I have an XPS M1330, indeed, I am typing on it at this very minute, and it's of a similar design so it looks like the thin and lovely design ethic is trickling down the Dell range.

Matthew Walton@9: I agree with this completely. I also add this: what on God's green Earth is so important that you have to have a phone stuck to your ear while driving? I have the simplest handsfree system in the world, a Kreusel magnetic stud stuck to my dashboard with a metal strip stuck on the back of my phone. My phone, like most modern phones, has a loudspeaker function. Where is the excuse? The answer is that many people are just plain ignorant and stupid, so stupid that we have to legislate not to talk about what was on TV last night while handling half a ton of steel and plastic at 50mph, and so ignorant that they continue to ignore the law as if they're exempt. These people deserve to die. What is a crime that they end up taking innocent people with them. The people who text while driving scare me even more.

I think AT&T and O2 in the UK got burnt by the cost of ownership. O2 knocked £100 off the price of their existing stock and they have been leaping off the shelves. It would be interesting to see how many buyers have actually signed up to the £35 per month tariff as well - there are quite a few not on O2 in this office, for example.
I assume that this is the phone providers being practical rather than Apple accepting that their model was wrong, as of course, Steve is never wrong.

Meyer@19: That's complete nonsense. Someone who codes by hand produces the same code as Dreamweaver as they're using the same language. Whichever way you do it the cycle is the same: code, test, release. If it doesn't work on a particular browser then it should be corrected until it does - the newspaper's QA department obviously wasn't doing their job.

Jeff@14: You might be able to prototype a site quicker using Dreamweaver et al for a static site but it's not simple to use when dealing with dynamic data. In addition, what is called 'the semantic web' advocates the separation of appearance from content, with the content controlled by simple HTML such as lists and paragraphs and the appearance by CSS. Dreamweaver is pretty good these days but it hasn't really got a handle on inserting content so the last mile almost invariably gets done by hand.

@3:

That's interesting, as Mac hardware hasn't been made in-house for years. Designed, yes, procured, certainly but all the internals are off the shelf products, mostly from Taiwan. OS X for Intel will run on many PCs because their makers obtain their hardware from the same places. For that matter, OS X is roughly 90% open source, although it's the 10% that makes it OS X. So to say the software and hardware is made by the same people sounds good for advertising, but it technically ain't right.

Should this all be on a blog on StumbleUpon?

far too long name@6:

That was the obvious answer I thought of. The protocol probably isn't much more than a key pair comparison, but really the answer is to remove the 'protection' completely. This is the second time that this has happened in less than a year now: surely someone is going to get the clue?

I know someone who worked on 'Starship Titanic' and the story was much the same. Getting DNA to deliver his books on time was a feat that required management, cajoling and threats: to get him to work in an environment where requirements changed on the fly was nothing short of a miracle. I think 'Titanic' was finally released about four years behind schedule.

Random John: I would guess that the MO is to intercept search results for particular terms: a lot of people won't refer to an article once they have read it - I know I don't, particularly if it's fallen off the front page of a blog - and will google for a phrase that relates to the item. If someone could intercept those search terms by copying the articles they could potentially earn some ad revenue from those articles. This what half of the Stumbleupon network consists of.

WH Smith have more or less abandoned the honour box system, primarily at railway stations, because it was so heavily abused, with people paying for papers with Euro and other European coins, buttons and other small round things.

Both the Manchester Metrolink and Newcastle Metro fall into the 'honour based ticketing' category, with open stations and machine based ticketing. Both suffer from a fair amount of abuse but both also hefty 'standard fares' of £80. On the branch of the Metrolink that I use, the ticket inspectors change their tactics regularily, and used to wait at an isolated station on the line (originally used just for changing lines, and only having had entrances and exits added in recent years) and throw people without tickets off the train for a long walk into the city centre. A lot of people still take the risk.

Amazon UK should have a boxed set for not a lot - I think it cost me £19 three or four years ago. They are wonderful ensemble pieces between Alistair Sim, Margaret Rutherford and Joyce Grenfell among others, and the girls capture the spirit of Searle's illustration perfectly. Also go and find his male equivalent of the St Trinians girls, Nigel Molesworth, here: http://www.stcustards.free-online.co.uk/

I haven't seen that for about eight years, since I had 10.0 RC 1 running on a Quicksilver G4. In fact I didn't think it existed in production OS X as it is a crash dump generator similar to Dr Watson in Windows. The more usual error is the '(Application) exited unexpectedly' with options to Ignore or Relaunch and to send crash details to Apple.

I wonder how much data you could engrave in your hair? Would it be more than 320 gigabytes?

I've recently been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and have a couple of slightly more low tech blood sugar testers. They come with a map of where it's OK to take samples from and it's quite a lot of the body. I think I'll stick with fingers as I only have to do it a couple of times a week at the moment.

There is a page of old IBM anthems out there somewhere. 'Scuse me while I whip this out... http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/music/music_clips.html
'

I have the disks for one of these lying around, although I'm not sure if I still have the camera. I think I persuaded my Mum or Dad to buy the camera when they were cheap (they were maybe £10 when a decent 110 was £15). The pictures were inevitably crappy, but I wonder if that wasn't the fault of the developing system. The disks had to be sent away as most photo developers didn't have the hardware to handle them, and for the ones that did it was an automated black box process which didn't have any option for correction except the ability to put quality stickers on the finished pics.
I don't think the disk was equated with digital media: if my leaky memory serves they came out in about 1978 or '79, maybe even before, when the CD was merely a fevered dream in the minds of a few backroom boys in Apeldoorn. The driving idea was to make changing film simpler, and as far as Kodak was concerned, the 110's snap-in cartridge was Not Invented Here, so they had to do something different.
That the disks remained in production for so long is interesting: I suppose that if the cameras are still out there they had to be supported: I know that Kodak still make dwindling amounts of 8mm cine film and I seem to recall that they stopped making black and white film a few years ago, which was probably a bigger mistake.

There's a fair bit of history around the monowheel. It wasn't as dangerous as it looks, it seems, but there must have been a compelling reason why I didn't whizz along the M62 on one to work this morning...

And from the picture, apparently converts into a handy easy to transport coffin...

Always nice to find a new Ken MacLeod story but I wished they'd formatted it a bit or turned it into a PDF like the Greg Egan story.

kpkpkp@11:

Realnames was a perfectly valid idea but needed to be accepted by the browser makers at the time to work properly, and for some reason they couldn't make the inroads to be anything other than a third party plugin. Google effectively killed it because it could search on more abstract keywords than Realnames could. I *think* the rump of the operation is still administered by one of the big domain services.

One of their first big demonstrations at one of the big Internet trade shows or somesuch went a bit wrong: the CTO was demonstrating a number of names and said 'If you type in Bambi, it goes to Disney's site'. It very much didn't...

These things pop up on alibaba.com and dhgate.com all the time. Not one of the clones comes close to the functionality of the iPhone, so yes, I think part of it is the look, particularily for the far east market, where people will change their phones every few months. The inventiveness is impressive, but very few Chinese companies seem to manage to come up with something innovative.

ACB@4:

The link says that the font is unrealised, so it probably can't be done in any font format so it would be bitmaps.

I don't think that his was the first SF that I read, but it was 'Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations' that turned me onto ACC as an author and science fiction in general at about age nine. It's one of his less well known books as it tends to be regarded as non-fiction but had some excellent ruminations on the state of science and speculation in 1972, including one my favourite short pieces of his 'So You're Going to Mars?'. It's rather sad that he didn't manage to see man reach the red planet but I don't think I'm going to see that in my lifetime.

Interestingly the dollar has been worth about half a pound for most of the twentieth century. A 'dollar' was slang for the pre-decimal ten shilling note because it was worth a dollar in the Gold Standard. Ten shillings became 50p in 1971. I can't remember if the pound is strong or if the dollar is weak at the moment - the pound is at a low against the Euro, but still around $2.

NEED

I knew buying the black DS would pay off eventually. It will look ace next to my Legacy Series controller.

Andrew Keen is a charlatan. Every time he repeats his assertions about the nature of publication on the Internet he assumes that it, like paper publishing, is a one way medium, because that is the one that he is safest in, in a situation in which no-one can challenge him or his arguments. As soon as he finds himself in a situation where someone can question him, he clams up, like in this case. Unfortunately, some people, particularily in the old fashioned one-way press, still regards him as relevant because he confirms the things that they believe. The Independent has given him a platform in which he sees every incident like Wikipedia's squabbles as proof that Teh Internets Am Bad. And funnily enough, he doesn't allow discussion of his articles on the online version. Funny that.

What's even more fun is that he's raised money on the future earnings of Northern Songs (the publishers of the Beatles' music) but now they're mortgaged off for another 20 years so he can't raise money on them again. Bowie did the same, but I think he's been a bit more circumspect.

Hmm, spot the camera conscious one...

My Chilean friend, who has spent the last month here, got mildly obsessed by the Indian music video stations on Sky. Every song was almost the same. You also realise after a while that all the actors look the same, either that or there really is a very small pool of them in Bollywood.

Something I noticed in Taiwan when I visited was that the Taiwanese certainly like their nature to be well managed: I went to places like Yangminshan, the mountain in the middle of Taipei, which is essentially a country park, Dongshang River Park, which is a beautifully manicured riverside in Ilan County, and a 'flower park' whose name I didn't get as it was all in Mandarin, which was several acres of well attended fields of different flowers.
Similarly I came across a website about climbing in Hong Kong, which has some incredible cliffs and mountains, but which are hardly visited by the Chinese, who would apparently prefer to get the tram or escalator up the Peak.

In the UK, there are no restrictions on where you can be buried and indeed how as long you have permission from the landowner. Even in the US I think it's a sin of omission rather than commission.

Actually, it does exist, but you need a Reuters, AP, PRPresswire or similar feed to use it, and of course they cost money. I have been toying with a similar idea for years but of course the fun bit would be getting the companies to use it. I suppose if it could be seen to be useful you could get them to use it, but then you'd have the joy of trying to make an honest bean out of it without stepping on Reuters or AP's toes.

I was in Orange County about ten years ago, just as California (or was it Orange itself, I can't remember) introduced its no smoking in public places law. There were various exemptions at the time, including one for 'cigar bars'. Almost all the bars in Irvine applied to become a cigar bar.

There's one of these on Bethnal Green Road at the junction with Rivington Street that has been there since the mid-90s. What is interesting (well, sort of) is that it replaced a Victorian underground loo of the same type that was sold off on Commercial St (opposite Spitalfields) and is now a nightclub, and on Whitechapel High Street, which is now an Indian cafe, whose surface decor looks like a larger version of the autoloo. They are horrible things though, and have a life of about 10 years maximum before they become unusable through wear and tear. They've all been there for about 12 years now.

'So we uploaded 4Tb of data to S3' Holy shamoly, how long would that take and how much would it cost? I'm worried about moving 100Gb of data about at the moment...

You can't die of 'natural causes' any more. My father pretty much died of complications arising from dementia, basically 'old age' in earlier times, but the cause of death given was a chest infection relating to a build up of fibres in his lungs. He had worked in the textile business all his life and it was no surprise that he had fibres in his lungs, but he had never had problems arising from it.

These maps are on display in Bishopsgate Library, or were at the turn of the century, it's probably all plasma screens and DVD hire now, and books are a distant memory. Cory, you will be rather pleased to see that the Brick Lane area is coloured black for the highest rates of poverty, mortality and crime. There are some great contemporary essays about the area here: http://www.eastlondonhistory.com/

Has Jeffrey Vallance put in a bid? Or is he selling them?

I'm sure something like that happened in the UK a few years ago: a disused railway bridge over a road was removed overnight and made the news. However it then transpired that the work had been carried out by National Rail who had just forgotten to tell anyone. I can't find the story now though, so maybe I just dreamt it.

Hmm, I'm getting *far* too cynical. When somewhere goes on fire after getting heritage status I can't help thinking that someone is going to benefit from the redevelopment *coughCamden Marketcough*. Still, it's a great shame, and sounds like a great place to be, and I hope it can be again.

I can tell that something is broken as I can see a bit of an ad...

That's OK, we'll just stop coming over and buying things with your comical little dol-lar. You know, things like oil, gold, diamonds...

I'd throw in TG24 by Throbbing Gristle, which I do own, and have listened to... most of... There was also a longer version, TG+ which had another 10 performances, so 35 thats CDs of semi-listenable noise in all. My copy was only £200...

China is a ripe market for foreign supermarkets. UK giant Tesco have a considerable presence there, as do French hypermarketeers Carrefour. Somewhat incongrously the biggest chain of pharmacies in south-east Asia and indeed the the world is Hong Kong based Watson's, owned by Hutchison Wampoa and branded in English in the most non-English areas of the world.

I'll see you and raise you 'The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme' and 'Hot Doggie' by Colourbox, which both have beautifully graunchy 8-bit sampled guitar solos in them, although I don't think the Colourbox boys ever made rock faces with a keytar.

It shouldn't be too hard to put an M-Audio Oxygen or similar mini keyboard into a controller module with a neck and the right holes in the back. Hmmm, I feel another crazy idea coming on...

The i-pot needs to be a little more specific with it's information: 'grandmother is trying to boil an egg in me' or 'grandmother is using me to water her houseplants'.

Oh, and surely there's a world of difference between risotto and congee. The congee that I have eaten in Hong Kong is basically watery rice, about as far from risotto as it's possible to get.

jeffjonez@7: one could easily achieve that googly eye effect with a table tennis ball and a magic marker. Unfortunately I don't live in East Texas so I can't patent that and use it as a business plan.

BBC Radio 2 did a series last year about tribute acts, with one episode about the most enduring Beatles tribute band, the Bootleg Beatles, who have been playing for 25 years and play songs that the Beatles never played live. They have a Paul McCartney lookalike, or at least would be lookalike if Paul still looked like he did in 1970, but older. The series was splendidly called 'Earth, Wind for Hire' and can be found here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/musicclub/doc_earthwindehire.shtml

Do bands trademark their names? That's the issue here. In the UK we have the act of 'passing off', which basically involves the use of a similar name in a similar business, under which criteria (and it would be one for the courts) young Ms Murphy probably wouldn't get her way, and is rather silly to assume that she would against an icon of modern music. For that matter, if she became more popular, her name would almost always be linked with John. It's like calling your band the Beetles, or as was the case in early 80s New Zealand, the Stones, which is a great name for a band but unusable because of a certain bunch of permatouring geriatrics. If I were her I'd walk away and think of a good name on the offchance that she actually gets successful.

They get the beans from the prefab shop that's sitting in pieces on the freighter that's waiting to dock in Havana as soon as Fidel dies...

Microsoft buying Danger makes perfect sense. After all, it's a stagnant technology, bound to one provider, that had its brief moment in the sun a couple of years ago. It's an excellent addition to Microsoft's innovation portfolio.

The BBC were reporting a woman 'acting suspiciously' on Sunday when the incident occurred. At the time I wondered how difficult it was to get onto or off an oil rig without the company knowing about it (it's very difficult unless you're an experienced frogman who can climb slime encrusted steel, or James Bond). That it's been brought about by a member of staff having a panic attack is a ridiculous overreaction by a lot of people who should know better. Once upon a time there used to be a thing called disaster management, which could cover anything from a sporting event being rained off to a skyscraper catching fire. Now we just shit ourselves and run around screaming about terrorism. Another victory in the War on Terrorism. By the terrorists.

My Mum had a Spong meat mincer when I was a kid. From those pictures, it was almost identical, except silver. It probably *was* the same thing except for the mincing plates. (Yes kids, people used to mince their own meat once upon a time instead buying hamburger from the supermarket. By hand. Minced lamb made a great shepherds' pie. Try and find that on the meat counter.)

As well as the wine rack, they also do a rack mounted fridge. Just the thing for those all-nighters in the machine room.

He who controls the spice, controls the universe.

OK, OK, I'm going.

For some reason this has made me think of the Scottish sweet macaroon, the traditional recipe for which includes potato.

wurp@7:

As much as I like the idea of FreeRunner I think practicality is going to get in its way and it's going to end up being a very niche product that will be supported by no phone provider, which is more of an issue than you might think. Irrespective of how open it is, that will be compromised in some way as soon as a SIM is put in it. I'd love to be proved wrong but I'm not holding my breath.

In the interest of balance there should be a committee for torture.

Kraftwerk use a stylophone on 'Pocket Calculator'. There is a video of the 1981 tour floating about (almost certainly on YouTube but it's blocked here) where they play the tune on handheld instruments while standing at the front of the stage, with Wolfgang Flur tapping out a rhythm part on one. For all their hi-tech (like Stevie Wonder, they used to buy two of every keyboard on the market), much of Kraftwerk's output was made on minimal hardware, particularly 'toys' like the Stylophone, Optigan and Speak and Spell.

I bought a new Stylophone at HMV in Manchester a few months ago. They had them at the checkout, like geek candy.

You can buy tokens, usually from a charity, which are the same size as pound coins and work just as well in a trolley. Personally I use an Isle of Man pound coin, which isn't legal tender on the mainland. One euro coins will also work in most trolleys.

Then again, as one of my friends did far too often, you can tip the trolley into the back of your van, take it home, and use heavy cutting equipment to extract the pound. I think that's the epitome of unreasonable effort for low returns.

Aw, you shouldn't knock the dollaro so hard Cory, it hasn't collapsed *looks at watch, checks news* yet.

The XPS M1330 is a 13.3" laptop, not a 15" (Dealnews got this wrong too). $900 isn't a bad deal although it's part of the range that has allegedly delivered shocks to owners due to bad power supplies and aluminium casings.

That's the machine that appeared just days before the Macbook Air did, very thin and the same sort of size screen, the expected peripherals, yet half the price.

Chikurt@11:

'Suddenly' started boiling? Any Englishman knows that a vegetable is nothing until it has had several shades of Jebus boiled out of it, and that all cooked vegetables should be a uniform grey in colour, especially carrots.

"I don't have a vagina of my own..."

Well Joel, if you did something about your hair and left the house occasionally, you never know what might happen.

That looks like Kraftwerk in more ways than one. It would be cool if the owner had hooked up all the controllers and knobs to sound makers.

Charlie: it's interesting that you find your Macbook heavy. I have a black Macbook that has spent much of the last year and a half on my shoulder in various places and I must have become used to it as I hardly notice it any more. Prior to that I had a 12" PB, and, as lovely a machine as it was, it was noticeably heavier. And don't get me started on the various PCs that have made walk with a leftwards slant.
Light is great but smaller but fully functional would be miles better. Both, well, I would have been at the Apple Store yesterday.

It's easy: wear jeans you bought from Target with the suit jacket you bought for the last wedding you went to, get a newspaper column in which you describe driving very fast, very expensive cars in embarrassingly near-sexual terms, make snarky comments about RVs and sensibly priced cars and foolishly publish your bank details in said common assuming no-one can get into your account.

Guruscotty@17: There's no 'if' about it. It's a religion invented by a science fiction writer.

This has been much the opinion that I've seen across the web. It's too big to be a sub-notebook and it's too expensive to compete with the other 13.3" notebooks out there, and definitely not with the Eee and its soon to arrive clones.
It's also correct that it's more like an appliance than a full strength laptop. I can see a domestic vision forming here with the Time Capsule at the centre of a home media hub to which machines connect wirelessly as they join the network, which means that the relatively small disk isn't so important and the lack of peripheral support is mitigated by networked drives (then again, the only applications I've installed from disk in recent years have been music based).
So yes, it will sell, and there probably is some kind of vision, but it's not for me, and I think a lot of other long term Apple users look at it in that way, possibly the same ones that said the same thing about the iPhone. That it might extend Apple's footprint in the same way as the iPhone does remains to be seen but it's in that market, rather than the power users, where it wil be popular.

mechfish@2: as the joke goes: how long does it take to tune a banjo? No-one knows.

I was thinking that this guitar would be a boon to Sonic Youth and their shaggy ilk, but if you actually look at their guitar boxes on stage, and more to the point see the things that are done to them, well, you wouldn't. Damn thing probably costs as much as their touring set-up altogether.

I'm trying to remember what that cafe was before it was called Top Nosh. I'm fairly certain it was an Italian cafe dating from the 50s that became a kebab house maybe 15 years ago when the Italian owner retired. Like the Chop House it dates back to when Clerkenwell was the city's lunch box. I just came across a splendid 'hidden' tour on Adrian Maddox's Classic Cafe's website that uses the once splendid No. 8 bus as a mode of transport. It's not been the same since the Routemasters were withdrawn. http://www.classiccafes.co.uk/Tour2full.html

The sub-notebook is rather common in the far east, and I have never been able to work out why so few of these lovely little machines that can be seen in shop windows in Nathan Road in Hong Kong never make it to the west. Sony had their Crusoe based PCG-C1F back when the first Vaios appeared in 1999 but very few companies have matched it in the west, including Sony themselves. The Eee, and the machines that appear to be shortly following it over here, have been made possible by the cheapness of components (4Gb flash disk not enough? Add another 4Gb on a USB stick for £30!) and an OS that is mature enough match what Windows can do butu that isn't tied up with OEM costs and licensing. It seems that the machines being promised by other Taiwanese companies are trying to find their own USPs which can only be good for competition, and a nice aluminium or manganese alloy subnotebook can't be that far away.

The Life of Bryan@12:

Yes indeed, Postscript isn't just a printing language, it's also a display language. NeXT's OpenStep GUI was written in it, was licensed by Sun and subsequently appeared in their Common Desktop Environment. It's also part of OS X, although the display engine has moved away from it since 10.0 and recent versions haven't been OpenStep compliant. I believe its main function is now in some printing engines and the native PDF support.

I've gone with Fon to share my connection. The la Fonera router limits the connection speed to 512k, can be configured to allow 15 free minutes in return for an advert, and allows a bit of optional profit sharing if someone buys a pass from your AP. Fon has done a deal with BT where members can use their Openzone service for free (actually, this might just be for BT ADSL customers - I haven't checked it), as well as free connection to other Fon hotspots. The downside is that I live in a residential area and the range of the router isn't brilliant, even with the extender, and my village isn't exactly a hotbed of technology. Looking on their maps confirms that this is the case for much of Leeds, and I presume many other cities in the UK and elsewhere that have a large suburban population. Still, as 'open' wi-fi goes, it's a good compromise between truly open and locked down.

TFA does say that it is the City Council that has decided that it's counter to EU law, not the EU. Extrapolating from the article, it would appear that the intention was to extend the city's service out of public buildings like libraries and museums, which is probably technically illegal in that the council can provide free wi-fi on its premises in the same way as any other organisation, but providing it in public creates competition with telecom providers. The obvious workaround would be to create a partnership with Eircom or somesuch and then mount transmitters and repeaters on municipal street furniture. In addition the Republic does have to be rather careful where the EU is concerned as it's one of the countries that owes a lot of its economic success in recent years to the EU.

Chandler seems to have been going for years. It was originally envisioned as a complimentary calendaring system for Evolution. It's nice that it's advancing but it must have been going for about four years now (just read the link in #1 - SIX years) and to go that far without a 1.0 is rather worrying. iCal and Google Calendar have risen and matured in that time, and while there isn't a good personal and private server that will handle the .ics format in a useful way (Chandler imports it rather than serves it by the looks of it) and I'm happy to give it a try, I seem to have settled on Lightning for Thunderbird for my what-day-is-it-and-where-should-I-be needs and would like to see a calendar server that supported that.

The expresses travel at 22mph? That's madness, the human body couldn't stand the stresses of such a speed!

And the locals stopping for 10 seconds... most metro systems need at least 30 seconds at a stop. There would be hundreds of incidents of lost bags, hats, shoes and limbs.

Hmmm... interesting that people have gone for the 'atheists in foxholes' line. Remember that it's a quote, and also that it is patently untrue. I was trying to make the point that extreme situations often require or lead to exceptional responses. From personal experience I can also say 'there are no vegetarians in services on the A1 in Northumberland at 3am in the morning when they have run out of cheese sandwiches' but that doesn't roll off the tongue as well'.

There is a fish and chip shop in central Edinburgh that will deep fry anything if you ask them. It's on Newington Road and has a rotating selection of chocolate on the menu. At this time of year, the Creme Egg is the speciality. The effect when biting into one is reportedly like eating sugary lava.

It's amazing what happens when you search for things. It just reminded me that there is a local deep fried speciality in South and West Yorkshire. Chip shops take cooked potato (it might be left over chips), shape it into rounds, optionally add a slice of fish, batter it and deep fry it. They are called scallops, although they're nothing like the shellfish. Down on the south coast they take a handful of mushy peas, batter them, and deep fry them as a pea fritter. I still don't know how we missed that.

spocksbrain@2:

Exactly so. I've been vegetarian for 20+ years but in a disaster situation I would have no issue with eating what is available. Vegetarianism is, for the majority of people, a conscious choice. Being caught in a major disaster isn't. As there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no vegans in tsunamis.

Safeway in the UK used the name Zyklon for their own brand laundry and dishwashing products for a while. Presumably someone pointed it out and they renamed them Cyclon.

Why would anyone want to save an airline? It's a business. You owe it nothing, and, as this incident shows, it owes you nothing either. If it ran an essential service that wouldn't be replaced by another, then lobby to keep that service. If they treat you like a potential troublemaker, then take your business somewhere else. Simple.

I'm not sure if audiophilia is the issue: audiophiles don't listen to pop music as it doesn't show off the dynamic range of their giant speakers in their underground listening room.
The aim of pop music is to be heard and responded to quickly, to be, as Paul Morley once wrote, 'right for the time and a little bit after', so a good tune has to have a hook or two and has to stand out and be heard over the environment, whether this is a club, a car, or Glub forbid, out of a phone speaker on the back of a bus. Everything ends up loud and bright. It had to stand out on a Dansette or on the new radiograms in the 60s and 70s, on cheap stereo systems in the 80s and now on computer speakers, the previously mentioned mobile phones and a variety of other (physically) compressed digital media either streamed over networks or broadcast over radio. This is, however, how it's always been. Go and have a look for instruments used for recording in the early part of the 20th century: there are intriguing chimera such as violins with amplifying horns attached for the purpose of recording to 78rpm acetates: loudness was needed even then.
Audiophiles listen to silence. They can keep throwing their money at accessories that allow them to attain their ultimate goal. In the meantime, everyone else will dance to the radio.

This has been around for a long time - I bought it maybe six or seven years ago. It's a lovely thing for all that because of the hyperrealness of the printing processes. There's a similar Taschen book that I found a couple of years later for a pound in a remaindered bookshop, but, oddly enough for Taschen, there isn't so much Cock.

Why is there always one person in every discussion about the OLPC who doesn't get it? Not everyone in the developing world is starving, and those who are do indeed have bigger problems than connecting to the Internet. However, there are plenty of people who have that food and infrastructure problem solved. Read up on the locations of the first two deployments, Uruguay and Nigeria. Both have relatively strong economies and good infrastructures, and can afford to hand out OLPCs to their kids. It's all about bootstrapping the next stage of development and getting the next generation out of a local mindset and into a global one. The project probably should consider the USA as a deserving nation. The next generation might actually learn something about the rest of the world.

Would there be a lot of use for an Oz/Kiwi plug at the EBU? Perhaps not (actually I would have thought that the Antipodes would be 240v/square three pin being British colonies and all - then again the UK only adopted that in the 60s).
I'm also guessing that all the connectors with earth pins, such as the UK socket, would be installed 'upside down' as there's a probably an earth rail on the bottom of the power strips.

coop & noen:

What would be worse would be if they were gathering in malls listening to music using the hub. Anarchy would be quite literally around the corner.

Converters are generally set top boxes although there are a couple of small inline devices around that sit between the antenna and analog socket or the antenna and a SCART socket. In the UK STBs can be had for £20/$40US but they tend to be supported by a broadcaster (Setanta Sport at the moment) and ones with expansion cards for additional paid-for options start at £40/$80US. I'm not sure if the US is adopting a similar system to the UK but I wouldn't be surprised if similar boxes and incentives became available if the drive is on.

zagabog@7:

I'm glad someone mentioned the Northampton Lighthouse (the joke being that Northampton is about as far inland as it's possible to be in Great Britain). I lived in Milton Keynes in the mid 90s and would happily point out the lighthouse to people when going to Northampton. I didn't know that it had only been built in 1982 though.

I started to set up a PowerPC Mac mini as a media server over Christmas by installing Debian and mounting an external drive containing a lot of video and most of my music. I installed Firefly media server for my music needs (I have OS X desktops and might as well keep using iTunes until Songbird gets up to speed) and explored using VLC as a video streamer. "What this puppy needs", I said, "is a nice little multi-format IPTV box that I can run over wifi, or, more likely, over Ethernet over Power so I can stream TV around the house." And here is that puppy, less than a week later. What a time it is to be alive.

I took a detour to see the Wheel on the way home from Edinburgh a couple of years ago, and it's actually more astounding in the steel than it looks in pictures. It's huge. What makes it more impressive for me is that it is that rare thing, a capital project that solves a specific problem in a unique way. These are remarkably rare in the UK these days - there even seems to be a factory that builds arced suspension bridges for crossing canals that have become residential areas. One can only hope that it will still be working in a hundred years time like the Anderton boat lift is, as it will be a reminder that we could still occasionally create engineering marvels in a time when it seemed that the art was moribund.

There would appear to be a simple solution to this in the first instance - get VirtualBox or VMWare Server and clone his Windows installation into it. I'm not sure whether he could run his new screen through it but it would separate his Netflix files and his Amazon files.

Of course it would also be a good idea to write to Netflix and/or Microsoft and explain that their DRM systems are destructive and that they would be held responsible for the replacement of any third party media made unplayable by this modification. If you are going to have a global DRM system it has to work globally.

And indeed, the author could stop using DRM-crippled services. If everyone did that instead of accepting it and seeing it as a problem 'Hollywood' would see its revenues fall and realise that they can't abuse their customers. Personally, with the exception of DVDs, which I play on a multi-region machine anyway, I go for this.

I remember wandering into Cyberia, where I worked at the time, and seeing a bunch of suits clustered around one the PCs looking at a Wired page in its early yellow form. At the top was a long, thin graphic with a Ford logo at one end. Advertising had come to the web. Did Wired invent the banner ad?

Oh, our government believes in the War on Terror too. Our semi-visible Prime Minister Gordon Brown materialised to blame Benazir Bhutto's assassination on 'terrorists' as if it was the same group of people fighting the same war the world over. In public at least, the war must continue, with the privations of war imposed upon the public and unpopular policies introduced in its name.

We're at a stage at the moment where we have quite got enough bandwidth. Digital broadcasting is also at fault here: both TV and radio are broadcast at remarkably high compression rates. Radio 4 as a speech station is broadcast at 80kb: the commercial station Oneword is 64kb. Music stations are encoded at 128kb, which is the maximum bitrate currently available on the network (the original intention was for 192kb or 256kb but economics prevailed as usual.

Similarily the quality of many DVDs and now indeed HD and Bluray discs is just plain bad. It could well be that the things that I buy, particularly old British comedy series, are either badly transposed to digital or compressed heavily to fit on DVDs but it's not reassuring to put a commercial DVD in a decent player and see blocks flicker across the screen. I saw a report of the HD version of 'Casino Royale' on Bluray which said that the print (or whatever you call it) looked garishly bright and artificial on a 40 inch LCD screen and wasn't a good advertisement for the format at all.

We accept this: MP3s are convenient because we can carry our music collections around in our pockets, which is fine, but we then start listening to the MP3s on our nice stereo systems (guilty as charged there - I want a hifi separate with a big hard disk that will play FLAC, and one of my part time jobs this year is to re-digitise all of my CDs) and it becomes the norm, so music starts to be recorded so that it stands out or 'sounds punchy' at 128kb like records in the 60s were made to sound good on Dansette record players or in the 80s sprawled sonically to impress the emerging CD market.

One of the better results of the growth of the DVD format has been the way in which it makes available archive material that would have been otherwise left in libraries, however, limitations in processing power mean that the transcription process has to be very meticulous or the resulting DVDs will look bad. This won't go away with Bluray/HD. Similarly if IPTV picks up, we will spend a few years watching degraded video because there isn't the bandwidth to distribute it: the producers' response would be to simplify sets and the compression methods to simplify motion.

Hopefully Moore's Law does still apply and the bandwidth and processing power will become available to improve fidelity but I think the point I'm trying to get to here is that we adapt personally and culturally to our inputs and that we respond to the limitations by working around them, so hopefully dynamics will come back again. It was interesting that the article singled out the Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen LPs: they are both particularily loud LPs, Lily's to the point of distortion in some places. I'm glad I'm not a young person any more, I don't have to listen to them unless they're on the radio.

I think it's the same the world over. Here in the UK staff at PCWorld or Currys or Comet are generally just sales staff. Some have an interest in particular fields such as home theatre or cameras but most are more interested in selling you the three year extended warranty as that's where they get the commission. Next year they might be selling shoes or mobile phones. Maplin, who essentially replaced Radio Shack, are a little better as they employ a few enthusiasts or people who have been trained in their parts side, but on the whole it's better to be prepared and do your homework before looking as they all have quotas as well and would rather send you with that Packard Bell laptop with the three year warranty rather than a Mac Mini that's going cheap in the end of line corner.

Ah, back to the days of the high frontier... the first browser I used was Mosaic 0.3, and it was only maybe three or four months later that Netscape 0.9 appeared. It revolutionised the nascent web industry with tables with border=0 so you could position things instead of just present data, and a default white background instead of grey.

It was the first real case of software being developed in the wild I think: every new release was jumped upon and poked and prodded for new HTML tricks and hacks. One I remember from quite early on was the multiple BODY hack, in which multiple body tags with different backgrounds could give a strobing or primitive animation effect. That was in 1.1 I think, and even the BBC used it for their homepage for a while. It was fixed in 1.2.

The about: pages were abused horribly inside Netscape. Regular staff had homepages linked to their handles (or in jwz's case, a new throbber too) but there were so many easter eggs: the fishcam, about:mozilla (still in Firefox) and the error handling in v3 and v4, which met any unrecognised command with 'whatchew talkin' about, Willis?' (might have been only the Solaris/Linux version, but I think you could coax it out of the Mac and Windows versions somehow).

For all that, it was possible to distribute Netscape 0.9/1.x, Eudora, WinFTP, FreeAgent and HotMeTaL on two floppies. Tell that to the youth of today and they won't believe you.

Noen, English is the common language out of a couple of dozen. The same applies in India: many people have to speak three or four languages to get by in the day and often the only common written language they have is English. I'm not familiar with standards in the police and armed forces but in part it's an artifact of the British Empire, which still lies at the roots of the government's systems even 60 years after partition.

Noen@12:

English is the official first language of Pakistan, with Urdu being the commonly spoken language.

In terms of connectivity, ethernet over power is getting good writeups now, and the kit is getting cheaper. However, outside the building ADSL2 still isn't that fast so perhaps a Slingbox or something that does similar to compress the feed might be worth considering. I've been thinking about options for a while because I'm away from home a lot and want something that distribute around the house and to my flat in Manchester.

Something just occurred to me here: OK, the TSA is a government body doing something that the government thinks should be done in the absence of anything positive. But the airlines, and I assume the airports, are businesses that require your custom. As well as complaining to the TSA, complain to the airline about the way you are being treated too. The airlines have to be concerned about the overall passenger experience and as we know, businesses are more important than individuals in Bush's America.

Ah, Brick Lane market. I lived on Cheshire Street for two years, and it was a great time apart from never having a lie-in on a Sunday morning. It's amazing what you can buy there, things like boxes of Duracell batteries for a pound, and they really are Duracells. There are lockups around there that are treasure troves, rooms full of old computers rescued from city refurbishments and the like, and the people selling junk along Sclater Street and Vallance Street. The East London Line is either going to kill a lot of it or make it stronger, it's difficult to tell at the moment.

When Julian Cope plays his occasional epic solo shows, he does a part with just him and a guitar and his keyboard player playing an Omnichord. They have a very nice clavinet sort of sound and are less fragile than a clavinet and more portable than a laptop/keyboard combination.

I can remember playing with an Omnichord at a trade show when they were launched. The controller was very responsive, perhaps a little too so until you got used to it. I thought it would be a great MIDI controller but as you say, the early ones were actually just pre-Yamaha's MIDI implementation. I'm quite tempted to go and look for one now...

I had at least one Casio Databank watch. I think its capacity was about 18 *letters* or something. This was in the early 80s, maybe '81 or '82. It went the way of all Casio's resin bodied watches though with the strap snapping and the holes that held the pins in place shearing when my Dad tried to fit a new strap. It felt like the future though. It's probably still in a box in my house somewhere.

Los Altos was closed in 1998 or '99 if my Sun history serves me. Sun had a massive jitter after riding high on the dotcom boom, with the next quarter's results some ridiculous amount down, which lead them to make staff take a month's unpaid vacation in July '99 and started them off on a rationalisation track which ended with most people working away from the office apart from when necessary. The same happened in the UK: they still hold onto their main campus in Camberley although it's mostly empty when you visit these days. I guess Los Altos was finally deemed to be surplus to requirements once that everyone was working from home. I wonder when the shooting was though...

There is a Little Englander mentality in this country that is worse in the provinces than it is in London, and many people are naturally suspicious. We don't need a police state as a lot of people would dob their neighbours in without prompting if they thought they were doing something that wasn't normal.

Then again, this being Hull, the complainant probably thought that the photographer was trying to steal her soul.

Any good bar in Scotland will either have a jug of water or a brass tap on the counter solely for the use of adding water to scotch. Different waters will benefit different whiskies too: Edinburgh tap water is naturally soft and peaty (and brown on bad days - very disconcerting when you run a bath) and benefits the local blends like Baillie Nicol Jarvie or, oddly enough, Whyte and Mackay, which outsells the most popular national brand, Teachers. So definitely yes. Ice is a definite no as it will cause the oils to separate, and a bleedin' great chunk of granite will just poke you in the eye.

And Kirk had every last one of them. It's good to be the Captain.

Loving the old Yamaha synth logo there. The Chinese will knock off anything.

Noen@7:

No, you're thinking of lizards.

In the UK, the most common books in charity shops (thrift stores) used to be 'Jaws' by Peter Benchley and, for some reason 'The Music Machine', which was the book of a fairly obscure late 70s film. On the vinyl side, it was 'Frampton Comes Alive' (and somewhere in the BBC Radio 2 archives is a great documentary about that record and why it was so popular) and Leo Sayer's first album. I used to check for all of these in any charity shop I visited. I also considered buying spare copies and redistributing them to shops that were bereft.

I would have dumped it into a text reader myself and let that take the strain. I have read the Hacker Crackdown a few times and really enjoy it, but I've never read the E911 document.

There was a project a couple of years ago where someone had put the Linux source code into a text reader and was broadcasting it over the net and on radio. Ah, here it is: http://radioqualia.va.com.au/freeradiolinux/. Now *that's* boring.

Noen@10:

No, but I've just patented the idea and will be developing one and two person models for sale next Christmas. Instead of water I'm thinking of a body temperature gel.

Schmod@11:

They will attempt to recover the money by court order, which can include distraint, which means sending bailiffs to your house to collect goods to the value of the fine. It gets expensive after a while. Where council parking control schemes are involved it's often better to pay the fine and then dispute. These private deals are on shakier ground though, and can often be settled out of court. The private parking contractors in London are like rats and there's nothing so pleasing as seeing one of them get ticketed by another.

That sounds like exactly what happened to my Dad. He had something that seemed to be a stroke, but wasn't diagnosed as such just after he turned 70, and started to decline mentally. He wasn't diagnosed with dementia for another couple of years by which time it was hard to do anything, although Exelon kept him going for a few more years.

I would expect that there is hope for Pterry in that it's been caught so early on so there probably isn't too much to worry about at the moment. One of the strongest defences against dementia and Alzheimers is an active mind, so I think he'll be productive for a while yet.

When I visited Hong Kong last year I was surprised by the amount of Mao based tat on sale in the night markets of Kowloon. It was hard to tell whether it was original and imported or reproductions. There were lots of Little Red Books around though, and they were practically banned in HK until 1997.

A friend went to Guangzhou earlier this year to sort out a manufacturing deal and came back with 'Zippo' lighters with a Mao engraving that he had bought at the airport. They looked reasonably believable although they fell to bits after a couple of weeks of use.

Svein@2:

There's a lot of cause: the US can provide pressure through NAFTA (is similar legislation on the cards in Mexico, one wonders) and this week's announcement of draconian anti-copyright laws that the US believes it can apply anywhere for the protection of US intellectual property. I wouldn't be surprised if we get a similar law in the UK or across the EU very soon.

I can hear this being read in the voice of T. Herman Zweibel of the Onion (wheezy, thin, as if coming from a valve radio. Possibly built into a hat).

Does the foil lining selectively deflect the alien/government/big business transmissions? I must know.

Plus it's always a joy to see a circuit diagram that features two valves, and even more of a joy to see those valves sticking out of a jaunty het.

This was, and could still be, a regular offer in the back pages of the Guardian, presumably working on the assumption that its readers were concerned that they weren't doing enough for the environment in putting their back issues aside for recycling.
The principle is like peat, I understand. The blocks that the log maker makes are heavily compacted and provide a slow burn rather than a fast one, and as such as are well suited to powering Agas, which, of course, all Guardian readers own.

At the Hackney end of Hackney Road a few of the kebab places changed their name at around the turn of the century, and we had Millennium Fried Chicken and the Euro Kebab House complete with the 12-star flag and Euro currency logos on the signs. I never did try and see if I could buy my veggie burger with them.

There are many examples of misplaced fried chicken shops, including the mostly inexplicable Kennsy Fried Chicken here: http://badgas.co.uk/chicken/list.shtml

Portable acoustic kits aren't a new thing - I remember seeing them 20 years ago, and it's pretty impressive how much you can strip down a kit yet still get a live sound out of it. The one I saw was basically skins with something to clip them onto a riser and I thought it was electronic but the drummer assured me that it wasn't. It needed clever miking in a live situation but it worked. If I had the cash I'd have one of those kits though. I have a cheap ION kit that I use to play in parts to Logic but it's horribly unresponsive and gets painful to play after a while because of the hard pads and it would be nice to have something responsive.

Drtwist:
Maplin in the UK sell a similar one. It's proved to be remarkably useful. The caddy is a good idea but takes up a bit more desk space.

Being a pedant for a second, the plural of 'euro' is actually 'euro', so the plural of 'amero', as a lot of its potential users would speak Spanish or French, would be 'amero'.

I wonder if there's a DAB model for the European market. The Germans are into DAB in quite a big way - I had a Blaupunkt DAB radio in my car four years ago. It looks very 70s in a good way.
Those in the UK who have a hankering for something similar should look at Roberts radios. They're a venerable brand with a combination of hi-tech and classic design.

Simple answer - mobilise (with an 's'). Is there a Canadian equivalent of WriteToThem.com? There should be. This is the sort of issue that MPs *need* to be informed about, need to understand that they are selling away the right to own media for exactly the reasons that you mention above, need to know that they will be limited by the implications as much as anyone else. With a bit of luck it won't happen... until the next time.

Fortunately, they didn't file for Crab Juice.

Suzuki, Nissan and Daihatsu (and probably other Japanese motor companies) still produce tiny vans which certainly have a place in the UK market. They are usually about eleven feet long and maybe 5'6" high with sub-1000cc engine and a capacity of about a thousand pounds (around 600kg in the new money). My Dad had one for his sewing machine business and he could get a couple of industrial machines in the back, and even up to 50mph downhill with the wind behind him. I'm sure people have tried to convert them into camper vans too, but they'd be, ah, snug to say the least. You'd never see them in North America as they'd be blown off the road by the average sedan.

Ah, the Daily Mail... you may want to get one or two other sources for this story before believing it. Unfortunately I wouldn't be surprised if it was true - Fish Street Hill is one of the less, ah, productive open spaces in the City because of that silly tower in the middle, and to misquote some chap with a beard, if it ain't selling, it ain't working. I'm not sure how extensive the redevelopment would be though. Most of the buildings around the Monument are 70s brutalist banks and I can't see their view being spoiled unless they are being moved too.

Mollyesther@7:

Philomath is referred to in 'Can't Get There From Here' by REM. Hmm, the Wikipedia entry for the town doesn't mention it. Better fix that.

As a vague sidebar, I have a Nokia 770 which I got for cheap from Expansys in the UK earlier this year. There is an ebook reader called FBReader for it which has been developed for Maemo, which is the FOSS distribution system, and the combination is reasonably usable. That with an e-ink display would be good utility tool. If anyone from Nokia is reading - here's a use for the Internet Tablet.

I'm more interested in why your nickname was goo machine...

I would happily put this on my roof, as long as it could survive a British winter... I suspect we'd have to at least cover it with plastic to survive rain, snow and wind.

I'm assuming that Dr Pepper must have once been sold as a syrup or cordial. I can't imagine cracking a bottle of the fizzy stuff and zapping it in the microwave.

Coming from a cold, damp island such as Great Britain, we have similar traditions with drinks that are more related to summer days: hot Ribena (blackcurrant) is surprisingly tasty, as is hot Vimto, a north-western delicacy that is nominally grape based.

Pool's, er, been stolen.

Hey, when Sonic Youth use them, I'll use them.

@7: seconded, and I know we're not alone here. Perhaps we should start a petition.

The book world is full of this sort of thing: I'm thinking primarily of the acres of unofficial autobiographies and photobooks of current flavours of the month that are currently clogging up the gift suggestion shelves in your nearest Waterstones or Borders. On the other hand, and more relevantly, look at how Terry Pratchett manages his IP. He has kept a firm grip on the Discworld, but has authorised publications such as play adaptations, the 'Science of the Discworld' series and indeed the official Discworld reference, which was written in association with Stephen Briggs. It probably helps that he has a tendency to get involved in forums and newsgroups about him and his creations, which I suspect JKR doesn't. I would say that any author has the right to protect their property but these days, the failure to be aware of what is being done to their property at an early stage is inexcusable.

Bamboo is incredibly durable and hard wearing so it should make an excellent material for hardware cases. As for using it in space construction, if you've ever seen bamboo scaffolding in Hong Kong or other parts of the far east, you'll know that it can more than do the job, and as it grows incredibly quickly, with the application of hydroponics you could grow your building materials on site. Hmm *adds to writing notes*

Looking at what Redsock has said, I think I can see part of the problem. If he has the files on CDs, the player *might* either need to write something to the file itself (the spec I read suggests that this could be the case) or the player regards a CD as a removable drive or somesuch and requires validation every time they play. The answer might be to copy the files back to a hard drive on a machine on which they have previously been played, if possible, and capture them to another file - WinAmp might do this but if not I'm sure there's something around that will.

The WMP 10 format was quite clever, being a rats' nest of encrypted DLLs in the player and an exchange of key pairs embedded in the file. However, it was inevitably broken: look for FairUse4WM and play the files using VLC. I can't guarantee that this will work but it's worth a go to preserve your investment if MLB aren't going to honour it.

It's on Encyclopedia Dramatica too, has been for several months, so I call lulz.

@FatherCrow: the BBC are as guilty as the rest of us in looking up information on Wikipedia and passing it on as news, so take what they say with a pinch of, well, something.

The middle part of the story was more worrying to me: it seemed to imply that if/when hostilities break out with Iran, the FBI will be rounding up everyone of Iranian origin/ancestry in the Bay Area. Then again, if they're just following trails of falafel crumbs it might take some time.

Neal Stephenson wrote about something like this in a Wired special back when all this was fields. The addition was that while you watched cameras from around the world, if you saw something suspicious, you could alert someone to do something about it. While you were asleep, other people were watching cameras near you and would do the same. He's not pursuing the idea now, but there's no reason that someone shouldn't.

Aww, now look what you've made me do. It's another little Linux thingy that I have to buy. Still, I think I'll hold on until they've got the bugs out of the transporter.

I don't think Casio support anything other than Windows generally. Hmm, is there any label maker support in CUPS I wonder? It would probably be easy enough to hack if there was.

The semi-industrial machines were a staple of trade shows when I was a kid, even in the UK, and I was always mesmerised by them. And now I can buy my own tiny version. Hmm... I think I'd prefer the full sized model. Maybe it will go in the basement...

I have no intention of spending any money or time on Keen's ramblings, but every time this thing about the validity of blogs comes up, I have to ask, 'so what?'. The same principle applies to blogging as to all media, that 99% is sh*t, and the other 1% has to earn its reputation, and it would be foolish to think in any other way. That's where Keen seems to be fundamentally wrong, he seems to believe that the Internet is there to replace existing media, whereas most of it merely extends existing media, and much of what he says is sour grapes and should be met with a shrug and a 'your point is, caller?'. If we stopped talking about him, he would disappear.

http://xkcd.com/331/

I have been looking forward to the day when I could lose all my keys in one easy to drop package, and that day is finally here. Huzzah!

Looks very nice, but it's still apparently vapourware, and I just noticed that the patch editor software is Windows-only (well, it says PC, but we know what that usually means). Remind me again, what computer do an awful lot of musicians use?

Proto@6:

Which has it's own little Swiss Army Knife, which has its own, and so on, like a mandelbrot for getting stones out of horses' hooves.

Ah, what do they do that improves on selling it yourself on eBay? Surely having DHL pick it up is adding to the carbon footprint unless they've started using electric or pedal powered vans. A simple RoHS calculator would be just as effective.

It's the same in the UK now. The drivers are on such tight schedules that they can't stop apart from for their legally-mandated rest times, so the roadsides are full of bottles of man-wine.

Hey, don't knock the Tull.

NEED.

I love subways and subway maps. I can only hope that it's coffee table sized, with the screw in legs and everything.

Still not here either, and I've been trying on different machines for 12 hours. Perhaps I want doesn't get.

subspace@1

You need AdBlock Plus and NoScript. The Doubleclick scripts are, to use a splendid Scottish term, mince.

Eclectro@11:

You're *only* 300 million or so people out of a population of six billion. There's another 300 million over here with a similar disposable income who the Chinese are more than happy to sell to. And that 200 million of India's billion who have the disposable income to buy from China, and Africa's prosperous, who the Chinese have been courting as investment and as customers. Sure, the US is probably China's main market but there's a lot more people out there. Hmm... who used to do that?

Micah@3:
Yes, that's exactly what happens. Northern Rock, a UK bank, in fact the sixth most well off in the country, found itself approaching a liquidity problem a couple of months ago due to the sub-prime crisis, and was given an emergency loan facility by the Bank of England. This created the belief that the bank was in trouble (it wasn't, the loan was a short term bridging facility as the bank was finding trouble placing some of its mortgage funds in the market) and caused a lot of people to try and attempt to withdraw their savings. This then turned into a lack of confidence in the stock market, and the bank's shares dipped. The Bank of England intervened again, for the first time in 30 years, the message got through to the saving customers and the bank recovered, but it has been weakened and commentators expect it not to be in the market place under the Northern Rock name in the next year to eighteen months.
To apply that to a country we have to go back to 1992: George Soros and others made a run on the pound sterling and the Italian lira which caused the UK government to raise interest rates from 10% to 12% and ultimately to 15% to attract investment. In the meantime the speculators kept selling pounds and the government was forced to leave the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Interest rates stabilised at 12%, the UK economy went into recession and the Conservative government lost its popularity which contributed to Labour taking power in 1997.
All it needs are a group of determined bodies to want to make some money out of the US dollar, selling it for a stronger currency, probably the Yen, and the dollar could easily collapse in the same way.

I want one that has Google Earth projected on its surface. Oh, it has to be bigger too. Then another part of my plan for world domination will be complete. Muhahahahahahah *strokes beard*. Hmmm, note to self: grow beard.

This is starting to sound more like cock-up rather than conspiracy with every report. It's probably due to aggressive traffic shaping and a lack of knowledge of uncommon (on a domestic network at least) applications. Notes uses port 1352 for general communication, 389 for LDAP and 993 and 995 for IMAP and POP3 with SSL and its replication processes could be mistaken for some kind of peer-to-peer networking as they do shift a fair bit of data around on strange ports. Still, Comcast seem not to be providing a 'complete Internet experience' (to use appalling marketspeak) over and above fair use.

My favourite ever 419 scam was for the Nigerian astronaut who went to the ISS a few years ago. You were invited to send the traditional $5,000 and your bank information to help him access his enormous salary. Obviously the scammers didn't know *that* much about astronaut pay.

I remember that they did this with 'Kid A' but made it a timed, streamed broadcast, partially to prevent piracy (they probably didn't) but also to make the preview a global event, which worked.

I've got the LP *cough* and I quite like what I've heard so far, as I did when I listened to 'Kid A', which I might even still have had ISDN for, which would have made it bloody expensive, but I still don't have any hardware Radiohead CDs.

I like Radiohead's attempts to do something different and detach themselves from the business a little, but their management are either being disingenuous or, well, just being management. It's good publicity for whatever comes next.

It's a *voluntary* science project, which the source article from the Times eventually says but the linked blog doesn't. Hungerhill specialises in science and technical studies although it is still a state (or public for those of you in the US) school. So they're just developing budding Kevin Warwicks.

3 have been a bit of a rolling disaster in the UK too. They're backed by Hutchison, and paid a fortune for the only independent 3G licence in the UK - all the others were taken by existing mobile phone operators. They launched about five years ago with the first 3G phones, which were blocky and unattractive and their USP was video calls (to other 3 users only, of course), and free clips of Premiership football. Their coverage was practically restricted to urban areas too at first. Since then the phones have got smaller, they did a deal with O2 for coverage where they didn't have masts and have slowly, very slowly, come to terms with the possibility that people *might* use a relatively high speed and reliable data collection for something other than watching football and music videos.
iSkoot is a neat piece of software, a voice only Skype client that runs on Symbian 60 among other platforms. The thinking would appear to be that people will use Skype for overseas calls, for which it would be O2 rather than 3 that collected the transit costs, so 3 is actually probably not losing a great deal of money by allowing Skype calls across their data network. You also may be interested to know that T-Mobile in the UK allow the use of Skype on their Web'n'Walk unlimited data plan, but only if you pay an extra fiver, which also allows your phone to be used as a laptop modem. That's why I don't need no steenkin' iPhone.

Unixware is a registered trademark of SCO. The makers had better be careful that they don't get sued. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha.

Kyle@#6:

Who buys software in a store these days? I don't think I have for Windows or OS X for at least five years. If you need to do that, then stick with Windows, keep paying that Microsoft premium for software that is nearly all replaceable with free or open source software and keep your head in the sand. You don't need Linux and Linux doesn't need you. If fact, dammit, you *can't* download Linux. I forbid it. You might learn something.

Randy Waterhouse is buying a box of these as I write.

And Grantham is where Margaret Thatcher came from. Perhaps she is planning to return as Davros. Is The Gingerbread Daleks a good name for a band?

I bought a Nokia N770 for cheap a few months ago. I think I'll cover it in a beanbag...

Aww, who am I kidding? I'm going to have one of those, and an Asus Eee, and a pony...

Hmm, I wondered where the Discuss button had gone. She *had* been arrested and subsequently convicted for shoplifting. And dried cat pee isn't a common handbag accoutrement as far as I know. YMM, naturally, V.

God, I'm old... I did this 15 years ago. In PCL. It's always a joy to see a salesdroid spend a couple of minutes looking for the slot though.

There's a lot of FUD here: the original article actually said that there may not be a version of iPlayer for OS X or Linux but that they are investigating a Flash based player a la YouTube.

The issue of rights is a difficult one for the BBC. There is a common assumption that once the BBC produces content, it somehow belongs in the public domain. This isn't true. The BBC has to pay rights fees, repeat fees and residuals to artists. Many artists' contracts are designed so that whenever a programme that they appear in is broadcast, they are paid a fee. This has caused problems in the digital broadcasting system in the UK where networks that are supported by advertising revenue have attempted to increase their income by launching '+1' stations, broadcasting the same programming an hour later. ITV, the national commercial broadcaster, ran into serious issues over repeat fees when it launched '+1' versions of its digital stations, which mostly broadcast reruns of programmes from the network's archive: they didn't realise that some performers' contracts required a residual for *every* transmission of a programme, so one episode of 'Maigret' on ITV2 counted as one payment, and the same episode broadcast an hour later counted as another.
A programme played out over the Internet therefore counts as a broadcast. There may be agreements in place that limit the residuals payable on a programme transmitted in this way, but I believe that the way in which iPlayer works provides a kind of workaround in that it is based on torrenting technology so it isn't being streamed in a one to one way, so the process can be regarded as 'broadcast'. That the technology has been limited to the Windows platform is a combination of the BBC's technical philosophy, which is essentially a combination of 'not invented here', which limits the use of FOSS and 'it costs a lot of money, so it must be good', which sustains the use of RealAudio for streaming services, and indeed, Microsoft software for iPlayer.
The rights issue is a problem that has to be fixed, and probably will be. The BBC is in something of a cleft stick because its charter doesn't allow it to charge UK citizens for its programming - after all, we pay the license fee, so it can't really put programmes on iTunes like the US networks.
There may be a blanket Internet agreement on the way, but until then it has to track and manage what it delivers so it can pay for what it delivers. There are pretty obvious solutions available but again, they would have to be developed in house or bought in, and neither are viable in the timescales available. So as always the compromise is unattractive to everyone.

Does anyone develop 120 film professionally any more? I can envisage paying $50 for the camera and several hundred for a darkroom set up.

I love the way that US legislatiors have to have nice acronyms for their laws. A better one for this act would have been the Federal Use of Communication Controllers Act (I couldn't think of a word that fitted the context and began with K).

Maybe Sony have been in touch. It's no surprise though. The advertising industry frequently lifts ideas and hopes that no-one will notice. Fortunately, they have enough spare cash to pay out for people who do.

Vi of course... Perl would be good too.

@Alan Yeung: There is a CD, in fact two, in the diskbox, that is available in December, and likely to be a domestic release i