John - I assume you purposely avoided the obvious "G-Spot" gag? Shame on you! ;-)

Mine arrived in the UK in just 4 days! Have to say I'm lass than impressed with the build quality, which is painfully cheap. Also, the "engrish" instructions are quite useless :-( Oh well, I shall experiment until I get somewhere..

Oh. My. Gosh.
This is both faintly disturbing and very, very touching. Poor fella.

Surely your answer to (1) unfortunately contains the meat of its own fallacy?: "Because software moves so quickly", the value of "By the time their competitors ripped off their products" is severely reduced. Any competetive advantage produced by new software methods is rapidly lost. To protect R&D investment you would therefore need to pass on more cost to the consumer.

Not flaming here, just asking! I've been a FOSS advocate since forever, and firmly believe that the patent system fails to be relevant to many of the new technologies which have emerged in the last couple of decades. On the other hand I can see that investment in new, innovative ideas needs to be protected.

And this being the UK, if this little toy is classed as "Equipment capable of receiving a television signal"*, you'll need a license for it too. That'll be £139.50 please, as this is a colour set.

* It's not. This is a joke.

P.S. Are we a little upset about the $/£ exchange rate at the moment, Cory?

And this being the UK, if this little toy is classed as "Equipment capable of receiving a television signal"*, you'll need a license for it too. That'll be £139.50 please, as this is a colour set.

* It's not. This is a joke.

tragically bad luck, like being the last soldier shot down on the Western Front moments before the armistice was proclaimed.

His name was Pte George Lawrence Price, serving with the 28th Battalion (Saskatchewan) Canadian Infantry. He died in Ville-Sur-Haine, Belgium at 10:58 a.m - 2 minutes before amistice was due to come into effect. He is widely held to be the last soldier to die before the armistice.

For that price they damn well better not waste the first 30 minutes of the "show time" bombarding customers with adverts for random crap.

Video's not viewable here thanks to our overzealous IT stazi, however I'm guessing it's relying on the phenomenon of "Inattention Blindness", well documented in a chapter of O'Reilly's "Mind Hacks" and based on work done by UIUCs Visual Cognition lab. It's a fun trick to play on friends :-)

http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/media/mindhacks.html