"a pin through the coax and cut off flush can be very hard to find"

Oh! That does bring back memories!

Re: +1

My sentiments exactly. The thought of the El Reg hacks sitting in the pub/office thinking up lines like this makes my day.

Re: Out of sympathy

I think you mean "Arguments to curtail freedom always begin with something like this."

Re: Sod the lot of them

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices…. "

Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations" 1776. Still a very relevant book today!

Re: Fast connections

"China is a totalitarian state than can mandate what it likes ...... but people in W. Europe prefer to have some say in where their tax money is spent."

So how do I go about making it known that I would like my tax spent on FTTP rather than on HS2? Or a third runway at Heathrow? Or a forest of wind turbines?

Re: Made in Wales?

Twp? Did you not read the bit where it says the typewriter is going to the Science Museum in London?

Re: and to think I moved accounts from Nat West to Nationwide

Yes, I moved from Natwest to Nationwide also earlier this year. However, whatever the problems with Nationwide's new system I would never go back to Natwest.

Re: I miss the ounce...

Same in Italy. Un etto is 100 grams and is used in grocers where we would use 4 oz or quarter of a pound. And even the French often use un livre which is a direct translation of one pound as a way of ordering 500 g or half a kilo.

Re: Didn't BMW try this once...

I think you have to blame the French, and Michelin in particular, for this piece of nonsense. They persuaded car makers to fit wheels with metric diameters to various vehicles, Montegos and Saabs as well as BMWs, and thus tied you buying replacement tyres from Michelin. Expensive they were too. I think the car manufacturers got the message from angry customers and dropped the idea tout de suite as they say.

Re: Too Late

Indeed. Even our local library in darkest Wales offers ebooks.

Horse? Stable door?

Re: It's lobsters

Ah! So that explains this

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/07/29/us/20120729-lobster.html

very nicely. Just waiting for them all to appear in my local Tescos.

@ZanzibarRastapopulous

Water, electricity, sewerage and gas are not universal but there are alternatives. I have a borehole and pump for water, mains electricity, my own septic tank for sewage and no gas. So I use alternatives to mains for three items, water, sewage and oil for heating and hot water instead of gas. I do have the luxury of mains electricity. Electricity is all but universal these days though we did not have it in my youth but had a small hydro plant. I could, expensively, have an alternative for electricity too using a diesel generator. Now tell me how I could provide my own broadband connexion to the backbone without outside help from one of the big players?

Re: Coincidence?

Agreed. I have been on holiday in France for the last week and the complete Orange outage was front page news over here. It just so happens that I am piggy-backed on O2 and had no service here last night. This morning it is working perfectly though. Never mind, it is 30 degrees and sunny!

Re: One, two, three, jump! But where?

I too jumped from Natwest who I had been with for over 50 years only about 3 months ago. I too went to Nationwide who have been perfect so far. They even have somebody in the bank I can go and talk to, unlike Natwest where every contact seems to have to go via a call centre. The whole Natwest "customer care" system which involved 4 months of mucking me around for a simple change of account name got me so livid I moved. And now I get free travel insurance too! Well done Natwest, you have save me about £100 a year on that one. Idiots!

Re: "I have almost 300 facebook friends"

Great link! You have made my day. Am I allowed to upvote you as well? Oh, let's try it anyway...

Join the club!

And I thought it was just me.

Re: Motorbike Satnavs?

I have been using a Garmin Zumo 550 for the last 5 years and cannot rate it highly enough. Although I do not use it with a Bluetooth headset it can be done and Garmin market some of the Zumo range with Scala Bluetooth headsets as part of the package. I tend to use a lot of out-of-the-way roads, many abroad, and the normal choice of fastest or quickest routing on the GPS is not enough. The Zumo 550 (and some if not all the other Zumos) comes with a route planning program for the PC (Windows only at present I believe) which allows you to create a route on a much larger screen than that of the GPS itself. The route can then be saved and downloaded to the GPS and off you go. All the Zumo range are designed for motorcyclists so are waterproof and pretty rugged. I think they all come with a car windscreen mount too. Your problem is the price, at least double your target £200.

Re: Re: Oh yes, that's the car for me!

Can you tell me where this extra 5 litre tank is? How is the switchover performed when the main tank runs dry? How do I know that I am running on the secondary tank and not the main one?

Perhaps you mean that most, if not all, tanks have a safety margin of about 5 litres when the fuel guage or trip computer tells you that it is empty. This has been standard practice since long before fuel injection. With fuel injection the system is normally self-purging of bubbles otherwise cars parked after a long run in the Texas sun would never get started again for fuel vapour blocking the lines under the bonnet. As for the idiot light, it depends on whether that is self-resetting or not.

Re: map costs

My Garmin has lifetime updates, normally four times a year, of the maps for the whole of Europe for a measly £70 or thereabouts.

Ah! I feel a Jenlain coming on. Here that would cost about the same as a month's broadband from BT

Can't really blame the clerk...

I don't see anywhere in this article or the two linked ones any statement that the clerk wasn't told of the dangers. However I did note in the newspaper article that she made a habit of not bringing enough paper rolls with her to work. She transferred the files from her stenography machine to her PC then erased the disk of the former. Sounds generally slap-dash and incompetent to me. Definite FAIL

Not saving the planet...

...but probably saving your catalytic converter from being poisoned by neat fuel.

different at depth...

Most of the ocean lies below the influence of the heat input from the Sun. There is little mixing of warm and cold; the cold water is denser and stays down (at close to 4C) and the warm stays on top. You therefore need to calculate the expansion based on the top few meters which are the only bits which are warming, not the whole depth.

Yes, but how do you know that the margin note has been written by another expert and not somebody pretending to be an expert or indeed just a troll?

Too cheap to meter?

What they forgot was the cost of the transmission network to get the electricity to the consumers. That probably accounts for half the cost of our electricity bills. Neglecting the subsidies for the wind lot that is.

"Old and daft"

Well, I guess that I come into that category but being old means that I do know what goes on under the bonnet (hood to you Merkins) because I had to in my earlier years. The analogy with cars (automobiles) breaks down though because when the number of users became great enough, and there were mounting safety problems i.e. deaths and injuries, the authorities introduced compulsory assessment of driving skills. In the UK it was in, from memory, 1935. (No, I am not quite that old.) The answer was not to make cars uncrashable.

So a true analogy with cars should mean that now there are a huge number of interconnected computers then for the safety of others, never mind the safety of the owner, a form of assessment of computer skills should be a prerequisite for operating anything other than a stand-alone computer not connected to any type of network.

Not a SNAFU...

but a good illustration of Hanlon's Razor.

Quite right too!

It is clearly completely wrong that a person should break the law even if it is to highlight the poor security of some organisation.

Oh wait! I had forgotten:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7147620.stm

Agreed

the brass keyhole is completely out of place on a piece of retro '50s furniture.

The desktop wallpaper is the Horse's Head Nebula: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eifelsternwarte/2836509256/

But what is the round thing on the bottom of the keyboard flap? In Swedish it is "Solsystemet" and looks as if it ought to be an astrolabe. Perhaps even a working one. Does anybody know?