| Water tank hopes spring a leak
The Jim's Water Tanks debacle, stranding about 5500 Queenslanders sweating on rainwater tank deposits between $300 and $500 paid as far back as April, has unravelled even further. After a nine-month wait for the first batch of the much-vaunted, half-moon rainwater tanks to arrive from China, the Ipswich plastics experts enlisted to assemble the 88 tanks away from public view have abandoned the task after concerns about poor-quality products. Staff at Plastic Mend have spent the past four days struggling to assemble only about 15 tanks – described by Jim's Water Tanks as akin to a Ferrari – as they wrestled with large gaps in joins that didn't fit. Echoing concerns from tank suppliers about poor-quality, Chinese-made products, Plastic Mend owner Mark Kelly yesterday said the materials were so bad his three-person team could not weld some parts together.
Gadgets Warranty Report Pegs Xbox 360 Failure Rates at 16 Percent
Majority of all Xbox 360 failures are from Red Ring of Death The vulnerability of the Xbox 360 to a hardware failure known as the Red Ring of Death is a well publicized matter. Last summer, amidst a flurry of reports from Xbox 360 owners, DailyTech exposed retailers' estimates that up to 33 percent of Xbox 360 consoles experience hardware failures within the first year of ownership. Electronics and appliances warranty company SquareTrade now claims that it found a 16.4 percent normal-use failure rate on the Xbox 360. The figure, if true, shows that Microsoft has steadily improved the reliability of its console considerably – though still not up to the level of general acceptability. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates expressed earlier this year his aim for the Xbox 360 to be the most reliable console on the market.
Ways to wean travellers off the water bottle
High on the slopes of India's Kangra Valley, Dharamsala is a spiritual, new-agey kind of place that attracts tourists as much for its mountain scenery as its laid-back Tibetan vibe. So when I crested a hill just outside of town nine years ago, what I found shocked me out of my meditative state and seared itself into my conscience. Thousands upon thousands of empty plastic water bottles spilled down the slope. This was the town's solution to a largely tourism-generated problem. Don't drink the water—it's a mantra we live by when visiting regions with unsafe water systems. But drinking bottled water instead isn't a perfect solution. Recycling doesn't exist in many of these countries, and those empties are a mark you leave on the local environment. Of course, everyone wants to avoid water-borne illnesses, which range from diarrhea to hepatitis A to typhoid fever.
Consumers lose out on generic-drug savings
Intense competition among generic drug makers has been a boon for pharmacies, but consumers aren't reaping the gains, the federal Competition Bureau said Monday. The marketing of generic drugs needs to be changed, the bureau said in a report, so individuals – along with the governments and insurance companies that pick up the cost of many drugs – can glean the benefits of lower drug prices. "Competition stops at the pharmacy level and does not accrue to the end payer," Competition Bureau commissioner Sheridan Scott said in a speech to the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto Monday after the study was released. With 15 generic drug makers now selling into the Canadian market, competition is more intense than ever, Ms. Scott said. In 2005, 43 per cent of drugs dispensed in retail pharmacies in Canada were generics – the copycat drugs that can be sold only after patents expire on brand-name products.
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