Sprouting seeds should also get a mention

Even if you have no garden, you can still make a really nice variety of salad and stir-fry ingredients by sprouting seeds. It's dead easy too - just get a large glass jar, soak seeds in it overnight, then drain (cap the jar with a piece of muslin held on by an elastic band) and leave on a windowsill. Rinse the seeds three times a day (more if you can) by filling with clean water, swilling around, and emptying.

Standard supermarket beansprouts are mung beans, but I don't like them much - alfalfa is much nicer in salads and sarnies, and sprouted seeds from clover, radishes, any brassicas, or indeed pretty much any legumes are great - they taste surprisingly different from their parent plant (some quite spicey), are really good for you, and cost very little compared to buying sprouted seeds or the equivalent weight in fresh veg. Check your local wholefood shop for packets of seeds for sprouting.

Recommended reading ...

http://asa.org.uk/Rulings/Adjudications.aspx

Plusnet are in this week's list, but if you go back a month or two, you'll find complaints upheld against BT, EE/T-Mobile, TalkTalk, Virgin Media ... so while I favour the Bollocks Alert and klaxon solution (AC 12:04), I would apply it to all ISP and telco ads automatically, thereby saving a lot of time and green ink.

I'm not remotely surprised by these judgments - but I was surprised to find a complaint upheld against Gallaher, the company who sell tobacco and are therefore not allowed to advertise:

http://asa.org.uk/Rulings/Adjudications/2013/4/Gallaher-Ltd/SHP_ADJ_210929.aspx

But I think this is my favourite:

http://asa.org.uk/Rulings/Adjudications/2013/4/Esselle-Pole-Repairs/SHP_ADJ_222353.aspx

You CAN change the laws of physics, Captain - apparently...

>> less atmosphere to allow heat to radiate away

Citation needed?

Want one!

>>The initial design for WAMSR is a 500MWe (megawatt electrical) plant that can be manufactured as a standalone unit and be shipped directly to customers, ready to be fueled up and switched on. It would cost around $1.5bn

Crowdsource, anyone? I'll happily accommodate it in my backyard, for an appropriate percentage...

The real challenge now...

...is to come up with a candidate that none of the previous 421 commentards (at time of writing) have mentioned. For the first half-hour of comment-wading I thought I was onto a winner with "The Man In The White Suit", but someone eventually cited it.

But as far as I can see no-one has mentioned "Max Headroom", so I'll go with that. Not very sciency, but that's not unusual in this thread, and it has the dystopian individual-versus-faceless-corporations shtick which seems to be the prerequisite for qualifying. Shame that like so many classics it was retrospectively ruined by further development.

I'll also give a million upvotes to "Dark Star", a film I loved so much as student that I once stole a television in order to watch it.

O happy day...

... now I can switch from boycotting Amazon for not paying their UK corporation tax to boycotting Google for not paying their UK corporation tax.

Mine's the only one in the cloakroom without a f***ing gift voucher in the pocket...

Thesis-creep

>it is uncomfortably close to the argument that the way women dress invites aggressive sexual attention.

Goodness Mr/Ms Parnell, what a fine exponent of the logical long-jump you are. How many do you get when you add 2+2?

I would defend very little of Ms Abbott's thesis, and definitely not the bits of it which require some kind of magical mechanism for filtering "adult content" (whatever that may be) - but there's no need to be putting words in her mouth that are even more rabid than the ones she puts there herself.

The Right Stuff

>Grunsfeld has a special attachment to Hubble, as he was the last human being to touch it

Spacewalking with no gloves on? Must be a Geordie!

Excellent location

If new startups are going to learn the most important aspect of running a business - the effective avoidance and evasion of Corporation Tax - then Silicon Roundabout is an excellent location from which to watch and learn.

Though personally I'd rather see the Silicon Roundabout types relocate in a proper offshore haven, preferably Rockall.

>Didn't we already try that with a chip factory up there? Can anyone remember the name?

Er - Harry Ramsdens?

Owwww!!

+8dB peak at about 6.5KHz?

I know we oldies are losing it up there, but we still have a pain threshold FFS!

SD card? Whaffor?

Since the primary function of my Nexus7 is to relieve me of the need to get off my arse except to recycle beer or fetch snacks, the fact that it talks nicely to my shared drives via wifi and my hi-fi via bluetooth makes on-board storage irrelevant. I have my MP3 library sitting happily on a shared network drive, and I don't want to clutter my devices up with multiple local copies of everything. If I need to access it when I'm elsewhere, there's a cloud for that (though I don't need to, I like my house and spend most of my time there).

I've yet to master watching tablet telly, though. The problem used to be Auntie's insane allegiance to Flash, but since they got their act together with iPlayer (are you listening 4OD?), the issue is purely mechanical - however I hold the thing, my hands eventually get tired or I accidentally press part of its touch-screen and cancel the playback. I think I need a device like harmonica-playing guitarists use, to hold it hands-free at a comfortable watching distance from my head. Any suggestions?

But the one thing I do really really really HATE about it is how it forces me to have a Google ID and link all kinds of personal and LAN stuff up via some cloud mechanism that I don't want and over which I have no control. Which is exactly what a lot of commentards above like about it.

Just goes to show how different folks' strokes can be - so as it's Friday, here's beer to drink to la différence!

> processors made of wattle and daub

Excellent.

Though the main issue wasn't the processors being made of wattle and daub - it was the programming and I/O mechanisms being hand-cranked. My first encounter was with an 8080A development box - this had a "Program" mode, in which we entered individual CPU mechine-code instructions and data using 8 little switches and a "Next" button, and a "Run" mode, in which the status of the data and address busses was shown by banks of LEDs - 8 for data and 16 for address. Debugging? Well, the Run mode had a single-step button...

Of course the proper computing types got to play with really advanced stuff, like punch-cards. But for us in the electronics world, "stored program" meant "write down a long list of hex numbers on a piece of paper with a pencil".

You try and tell that to the young people of today...

Specialist subject the bleedin' obvious

>>It is best viewed on clear nights

I hear a distant bell tolling...

I read recently [citation needed] that last year, for the first time, Apple spent more on patent purchase and litigation than they did on R&D. Eventually people will work out that buying their computers from a firm of solicitors may not give them the best value for money.

(Note for Americans - a solicitor is a lawyer, not a whore. Err .. hang on a minute...)

Mind you, I'm not holding my breath - it's a very, very distant bell. There are few consumers more gullible than Apple-istas, and the supply of people with more money than sense appears to be ever-increasing.

Typo

Surely that should read either "Properly NOT known as the Secret Intelligence Service" or "Properly known as the Not-Very-Secret Intelligence Service"..?

< Mine's the one with stuff in a cunningly-concealed secret pocket >

Wrong planet

'You're meant to encourage innovation, not stifle it'

Nononono - these are companies, they're meant to make money for their shareholders. That's what they are constituted to do, and should do. End of.

It's up to governments and legislators to regulate or moderate that paradigm into some kind of broader community or social benefit - but they stubbornly refuse to do so, and seem to believe (flying in the face of both intuitive logic and decades of experience) that an unfettered market will create a nice planet to live on. And while I'm more instinctively a European than many Brits, I do feel that the EU have been even worse than most national governments at cosying up to business at the expense of any broader social benefit.

Of course the companies' PR mechanisms work very hard to perpetuate the fallacy that what's good for companies is good for everyone, and they are good at making people believe this shit - but the stupidity of people in continuing to do so just makes me ....

<sigh>

Should be a FAIL icon, but I'm going for Beer because I fucking need one.

Automatic recognition and targetting?

Hmmm ... could be time to shave off the beard.

Helicopter because there's no drone icon yet. Or indeed brown-trouser icon.

@Pete2 et al

Interesting, popular, relevant, unbiased and informative - Steve Bell, every time, on the nail. His stuff alone is worth 2 quid a month.

Beer for Steve!

By their choice of friends shall ye know them

I'm happy that Canonical is not a charity and that I get free stuff from them, so I expect to pay somewhere along the line with a bit of adware.

But since learning about Amazon's avoidance of UK corporation tax (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/04/amazon-british-operation-corporation-tax), I've boycotted them assiduously, and tried to convince others to do the same. So for me, Ubuntu's decision would be a dealbreaker - if I hadn't already dumped Unity ages ago 'cos it kept crashing my bloody computer.

Interesting also that Shuttleworth thinks we already trust him because we enable updates from his esteemed repository. That's like assuming that everyone with a Windows box who has Automatic Updates enabled trusts Microsoft. Word up, Mr S - trusting you slightly more than we trust all the hackers, botnet masters and malware authors doesn't mean that we trust you.

You are, after all, a billionaire - and therefore the enemy.

@AC 11:18

Largely agree, but AFAICS the key point is:

"Of course anything I do is rendered moot by 3g or a friend's internet connection,"

The idea that controlling your own household's net connection amounts to controlling your offspring's net access is a complete head-in-sand number. Go ahead with it if it makes you feel better - but this entire issue is riddled with S2BDS syndrome and is lamentably short of learning from centuries of of people making laws and creating mechanisms to stop other people doing what they like doing. And of course we have to remember that children are people too, in this respect as in any other.

The most cheering thing about this whole debate is the prospect of challenging a bunch of adolescents to find clever ways to outwit their parents, ISPs, and governments - thus ensuing that we have IT-savvy youth to care for our systems in our dotage.

Afterthought - can 3G pr0n be thwarted by applying a tinfoil hat to your house? Perhaps tinfoil's time has finally come!

NB - IANAP. Mine's the one with the negative paternity test in the pocket...

Symptomatic of the FOSS problem

Trolls apart, it's evident from reading the above that even IT- and licensing-literate commentards disagree about fundamental aspects of the GPL. That suggests to me that either the GPL is hopelessly unwieldy and complicated, or that someone in a position of authority needs to set up a page carrying translations of the GPL from Lawyer into Civilian, and also into Commentardese.

Anyone volunteer to be someone in a position of authority? (Earlier contributors need not apply, for obvious reasons.)

Mine's the one with the Supreme Court subpoena in the pocket...

To paraphrase...

"There's no unequivocal evidence that fucking with the earth's atmospheric CO2 level will definitely hurt us now or in the future, therefore any rational person would agree that we should continue fucking with it at least until we have such evidence."

Bodycount, or it didn't happen!

<sigh>

Costs saved, cheaper stuff..?

So, now that Apple and Microsoft are NOT spending billions of dollars a year suing each other, can we hope that these cost savings will be reflected in cheaper products and cheaper software licensing? You know, the way the oil companies always drop the price of petrol when crude prices tank?

Why do I not have a good feeling about this? Could it be because I don't hold any Apple or Microsoft stock?

The point

I am assured by parents of teenagers with the BBM bug that the key issue is exactly what the rest of us don't get. Because it's a closed platform, and most of us grownups want interoperability, we are not on BBM. Therefore everything the kids share on BBM is shared only with their mates, and not with their parents. Contrast with Facebook - of course all the BBM kids are also on FB, but they (mostly) aren't allowed to lock their parents out of their FB accounts.

That's why in this case a platform locked to a specific device WILL survive, as long as the grownups keep refusing to buy the devices for themselves while allowing their kids to have them. Of course the teens will move on to more open systems as they grow up and have less to hide, but by then there will already be another generation of teens with secrecy requirements, so the model is sustainable. It can never take over the world, but it does have a revenue-generating USP, which is what matters.

Do my eyes deceive me or ...

... did it come down within fire-spitting distance of a stack of white static pressurised tanks? Presumably containing something relevant to the exercise, such as hydrogen, oxygen etc..?

If it were me I'd be leaving a little more margin for error.

Pint icon because they'll need one after that.

Re " the most successful political movement of the past few decades, environmentalism"

Not grinding an axe on either mentalist side here, but really? In the UK, one Green MP in one general election. I don't know much about other countries, and the Greens are doing OK in Germany - but I see no Green Party representatives in the US, only one in Canada (OK I got this from Wikipedia, feel free to correct me), and in most of Europe the Greens do somewhat worse than Communists, of whom no-one seems to be afraid any more.

Just as those who call themselves environmentalists can be lazy and ignorant of what they speak, environmentalist-bashers often are too. The trick is to dispense with the whole Daily-Mail adversarial yar-boo approach and concentrate on the science - and specifically on the question of atmospheric carbon. Which is why it's depressing to find that the yar-boo approach still seems to dominate debate on El Reg - not just among commentards, but also on the part of Mr Orlowski, of whom we have a right to expect better.

We need to take the focus off any quasi-moral dilemma about having equitable distribution, or issues around the economics of power generation and consumption - those are all human vanities, and irrelevant to the urgent issue - which (IMHO) is the simple engineering challenge of reducing the amount of carbon we dump in the atmosphere in order to power our lives, because this constitutes a significant change to the planet's ecosystem, and we can't be sure that it won't be apocalyptic for humanity. I'm not a mentalist in either camp, but I'm risk-averse, and in the absence of any control in our planetary carbon experiment, I would rather cut my consumption until I'm sure that we have an apocalypse-averting solution to current consumption levels - whether it comes from fission, fusion, renewables, diesel-shitting algae, or billions of wheel-driving hamsters on crystal meth.

I don't even think it's useful to include the environmental impact of carbon extraction or renewable generation infrastructure in the urgent damage-limitation exercise we have to undertake. A lot of those arguments cut both ways, and no-one ever died of a spoiled view.

Let's concentrate on what might kill us first, and worry about knocking down the stupid arguments of stupid people when we have the luxury of some energy security.

Oh - one other thing. Rampant Spaniel - "...religious objections to geothermal"...? Really? Have you tried telling these religious people how much money they could make if they harvested the wealth of geothermal in Hawaii and sold it to Europe in zero-carbon form? I would so love to see flotillas of liquid hydrogen powered liquid hydrogen tankers bunging up the Panama canal...

I prefer mine tartare

If any government repackages the data in a way which makes it easier to understand, it's inevitable that they would also put their greasy spin on it. We already get their version via press releases and departmental PR - surely the point here is to get the raw data available too, so that anyone can put their own visualisation / interpretation / spin on it. Or at least, anyone who can get their head around the semantic web can.

And while hating Nu Labour and the coalition with equal venom, one has to give credit to both for running with the idea, and letting Tim Berners-Lee drive the agenda - though as anyone on the mailing lists will know, all the actual good stuff has been done by the civil service, not by politicians.

Pint, because I'm taking tomorrow off so today is technically Friday.