£12.50, which I thought was cheap until I saw what some of you are paying. Then again I used to have it done in central London where £20 was a cheap haircut…

I've used hacksaws and pipe cutters; I find the pipe cutter is easier even on steel steerers – if you knacker the cutting wheel throw it away and replace it, they only cost a few p. Only drawback of the pipe cutter that I've found is that unless you're gentle with the final cut you'll have a slight ridge on the inside of the steerer that makes it harder to get a SFN in. If you go for the saw make sure the metal dust doesn't get anywhere near any of the functioning parts of the fork (or the headset if you're trying to do it in-situ 8O ). Pipe cutter may generate swarf but is generally less messy so less of a risk unless you're filing off the aforementioned ridge.

If you can wait until next month and you don't mind being an early adopter this looks like it could be a bargain.

Edit: sorry, wrong link, should have been this for 150mm

i was with you till you mentioned 3D.

Only mentioned that as an example of the way new things come along – not something I'd worry about myself! There's a deliberate policy of rapid obsolescence with recent technology which is why I wouldn't bother buying most of it from one of the top-end manufacturers. Next month's cheapo BD player may well be better than this month's top-end one, or have some must-have feature.

Why's it BS? Seriously, just asking

digital-to-analogue conversion from Wolfson – like my 2G iPod nano (although I don't know whether that's 24 bit)

linear phase Bessel filter – isn't the only reason you use a Bessel filter because its reasonably phase-linear?

high-precision re-clocking of data from the main decoder – can't even figure out what this means!

I like Arcam stuff, but if this is the best their marketing people put out perhaps they need to do some re-thinking. If I were to buy one of these (unlikely – I wouldn't invest that much in technology (BD) with potentially a short lifetime combined with a rapid development rate – 3D anyone?) it would be because of their reputation in producing good analogue audio stages, not because of "high-precision re-clocking of data".

My boss has just posted the airplane / conveyer question! http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/1001650-Please-help-solve-our-stalemate

Been rumbled on page 2, in less than an hour – impressive:

"Does S T W mean anything to you? "

Some brief research indicates that at least one STWer may already be trolling mumsnet:

"as a randy pervert (and that is what quite a few of you would think of me) how should I (a man) communicate this to potential partners?"

but don't read the thread if you're of a nervous disposition 8O

I very very rarely come across grumpy folk

I agree, and my point is that I'd like to keep it that way! There was, for example, a movement a few years ago to try to ban cyclists from Wendover Woods which fortunately failed. More and more "no cycling" signs are going up around my part of the Chilterns. People building obstructions on footpaths and bridleways because they want to make them more exciting only encourage that sort of thing.

I often find branches across the trails in the Chilterns, but I reckon they're 1/3 dogs dragging oversized sticks on to the trails, 1/3 gravity and wind and maybe 1/3 deliberate to slow people down. Equally I've been tearing down a bridleway only to come unexpectedly across a jump someone's built half way down which must be pretty annoying to the non-cyclists. As a frequent user of the trails I'm used to finding fallen trees blocking my way (and I mean big things at handlebar height that you can't jump over), so as someone said always assume the worst and ride at a speed that lets you stop when that dog runs out in front of you.

the area is massively more popular with bikers in the past 5 years or so than it ever was before and so that could well be leading to some issues developing

Applies to the Chilterns as a whole – every path now seems to be ridden regularly whether legal or not and I can see trouble brewing if we aren't careful. At the moment I find walkers and horse riders are generally very pleasant (as long as you're not within 500m of a car park where the numpties are) but things I see like jumps built on bridleways and new lines that cut corners to keep speed up aren't going to endear us to the other users.

FWIW our iMac is now 2 1/2 years old and just works, never puts a foot wrong.

PCs are getting there now that you can get all the security tools from Microsoft (you're no longer in a constant battle with your virus checker) but you still seem to need to be a bit of a geek to get the most out of them – we're still fighting with the crap HP pre-installed on Mrs R's Win 7 netbook to "enhance the experience". And as for getting Vista 64 to boot off a RAID array – don't start me :evil:

Makemkv. Quick and free, does the decrypting as well and easy to throw away all the junk special features to save space.

If MSE works for you, why not stick with it? If you look at the detection rate/time-to-update figures you'll find that the major AV products tend to leapfrog each other so you might as well stick with what works for you rather than keep on installing the one that was best last time.

If you want to test its detection use eicar – always a good thing to do with new AV to make sure it's doing what its supposed to do.

It's not necessarily all bad. We had a bad attack of the foresters here a couple of years ago. After they'd gone it looked like the Somme so people made tracks anywhere they wanted. Now we have new tracks where we didn't have them before and as a bonus this year we've had a particularly spectacular display of foxgloves. Which is nice. :-)

If it's a Dyson, take it apart (it all comes apart), wash all the plastic bits, dry them thoroughly and then put it back together.

If it's a Hoover don't do that.

If it's a hover take it to a specialist.

This may be right, although Labour's position as a party will depend on the outcome of its leadership election and (conceivably) conference.

Indeed – "On the Labour side, wannabe party leader Andy Burnham today dismisses voting reform as "a kind of fringe pursuit for Guardian-reading classes" – cruel but probably fair – while Ed Miliband promises to lead Labour in favour of a yes vote on AV if he wins. Backbenchers on both sides are busy plotting campaigns for a no vote."

Both Labour and Conservatives have a lot to lose – I doubt whether either would see an overall majority for a long time (if ever) with any kind of meaningful proportional voting – so it will probably not happen. A shame IMHO.

There's been previous threads on this; I use Memory-Map for detailed maps, it uses full OS maps and seems to work well.

That's hardly what Cristina Kirchner is saying should be the priority right now

Obviously not, but if you look at what Argentina did – it got out of its 2001 crisis by defaulting on debt; it's not doing too badly in the current crisis because since then it's operated a budget surplus and is therefore able to spend now to keep the economy moving. I'm not sure how that mirrors where we are now – if we defaulted on our debt to wipe the slate clean we'd have no access to borrow so wouldn't have anything to spend so we'd be like Argentina in 2001 which was pretty grim by all accounts. Although I guess you could argue that as it's grim anyway why not go for broke?

But maybe the laws of economics is the opposite in the southern hemisphere ?

Looks pretty similar to me – if you run with a budget surplus most of the time (which you have to do if defaulting on debt prevents you from borrowing) then you have something left to spend when a recession comes:

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has consistently argued that maintaining a budget surplus and a cheap peso has helped Argentina recover from a financial crisis in late 2001, when South America's second-largest economy defaulted on about $95 billion of bonds.

so it looks like you're suggesting a rapid reduction in the deficit is the right thing to do?

Good, saves me the bother of pointing out that central banks in most countries, including Britain, are not regulatory authorities but bankers to the state, so have little to do with how private sector banks conduct their affairs.

The Bank has a statutory objective to “contribute to protecting and enhancing the stability of the financial systems of the United Kingdom”. The Bank does this through its risk assessment and risk reduction work, market intelligence functions, payments systems oversight, banking and market operations, including, in exceptional circumstances by acting as lender of last resort, and resolution work to deal with distressed banks.

although admittedly this was a bit muddied in the days of the FSA.

Because the banks and other financial institutions (all private sector, unless Muppet11 would care to correct me on that) managed their affairs so badly they begged tens of billions of pounds

FFS get with the conspiracy remember that was Gordon Browns fault as he let the B of E set interest rates or he took the house prices out of inflation iirc. Clearly not a failing of private international capital , private companies, or capitalism just shows left wing politics dont work OBVIOUSLY.

I could point out that the central banks that are supposed to stop us from getting into this mess are public institutions, but I won't. :-)

It's missing all the horrible things that make other forums unpleasant to use. Lets keep it that way. :-)

EDIT: having said that, the throwing-up smiley that someone used recently would be a good addition.

Also, people suggesting Gordon Brown created the world financial crisis need to get a grip on reality.

Whilst there are many who think he is implicit in the activities that led to the banking crisis I haven't seen anyone on this thread explicitly blame him for the global economic downturn. But he's the one who didn't make allowance for the economic cycle in his spending plans – a beginner's mistake which left us in the current position when the inevitable happened.

molgrips – that's why I included paying down debt, not just saving. What they could have done is balance the budget over the economic cycle as they said they would. But running a deficit in a boom is just not sensible ( and definitely not "prudent").

Yes, probably.

spending DOES stimulate the economy, that's been proven

I guess you're referring to government spending. This is possibly true, but you need to have the money to spend. Keynsian economics as I understand it says governments should save during the boom times to spend in the recession (or pay down debt in the boom to borrow during recession). If you borrow during the boom then you are FUBAR, although if you think you've abolished boom and bust you may well make this mistake.

plain black is fine by me

I'm using a photo taken with my hand over the lens!

Lots of things could dump us back into recession. If the Euro zone doesn't pull itself out of its current mess then that could do it; no-one's sure what the overall effect of QE is – it certainly postponed problems until after the election at the expense of continuing the house-price boom but now that it's ended who knows what will happen; by my calculation suspending the BP dividend has taken about £1bn out of the economy; normally at this stage you'd hope for tax cuts to stimulate spending and investment but that isn't going to happen etc etc. And in the long term the cuts in spending on serious education (and I mean proper Universities and research, not degrees in beauty therapy to keep unemployment down) will seriously affect our long term prospects IMHO. Depressing really.

It's telling me its going to take 50 min to download :?

Edit: now 60min! 8O

Mr W, yes you were right IMHO!

TJ, some regulations were similar, e.g. the ones that let your bank sell you insurance, but the ones that ensure the stability of the banking system were not, there was a fundamentally different regulatory regime which incidentally Brown and Blair were very proud of.

So I say again – please let us know what regulation Gordon Brown removed from the banks?

I feel as though I'm banging my head against a brick wall with this one but let's have one more try. Brown created the FSA as a component of his so-called tripartite regulatory system, and implement what he called "light-touch" regulation, or what they called "principles based regulation", as opposed to more explicit rules-based regulation. One of the purposes of the change was to allow and encourage financial institutions to take more risks ("I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers" – Brown's Mansion House speech 2004), which they duly did with results that are self-evident to most.

The pedants will note that this indeed isn't deregulation, it's removal of effective regulation so I concede on that one.

Right, off to find the aspirin.

Try putting your head to one side (the affected side) and then banging your head on that side with the heel of your palm. Works for me, but best not to do it in public as people tend to think you're a nutter (or so I've found).

Thought this one had died!

BB – you seem to have a limited understanding of financial regulation and have therefore got hung up on the big bang. Wikipedia is probably your friend, but you might want to read up about the role of financial regulators in ensuring that financial institutions manage risk appropriately.

Depends whether they want to stay in the hotel all the time, but that one looks as though it's away from the centre; you might want to look at one of the hotels on the walkway that runs along the beach like the Movenpick or the Fayrouz Hilton. From recollection these both have ground floor rooms that open on to level walkways. Don't go for one of the hotels at the Tiran Straits end which tends to be more hilly (4 Seasons is excellent but needs mountaineering skills).

Who'd have thought Wikipedia would have a whole section on maths jokes.

I like this one, attributed to Bill Bailey:

An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first goes up to the bartender and says, "I'll have a pint of lager, please." Each next one says, "and I'll have half of what he's having." The bartender says, "You're all idiots," and pulls two pints.

For the mathematicians:

What's purple and commutes?

An abelian grape.

The reason why they went bust spectacularly was down to bad business practices which were allowed by poor regulation. The FSA for example claimed they were pressured politically not to expose the poor business practices of Northern Rock which became the trigger for many of the UK problems. The big bang may have allowed some of the building societies to become banks run by numpties but with appropriate regulation even that should not have mattered; the numpties would have been prevented from taking inappropriate risks.

However it is absolutly true that the seeds of this was in the major deregulation of the "big bang" and not in the minor tinkering that Brown did

TJ, I think most people consider the root cause to be a macro-imbalance in world trade which still continues, and which in the UK was exacerbated by a weak regulatory environment in financial services which was set up by GB but which we've established wasn't his fault because the FSMA was just 52 pages of minor tinkering.

Logic? Over-rated in my view… :roll:

He did not however de-regulate the banks

Semantics. Surprisingly good marxist description of events; I guess they're less worried than some about following some party line:

He therefore called for ‘light touch regulation,’ in other words less regulation on the City and finance capital. Before his Mansion House audience in 2007, he called for, "a risk-based regulatory approach". It was an old theme. In the same hall three years before, he pledged that "in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers" (2004). This is the approach that got us in the present pickle.

So may we now move onwards and upwards past that one semantic point??

BB I expect we have to agree to disagree on that. To me, removing the regulator is deregulation, to you it is apparently not.

I think I know enough about the "big bang", which may or may not have been a good thing depending on your political views. But that doesn't get away from the fact that the so-called tripartite "no-one's responsible" regulation system introduced by Brown didn't work.

It says basically that he removed any effective regulatory framework. Not sure that it can be put any more simply or clearly than that.