at Toshiba (Portege M400) ones recently mainly for the touchscreen Tablet editions which have a very good spec (Built in anti-theft & Biometric security, wifi etc) but, they are a bit expensive £1334 on Dabs.com and still needs a little bit more performance to meet Vista aeroglass Requirements. So still looking myself at the moment. Going to wait til Vista comes out before spashing out which I believe is in Jan/Feb 2007.

you dont want to go there unless you want severe diahorrea & vommiting. Girlfriend got this back in May for about a week after eating a Subway Sandwich Environmental Health needs to pay a visit as it's not the cleanest of places, but then neither are most of the fast food places in Aberdeen as the Staff are not paid enough to care.

The growing problem of obesity lies with the parents. Too many parents these days do not or cannot provide a healthy balanced diet for their children. Some of it is to do with poverty which the world as a whole has to deal with. The other is parental care where by some parents do not know what is a healthy diet. Exercise is another main factor. Gone are the days where you see children playing in the streets & parks enjoying the outdoors. Computer games and consoles are now the norm where most children that end up being obese, spend around 90% of their free time in front of a TV/Monitor. So what can be done to help parents tackle obesity: NHS Health Visitors are now providing advice to better educate parents during first few years of childhood using as many means possible. The Education department are now seeing sense and are trying their best to provide healthy nutritional school dinners. So what else needs to be done. Physical education needs to play a greater part in a young childs life before and during primary school, this needs to be addressed by the Education department. Some parents are still found to be illiterate, which means they cant read any of the leaflets that do provide advice. This needs to be addressed by both the NHS and the education department to help these people. The media need to take a greater responsibility for ensuring they dont advertise junk food when childrens programmes are on TV. This one of the worst cuplrits for infulencing children on what they should be eating. Finally, suing people doesnt get rid of the problem, people that are still obese after childhood need help to take responsibility for their own health, whether that be by their friends, family or their doctor.

The Intellectual Property law that is being proposed has nothing to do with the Patent Directive I'm not talking about who uses open source and who doesnt. This new law will affect both non-open source & open source since it deals with ideas rather than patents. If an idea has been used already then the company or person that came up with and published that idea will own the intellectual property for it. Therefore if say you write application that somehow mimics the operation of existing published ideas then you could be sued/prosecuted under this new law for reusing the idea without the consent of the company or person that first published it. If this law is passed then companies like SCO unix will be able make a lot of money from sueing/prosecuting people that have copied their ideas in other applications whether open source or not. However ideas tend to be copied more often in open source since most people that write open source applications in the past believe that reusing someone elses idea in their own applications is just a part of using open source because it's free. When in reality they will actually be breaking the law if this IP law is passed. Read the link on my first post

Eh? Am only bringing this issue up because it will affect a lot of people that use open source if this becomes law. Many of which appear use this Forum as you've all discussed how you all prefer to use open source applications enough in other threads. I'm not pointing at any particular open source application. This issue applies to all open source. It will limit it's development and use in europe since application developers and users of open source will have to ensure they are not infringing on existing Intellectual Property before they publish. It will to some extent affect some non open source applications as well. However they do seem to be more aware of what is intellectual property and the implications of infringing it than open source developers. Take linux as a prime example, it infringes on several pieces of SCO Unix intellectual property but open source developers/users are just ignoring it until they are sued. i.e. Daimler Chrysler for instance. Say like for instance Tabbed browsing, Opera had the idea first before Firefox & Internet Explorer so in theory they could say they own the intellectual property for the idea. The owners of Opera could then in turn sue/prosecute Mozilla, Microsoft and any users of the software in europe if they wanted to if this law was passed. The financial implications of this law are huge.

The European Union is proposing to implement an Intellectual Property Law. See link below http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050801/152/fon1a.html This has great implications on the use of Open Source as any intentional infringement of intellectual Property by a company or individual could result in criminal proceedings being filed against them. This means that SCO Unix for instance could sue anyone using linux applications if it is based around unix owned intellectual property which could result in a criminal conviction. Example: SCO Unix sued Daimler Chrysler for using their Autozone application on Linux, see above link. This in turn would mean that before a company or individual creates/publishes an open source application they would need to check whether someone else didnt already own the intellectual property for the idea. Would it mean the end for Free Open Source Software in Europe? What are peoples thoughts on this?

There is also a european patent been lodged by Microsoft which is also based around natural language http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=EP1178408&F=0&QPN=EP1178408 Hopefully though the Prior art that has been found to contest these patents in the form of X-faces will succeed in revoking microsofts application.

No the first one states that Firefox is picky about what websites it will show properly which means only a minority of websites will function properly in firefox. Which isnt good if you try to say it's better than everything else if it cant view the majority of websites without some problem occuring with how it interprets it. The second one states that the patch updates always seem to break something. which makes it a pain for the standard basic user as they wont normally know how to fix it themselves. Also it indicates that firefox has a habit of crashing badly resulting in loss of bookmarks etc. The third one see google link below http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webmasterworld.com%2Fforum21%2F9243-2-10.htm&btnG=Google+Search&meta= This site states the firefox has a major habit of crashing frequently and that it hogs memory. The fourth one states similar information as the third website about how it runs slow, hogs memory and crashes at least once a day.

Here's a few websites you should read yourself http://www.zdnetasia.com/insight/software/0,39044822,39200961-2,00.htm http://kalsey.com/2004/09/why_i_dont_recommend_firefox/ http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum21/9243-2-10.htm http://www.zackvision.com/weblog/archives/entry/001243.html

There has been a large frequency of patches for firefox already within its first year and is almost on par with the amount of patches released every month for internet explorer which has been around for more than 10 years. What happens in the next few years can mozilla keep up with an exponentially increasing rate of bug fixes.

All that means is that they've adopted a maximum security approach for initial installs, thats why Windows firewall in service pack 2 amongst other security features are now automatically switched ON. It is up to the installer to reduce the security settings down to a level to suit their required usage.

A possible prior art has been found that could contest the validity of Microsofts Patent. See news report below: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050725/152/fo4li.html A system called X-faces was developed about 15 years ago and was used on usenet bulletin boards. Hopefully this will be enough for the Microsoft patent to be thrown out. As it will be seen to be copying X-faces.

They have also filed a european patent as well If these patents aren't thrown out what will be patented next?

You'd better ask the webmaster that question