We don't have room to print all your letters and blog pingbacks - so here's what we chose from.
ADAPTING FOR THE ELDERLY I read Guy Clapperton's article with interest. He may well be aware that adaptations and 'gadgets' are designed for a range of people with disabilities young and old. A point not raised in his article is the 'look' of many of these aids and adaptations. Anyone like myself who has a physical disability is only too aware just how stigmatising these adaptations are. Baths, showers, rails, raised toilet seats, handrails - you name it and what is provided for disabled people are clunky, extremely obvious and 'shout' disabled at whosoever comes into contact with them. Stylish adaptations seem to be an oxymoron unless you've got lots of private capital and a hot-shot designer. I'd like to ask Guy Clapperton to do a little market test: try and get a raised toilet seat for a modern style toilet, you know the sort I mean, that most people have now. While he's at it could I ask him to drop by 'Keep Able' and report back on what items he would like to have in his home and mark them out of ten for style and taste. Yeh yeh get an accessible tin opener, but great big thick grab rails outside the front of your house - you might as well have a neon light flashing 'disabled person within'. Why should disability or being old be analogous with clunkiness? Methinks the subtext is if you require adaptations then pragmatism rules and style, design, even beauty is considered irrelevant by occupational therapists, designers and fitters. No wonder older people duck the issue of adaptations in the home and as the 'new' older population become used to a lot more choice and quality in home fittings, it's not surprising people are reluctant to go for the stigma brand. Please ask some designers to respond to your article by coming up with some new attractive examples, have a competition but do something to improve the visuality of these 'things'; put yourself into the shoes of those you are prescribing for and ask yourself 'would I like this?'. Jane Nation, London
TV DOWNLOADS A boxed set of DVDs doesn't set the price of a single downloaded episode (How much should we pay to download a TV episode? Sep 6) because it isn't available while the show is running, and so can't be used to fill a missed episode. The price for a single episode of a series, without any limit on replays, is defined by the cost of recording it on a VCR and is essentially zero. You might argue that this only works if you remember to set the timer, but PVRs are rapidly making that irrelevant. Adrian Godwin, Bedford.
GADGETS I'm no technophobe, but I am lazy and the Polaroid Media gadget that automatically backups photos sounded worth a look. First off though your link was hopeless (if Boots sell it they couldn't sell it to me). A wider search revealed that it doesn't actually work on quite a lot of computers - actually all those that aren't running Windows. Now what sort of review is that? Hopeless actually. Peter Cox, Cardiff
SITESEEING The Siteseeing section has a graph and I point out one error and raise one query. 1. Error - The labelling of the vertical axis scale must be badly wrong with equal divisions labelled 0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.6, 0.8 and 1.0. It is not even a logarithmic scale. 2. Query - The title of the vertical axis is "% of online traffic" and something [I cannot be sure how much, see 1 above] just below 1% goes to M&S. Is this really true of the whole of the internet traffic that includes Google, eBay, BBC, Facebook, and email generally. I smell a rat. John Broughton, Belper
It is OK to suppress the origin, and it is OK to use a logarithmic scale (so long as clearly so marked) but is not OK to just leave bits out, as in the y-axis of your graph of Marks & Spencer web shoppers. (Technology Guardian, page 4, 6th Sept 2007) Don Simpson, Rochdale
[It was a production error: the (linear) scale should have read 0.0, 0.2, 0.4... - Tech Ed.]
CROWN COPYRIGHT Copyright law is a minefield and it looks like there are some major misconceptions in this article. The problem is not whether Crown Copyright exists but whether and how the Crown chooses to assert its copyright. Incidentally you also need to distinguish between copyright and the right to reuse "public" data - they are different. The basic principle of copyright is to protect the right of the author or the owner of the copyright if not the author to control how a work is used. It's in fact perfectly reasonable that the Government on behalf of the Crown should hold copyright to protect the documents it produces just as the Guardian does over its articles and for exactly the same reason. The US Government - and the UK government for that matter - usually offers a general licence to use its documents under certain terms, notably that the text is not rewritten and the source is credited. (Copyright btw doesn't have to be claimed; it's an automatic right in any created work.) What you are campaigning for is the right to reuse data collected by Government which is not inherently a copyright issue. The issue is really the terms under which Government chooses to make data it has collected available. Your argument is that the "public" has paid for its collection, therefore its "public" property and the "public" should have free access to it to use it in whatever way it chooses. It's an attractive argument. The counter argument used by Government is that it's a commercially exploitable resource, so why shouldn't they be the ones to exploit it for the benefit of Government and the taxpayer? Actually, that, too, is an attractive argument! Robert Ward, Leeds
POST OFFICE VS FIREFOX I closed my Post Office credit card recently, the main reason being, as Paul Godier has mentioned it does not support firefox. The strange thing is the bank of Ireland do the credit card for Post Office and the login screens appear very similar, yet I have no problem using firefox for my Bank of Ireland online banking. Tom Corcoran, Andover
REPLACING MUSIC (CONT'D) Getting a TV known to be stolen is not entirely analogous to downloading music illegally (Dave Stewart, Letters, August 30). Lumping the two together used to be a common argument by the Federation Against Copyright Theft. However, digital music costs nothing to reproduce so the seller loses no stock, only hypothetical sales. Darrell Whitehead, Wirral
I just would like to share a frustration that I'm sure several internet and music lovers go through every day. I never bought an MP3 in my life but now that I'm working and have money I decided to give it a try and installed iTunes in my computer since I wanted to buy an MP3 song and copy it to my player (not an ipod). Everything went smoothly and it was easy to find the song and pay using PayPal. Then I copied it to my MP3 player and was very surprised to find out that it doesn't play since it's in a weird m4p format... Conclusion of the story? I Googled the song and downloaded the MP3 for free and 'illegally' from someone's website... So much for DRM... Tiago Alves, San Francisco
CARD READERS CONT'D Surely the underlying point about computer-based credit card readers and other "security measures" is that they have little to do with customer protection and far more to do with banks' and credit card companies' profits? The introduction of chip-and-pin technology was accompanied by drastic changes to banking conditions which transferred risk for fraudulent transactions from banks to retailers; similarly, forcing ever more complex security measures onto consumers is a strategy to prevent financial companies having to take responsibility for fraud. Banks have consistently refused to accept that their own security can be breached and routinely blame customers even when their own equipment (such as ATMs) malfunctions; the more hoops customers have to jump through to get access to their own money, the easier it is for banks and card issuers to blame them if something goes wrong. Don Keller, London
I completely agree with Anne Wollenberg (Technobile 30/08/2007) over her dislike/distrust of additional security hardware for banking. Surely the plan was to make online banking more secure, WITHOUT making the process more difficult? Providing millions of customers with additional hardware strikes me as being somewhat counter-productive. With mobile phones, iPods, wallets, keys etc. etc. already weighing us down - do we really need yet another device to literally stretch our pockets? What happens if you misplace the card reader? Suddenly you have no access to your money. And what if you've been daft enough to write down your PIN and your whole bag or jacket is stolen? Now in possession of the reader, card and PIN, the thief has even easier access to your money. As highlighted in your article, sleeve readers will need a substantial amount of support, whether it is replacing a damaged device or a dead battery. Not only is this more hassle than it is worth, the negative impact on the environment is unquestionable. When and if these are rolled out, we're presumably going to be sent multiple units - one for every bank or card account. Perhaps worst of all, every would-be fraudster/hacker will receive lots of new 'toys' to experiment with. Surely what we need is something simpler but more secure than the current methods of authentication? Jonathan Craymer, Peterborough
NDIYO "...Lots of companies had tried, and largely failed, to make successful thin clients - computers without hard disks that would get their operating systems and their programs from a server. But even the smallest of these was bulky and expensive: they all looked like small computers..." I'm afraid, the above isn't quite true. Product Line: http://www.sun.com/software/index.jsp?cat=Desktop&tab=3&subcat=Sun%20Ray%20Clients Technical specs: http://www.sun.com/sunray/sunray2/specs.xml Size: Width: 28 mm (1.09 in.) Depth: 122 mm (4.80 in.) Height: 205 mm (8.07 in.) Weight: 0.37 kg (0.82 lb.) Interesting Wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray Kwok Ng, Fleet
QUIET THE PRIUS Hi - I have a 2005 Prius and suffered beeper irritation, below is method to disable it, Join the club. Seatbelt Beep On/Off: 1. Power on the car to IG-ON or READY. IG-ON will do for this purpose. 2. Using the Trip/ODO button, set the Trip/ODO display to ODO (not Trip A or Trip 3. Power off the car. 4. Now power the car to READY (brake on). This is required so that step 6 works correctly. 5. Within 6 seconds of powering on, press and hold the Trip/ODO button for 10 seconds or more. 6. WHILE STILL HOLDING ODO *after* the 10 seconds, buckle then unbuckle the appropriate seatbelt while continuing to depress the Trip/ODO button. Now release the Trip/ODO button. 7. If the last step was successful, "b on" or "b off" should be displayed in the location where the Trip Odometer or Odometer is normally displayed. "b on" is beep on, and "b off" is beep off. 8. Press Trip/ODO to toggle the mode. 9. Now power the car off to exit the toggle mode. 10. Power the car on to READY and confirm the seatbelt beep status. The beep should not be audible if "b off" was selected, and should be audible if "b on" was selected.. Mike Dolby (no post town given)
