Re: £10K cap per household?

Not heard of a multiswitch? Standard equipment these days in blocks of flats to distribute sat signals. Some of them will even do two or 3 sats (9/13 input jobbies).

Re: Interface (Verb)

Odd that the EJ200 is specific to the Eurofighter. Usually jet engines have a wider range of use cases. I would have expected some kind of common interface API to the engine management unit, with a specific set of control algorithms for the Eurofighter which can be reprogrammed for other kit. But then I'm a software & networking guy so I tend to think in those terms.

Re: Too many moving parts...

Dekatrons!

Didn't you know? It's actually Swiss farmers who are driving all this stuff. IPv6 wouldn't have happened without their reps on the IETF...

Re: What? @Shasta McNasty

So now my toaster also has to have a LCD display, or a HAL-like voice to say "I'm sorry Dave, Corrie break in 5 seconds. I'll do your toast in 4 minutes and 15 seconds".

Re Horse

The Kid might have had his brain zapped by that Swiss finishing school, but even he would know that the US would only be accept a wooden rabbit.

Re: Enta outage

I've used a D-Link 300T modem in bridge mode successfully with Enta IPv6 to my own linux-based router. I've also successfully used a Draytek 120 in the same setup, though I'm back on the D-Link as the Draytek has become unreliable (either bad capacitors or a bad smps, probably).

Re: Earning their keep

One of our neighbours' dogs was savaged quite badly by a muntjac some years ago. They have become much more numerous in our part of the world (SE Suffolk) over the last couple of decades. I often see one crossing our garden at night on the CCTV.

No-one has suggested Lynx as a candidate for re-introduction, though I think they are more at home in hilly or mountainous areas, so Suffolk isn't exactly prime territory for them.

Think availability.

Re: Got both - dont care which is supposed to be best.

My (Tosh) laptop used to have a matte screen, until the wire broke off one of the flourescent tubes & I failed to repair it. The replacement, much to my chagrin, is shiny. It shows up fingerprints much more, quite apart from the greater reflectivity. I wonder what the incremental cost of putting antireflection coatings on sceens would be.

As for matte 'blurring' detail, my view is that, because the matteness is close to the emitting surface, then it doesn't really affect the sharpness, especially as the roughness scale is probably smaller than the size of the pixels.

I guess Plusnet would at least have considered using NAT64, except that most wireless routers don't support it, and probably don't even have a firmware upgrade to do so. NAT64 still has the NAT-specific drawbacks that v4 NAT has, but at least it would make the home network IPv6 by default. Perhaps as home wireless routers become capable of IPv6 they could start to run NAT64 in parallel.

Re: ofcom and bt has probably always known who and where from

Phone calls don't work like the Internet. An international call arriving into BT has a known endpoint on BT's switch, and they also know which overseas operator it came from (for charging) and some forwarded CLI, which could be anything. There is nothing to say it bears any relationship to the call originator, and it doesn't have to be accurate for the call to be successfully connected. So BT can connect the call in the UK and mark it 'International'. They may even trust the CLI in some cases and pass it on, but I've never seen that on my landline (not that we get many genuine international calls).

Having CLI on our phones, all 'International', 'Unavailable' and 'Witheld' calls are not answered & go to the answering machine. Almost without fail they hang up. It's a low hassle way of filtering the crap, though it would be good if there were a way of wasting their time without wasting mine.

Re: O2 boostbox doesn't work

That's the weak point. The support peope aren't really support at all. I had this exact problem. The young lady I spoke to at Voda was very pleasant but very soon ran into the limits of her competence & understanding. It was almost a case of "sorry, can't help. goodbye" until I said " if you can't help, who in your organisation will?". It got escalated to a manager, but even he wasn't happy in owning the problem, even though I could tell him exactly where the problem lay in his network. The support people ought to know much more about the detail of how the service actually works and be able to run connectivity checks.

Re: Angling to get another Brit into a US Court?

HP hasn't been the business that Bill & Dave started for decades. The remnants of that is Agilent, which still has a respectable rep in the instruments business. It's all very sad - I remember reading HP Journal back in the day in our company library and being amazed & fascinated by the techniques & equipment described therein. I dunno why, but it seemed to be de rigeur to be a backpacker to work at HP. Virtually all the author bios seemed to feature backpacking as their leisure time activity. It became something of a joke at our place.

Re: ""the underlying data from NOAA...."

My thought too, but I guess the ballooners have done this stuff before many times. I did notice on the map display a couple of others in the drink that day - one off Southend IIRC and one off Margate. Hope you've got enough in the kitty to refund the kit donors - that Iridium box must be worth a bob or two.

I hope you've got another intepid Playmonaut in training who hasn't just resigned...

Re: 2015?

I live in a village, with a cabinet about 100m away, and our county council is just finalising a deal with BT for rural broadband. I hope they do fibre up that cabinet, but I suspect the best we'll see is an upgrade from ADSL2 to ADSL2+. I'm also expecting it to come in late.

Re: noisy

Don't think they are strowger switches - there is no rotary switch bank below the relay bank. The covers look like those on the pre-2000 type switches I saw in Manchester Central exchange back in 1969. No doubt another ex-GPO commentator can fill in more detail.

Re: Note that *accuracy* prized over speed

From the edges of the roof tiles it looks like it is a fish-eye pic, and in actuality the racks are in a line.

Re: Counterfeit Cards

The conditional access system, SECA, that OnDigital used was actually already broken on satellite systems when the service started. The info was fairly readily available if you knew where to look, and I used it as an example of how not to design a security system in an internal talk where I used to work.

Re: Get one at home?

"With the increasing litigation against 'suspected downloaders' it is a good way to get sued/prosecuted."

Don't be silly. I've had a Voda box for a few years now. It uses a IPSec ESP tunnel to backhaul the traffic, and I, as the owner, need to register other people's phones onto the box before they can use it. That shouldn't be too hard to argue issues of responsibility in court, if it ever got there, even with judges' notorious lack of tech awareness.

Re: Not radical, at least nolt compared to what is actually being done

This guy definitely needs to be hit with the 'Be careful what you wish for' cluebat.

In any case the L1 Lagrange point already has sun observation satellites, which will be royally shafted by a dust cloud there.

Re: A shame, shameful prosecution

As was pointed out, this is a strict liability offence. There was little doubt he sent the text, so he's guilty, whatever his intent. I dunno if the CPS even have discretion in prosecuting strict liability offences. Sadly, the solution to this is only in the hands of our MPs in repealing the legislation, so don't hold your breath:(((

I wonder if the Apple one ticks? The other feature of SBB clocks is that the second hand takes about 59 seconds to do the sweep, then it stops, and the whole thing kicks off again with a pulse exactly on the minute. Has anyone been on a Swiss railway station in the early hours in March or October to see how they do the summer time adjustment?

I thought about buying a Swiss-style clock once but they are horrendously expensive for what you get.

Strictly speaking, Fish was correct. Hurricanes contain *lots* of rain - many cm in a few hours, as well as the high winds & thunderstorms. All we got in 87 was the high winds, apparently caused by a 'Sting Jet' (see Wikipedia).

Re: Accuracy

Nice rant, but a tad misplaced IMHO. People do rave about breaking records, and sportspeople have individual goals, e.g. personal bests, that are very important to them, even though they may not be potential world record breakers. So the absolute measurement is important. But if you think about it, the time, distance, height, whatever is actually less important than the *ordering*. Sport is a competition, and the order is always supreme in a competition. As performance margins at the top in sports get narrower, it becomes more important to measure those small differences accurately. Hence the clever tech so admirably described.

Re: How long will we

@Cowherd: I get a distinct feeling of deja-vu reading this comment - seems to be recycled from a previous discussion on a related topic here.

For myself, Sizewell B is just up the coast from me, and I can't wait for them to get busy building Sizewell C. Also, as I understand it, future nucear power stations are going to be built on the site of existing closed Magnox & AGR stations, so it's not as if the locals aren't aware of nuclear power on their doorsteps. As far as I'm aware, the locals haven't turned up at nuclear stations in the past with pitchforks, burning brands and lynching ropes - It's deluded greenies who engage in that sort of behaviour.

I'm all for fracking too. Nuclear can potentially provide a large fraction of our demand, as it does in France, but the output of nuclear (at least current designs) can't easily be modulated, so gas stations (and Dinorwig) will provide that match to varying demand. Also, it'll take at least 10 years to get new nuclear online, even if someone can cut the Gordian knot of the planning process, so gas is the obvious interim fuel.

Re: Thermite

Dry and compressed thermite doesnt explode. It just gets very hot & produces molten iron. This is how they used to weld railway track, perhaps still do. Having said that, one of my teenage escapades was to mix a stoichiometric mixture of Al powder, & Ferric oxide, both readily available finely divided as pigments at the time, in a 1 gallon paint tin. However the mixture was very fluid, and I knew it needed to be compressed under vacuum but didn't have the kit to do that. So we stuck Mg ribbon in the top, lit it & retired immediately. The thermite caught, and the superheated air in the mixture blew the stuff into a fantastic fire fountain, followed by molten iron running over the ground (this was in a disused quarry). Sadly, today, I would be banged up as a terrorist for doing that:(

Re: Do my eyes deceive me, or...

I think you'll find, if you look more carefully, that it's Elvis with a suntan.

Re: Nothing wrong with BASIC (line nos)

What's wrong with putting __FILE__ and __LINE__ in fprintf(stderr,...) statements, or equivalent in other languages? I'm glad I got into this stuff before BASIC became popular, by which time I had moved on from FORTRAN taught in a 1 semester course at uni in '69, to Coral 66, PL/1, Pascal and even played with BCPL. It's funny, though, how playing with lots of languages pays dividends. I found I could easily hack on the ancient FORTRAN code in the NEC2 electromagnetic modelling program, and more recently some amateur radio stuff where the author probably uses FORTRAN because he used it all his career.

I've seen some funny code in my time, but the one that takes the biscuit is some C code (no names, no pack drill) that, if possible, is even more convoluted than a BASIC program and no, it's not a submission to IOCCC . Virtually no indentation (though that can be fixed with astyle), and too many gotos without reason. Perhaps the guy started with BASIC & never really escaped the mindset.

I do confess, however, that I've never really got to grips with functional languages and that programming style.

I dunno what his tech credentials are, but reporters often come across as Joe Thicko in the questions, because they have to ask the questions Joe Thicko won't have thought of 'cos he's thick, but still would like to know the answer, if someone asks it for him.

As for HTML, no it's not a programming language, and IMHO, HTML is crap to use for someone who is an occasional marker-upper. It really is the markup equivalent of assembler. Better to use some kind of web page development app that hides the ugly syntax.

Re: Err...

Or Python:

$ python

>>> print "Hello World"

Hello World

>>> def hello():

... print "Hello World 2"

...<2 backspaces>

>>> hello()

Hello World 2

>>><ctrl D>

$

Easy as Basic, no gotos, intro to classes & objects if you want to go that far. Its only drawback, if you want to see it as such, is the indentation as block structure, but since most programmers use indentation to clarify structure anyway, this is hardly a killer.