Dealing with NEOs by means other than nuclear demolition may well be possible. If we wanted to deliver large technical payloads in a timely manner, we might need a spacecraft with an engine delivering very high specific impulse, and to me that looks like the Orion engine -- pulsed nuclear fission with a very big shockabsorber between the drive plate and the rest of the spacecraft.

Of course we could just make a very big pointy DU ballistic impactor, and use an Orion engine to make it move fast enough...

... the tawdry newspaper, rather than the Borged-by-Oracle the-network-is-the-computer vendor. So no SPARC, Java or Solaris angle.

Should we expect Playmobil re-enactments of the proud parents dutifully obeying instructions from an iPhone?

Sooner or later someone is going to propose neutron activation scanning; after all, all explosives seem to contain nitrogen, so if we can detect nitrogen....

Except food nearly always contains proteins, which contain nitrogen. Excuse me sir, you can't take those foodstuffs through security.

People are also made of proteins.

Best of all, supposing there was an explosive that didn't contain any nitrogen ... how about ... triacetone peroxide? That 'Mother of Satan' stuff at the centre of the 2005 bombings and the liquids-on-aeroplanes scare?

So, no neutron activation scanning then, which is probably just as well. But I bet some fool is going to propose it anyway.

"Make the source code of the Cocoa frameworks available. At the very least, this should include AppKit and Foundation. Developers will love you for it."

Did it occur to you that AppKit and Foundation might contain someone else's intellectual property, licenced under terms which do not permit Apple to release the source? Or that key Apple engineers might have recommended opening the source ten years ago and the matter might have disappeared inside Apple's legal department, never to be seen again?

And yes, developers would love Apple for it -- not always developers on Apple platforms, mind.

"Stop using undocumented APIs in application code. Microsoft did it and got hammered for it."

Microsoft got hammered because they used undocumented APIs to create an illegal anti-competive advantage; interoperable SMB implementations are a different ballgame to nonstandard prettiness added to GUIs.

I find Apple's arguments about undocumented APIs to be convincing; if it's not documented then it's not supported and may change or disappear without warning in a future release. If I was a software vendor I would consider being required to document and support all hitherto-private APIs would be to incur a huge cost that I'd prefer to avoid.

No offence Dave, but I don't really see why The Register needs a Mac Secrets column about MacOSX software development at all.

I've done case cleanouts before, including laptops. Usually the material is fibrous, fine, and grey. It is derived from house dust, ie squames, ie tiny flakes of redundant human skin. I have once seen material that was pale blue ... that computer lived in a spare bedroom which was also used for doing laundry (the room, not the computer). The material had apparently been contaminated with cotton lint from freshly washed underpants.

What we see here is brown clumps. That's house dust with a tar/nicotine binder, as I once saw in someone's Toshiba Satellite Pro P30, courtesy of her ex-husband. Unlike house dust or cotton lint, the tar/nicotine stuff is harder to remove, and also mildly corrosive.

... but puny electric motors, a petrol engine big enough to break CO2 emissions targets and then stamp on the pieces, and the watts for the electric motors come from the petrol engine. No thanks.

If you say so Lester -- my understanding is that we shall have all drowned in a tsunami of melted polar bears long before then.

...Not to mention the specialist recreational apparel popular in certain circles....

Recreational, as opposed to workwear? Isn't it true Lewis that you were once an RN diver and as such you were allowed to, nay expected, to wear a rubber suit at work?

Anyway the specialist recreational apparel is generally made out of synthetic latex and not natural rubber -- see also http://www.fourdrubber.com/ .

Why not just calculate how long it ought to take the balloon to ascend to release altitude, and have some clockwork cut the string?

"each bottle will be hand-blown and presented in hand-stitched, leather-bound cases. Alongside the bottle, a leather-bound book will detail the whisky's history and enable owners to record personal tasting notes for each occasion they enjoy a dram."

Whisky oxidises in the presence of air, and there's enough air in a typically half-empty bottle to make a noticeable change to the taste; savoury Islay malts turn sweet. I don't generally drink that much Highland malt such as Glenfiddich so while I reckon it would change from sweet to sweeter, I can't say so from experience.

Generally then, once you've opened a bottle, if you want it to taste right, you need to polish it off. The dregs in a near empty bottle you've had for years will taste completely different to what the distillery's chief taster intended....

... so unless you have some fancy system to flush the airspace inside the bottle with nitrogen before shoving the cork back in, drinking one's £10k bottle nip by nip over several years is probably a flawed idea.

Tsk. So these bold aviators got tasked with some martial, beg pardon marital weaponeering, and got brought down by their own ordnance? Very poor.

Mind you, if this incident had involved a proper surface-to-air bouquet, I suppose that might have encouraged the Taliban to grow flowers other than poppies.

Well yes I suppose it is stating the bleedin' obvious, but ... doesn't that mean that if they get it wrong this time they're out, and it's gone for good? That'd be too much to hope for.

As a user of web forums, and seeing myself as responsible citizen, I naturally applaud something that will lead to the rapid exclusion of nuisance users.

However, some of the finest bullying, flaming and generally reprehensible behaviour I have ever seen on a web forum was down to one of its moderators. ['Fish' at http://forum.kismac-ng.org/ : this means you.] Could we at least have this two ways, so that if a forum moderator makes a nuisance of themselves they get excluded elsewhere just as if they'd been a user? No? Well so much for that plan then.

Incidentally ... since running a service like ReputationShare costs some money, not necessarily a lot, but some ... does LOOKBOTHWAYS Inc have a business model for this wheeze, or has she sorted out how to do everything with ReputationShare except pay for it?

These were on the BBC's entertainment^Wfactual show Top Gear last year.

Also ... does anybody remember the Channel 4 drama "Cold Lazarus"? One of the two scripts Dennis Potter completed while terminally unwell? Some of the researchers shown in Cold Lazarus were riding about in their lab in vehicles superficially much like these -- right down to the vehicle reconfiguring itself to change the seat pitch etc for differing speed-based stability requirements.

Nobody I know has had any problems of note with Safari 4. That's across a company with an average of more than two Macs per person, and all the private Mac owners I know too.

But then, right at the top of the article were the words "Ever since we upgraded to version 4 from the remarkably stable beta version". Nobody I know installed the Safari 4 Beta n a production machine.

Perhaps some Mac user at El Reg would like to back up their user data, wipe and reinstall, and then update to Safari 4.0.1? Bet your problems would go away then.

Yes indeed, the Managing Director/Senior Partner/Supreme Dalek/whatever he's called himself this week could decide that all machine names shall be the names of proteins, not less than 40 characters long and quite improbably difficult to spell.

Mind you, if the office LAN-botherer spells 'logfile' with two G's, even 'keratin' might prove problematic.

Come on, it must have been a Windows Mobile phone. PITA?

Mmmm what a nice picture; I'm not eligible to vote for her in any election where she is a candidate, but yes, that's a fine piece of electioneering. I could stand to see a bit more of that on the hustings.

But if we're still fussing about 88p for a bathplug, or a few quid for a phone bill that included internet and satellite TV and some also a dodgy movie or two .... well yes, I would feel most aggrieved about tens of thousands claimed for a mortgage that did not exist, but I'm sure I could be a lot more philosophical about a claim for Bulgarian airbags.

Isn't it about time the Labour Party spin doctors and image consultants started reminding Ruth Kelly to look more girlie?

Are you sure there are two?

Are you sure there's not just one but who has been counted twice?

I am a Claranet customer, have been for eleven years, and the only other interruption to service I have suffered on this scale in that time was when BT-operated facility in Ilford caught fire, and broke an awful lot of wholesale ADSL, not just Claranet's.

This is/was not rebuild a POP server. The error message displayed on the webmail login page for a time was: "We are currently experiencing service problems on the Claranet E-mail platform. Claranet Engineers are currently working with our Storage Vendor to rectify the situation.We regret any inconvenience this may causing you."

Claranet, between the business services and the retail services and the services shared with other ISPs they have bought or with which they have partnered, is pretty big. A lot of their stuff used to run on FreeBSD on SPARC hardware; I don't know how much of what still does. It always appeared to me, based on there being multiple public server names that one could use to configure sending or retrieving mail, that there were actual different internal servers providing redundancy and they were all capable of reading to or writing from the same disk files for serverside mail filters, mail filter logs, POP3 mailboxes, and so on -- presumably these files were in some way on a network share, which is not a configuration I'd have chosen, but then what do I know, never having had to spec up a mail handling system even a thousandth the size of this one.

"currently working with our Storage Vendor" I'm going to take a punt: that is to say, the controller card for the RAID went bang, the guy from Sun turned up within x hours as per the Gold/Enterprise/WeLikeJonathansPonytail -level support contract, and yet somehow, despite the customer having the biggest best support contract available, despite knowing what hardware the customer had, despite being told by the customer what component on what system had failed, the guy from Sun did not have the required part on the van.

The interruption to service was a nuisance. As best I can tell no incoming email was lost, and I (and every Claranet customer I know personally) had workable alternative provision for sending and receiving email. The biggest bitch I have right now is that the serverside mail filters aren't available and so 90% of the spam I get sent ought to be deleted before it hits my POP3 mailbox, but currently it's being delivered instead. Anybody want a stack of pointless emails from the likes of sue@casimme.co.uk punting ' ...Business seminar informmation'?

Most ADSL modem/routers have 100BaseT ethernet, and the WiFi isn't always great. Some ADSL/cable ISPs require custom firmware for connectivity. It seems reasonable to me to let the modem be the modem, and let something like Time Capsule be everything else, including a Gigabit ethernet hub.

not Millennium, but Mile Endium. I always said that Greenwich was the wrong place for that Dome thing

If we wanted to slash the current/future defence budget by cancelling expensive things we don't need for future wars: why not abolish the Royal Air Force?

As it stands, Lewis's argument in favour of having a capable Royal Navy, aircraft carriers, Fleet Air Arm etc is plausible right up to the moment where we have to fund it.

If we discontinued the Royal Air Force to save money and reassigned its assorted responsibilities to the Army Air Corps and to the Fleet Air Arm we taxpayers could be quids in, and the surviving armed forces would have fewer inter-service areas of responsibility: transport aircraft full of paratroopers might belong to the Army just like the paratroopers, and maritime reconnaissance and antsubmarine patrol aircraft might be being operated by the same Navy they were supporting.

Apparently global warming is now a cause of ursine lesbianism.

... according to Birdie Bowers's journal, Titus Oates's last words were a muttered grumble about not being allowed to smoke inside the tent.

Well, if it's to be Zep, or least to sound like Zep, best *not* to re-engage Percy. He doesn't have the pipes for it any more.

The problem is that Page et al selected him in 1968 because, then, he did have the pipes for it. There was only one Robert Plant at the time, and we have been waiting forty years for the next one. And there is no sign. After forty years of leading the Israelites through the wilderness, Moses did at least know that Joshua would be available for the leading-into-the-Promised-Land bit.

Mind you, as Promised Lands go, the O2 Arena is a bit lacking. [It's not much cop as the wilderness either -- at least one got manna from heaven for free.]

Now, I have seen Led Zep tribute bands, mostly in smaller venues, and on occasion the experience has been thoroughly agreeable. One does need a band that can actually play a bit, and whose members know and love the canon of work they are trying hard not to butcher. But just how badly is the singer going to mangle the opening scream in The Immigrant Song?

And on that last thought ... James and John (and Jason!) need to think really hard about whom to employ, if they don't want to sound like their own really naff tribute band.

no, no, no, this would never work ... if you tried to bake an infinitely large-sized loaf of bread the dough wouldn't rise .... it would probably undergo gravitational collapse.

"Hey Fred, look at my nice new VAIO!"

"Oooh lovely..."

[opens lid, see Vista logo]

Hope the thing's got an accelerometer to help it survive being dropped.

"Since paintwork seems to be more in demand than gunnery you had better come in and make yourself pretty"

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

... all those comments, and only once has 'rebar' been mentioned. Structural concrete does get a bit more durable if you add steel reinforcing bars to it. Well, the structure becomes more durable, while the concrete becomes less durable. Although somebody did mention the Pantheon, proof that you can make something really big without rebar and yet it will not fall down. [Although those pesky Romans did cheat as I recall by using extra-lightweight pumice as the aggregate in the top bits.]

But ... somebody suggested printing concrete Levvies? What's going on there? Does somebody mean to prefab Hebrew priests to officiate in some lunar Pantheon, or are they going to ship in the priests and use the inkjet thing to make them denim trousers out of concrete on-site?

Personally, I think some of the commercial possibilities of terrestrial concrete inkjet printing have been overlooked -- cheaper than HP, with stronger more vibrant monochrome etc etc etc.

Except that the MBNA call centre droid told me that it's being made mandatory soon for all credit cards. Which I very strongly suspect to be a lie.

What I know about Verified by Visa (aka 3DSecure, and probably some other names too) comes from having read the manual to support it in a webstore. It appears to me to be a move to a three-factor authentication scheme, where the third factor adds no strength because it is likely to be stolen or leaked or compromised by all the same means a black hat would use to get at the first two. Since the shopper's 'secret' will have been presented, under the terms and conditions, the shopper has no right to repudiate the transaction. Or put another way, this is a way of shifting credit card fraud losses from the banks to the shoppers, and the shoppers get no benefit from this that I can see.

Remember that bit Russell T Davies invented for "The Christmas Invasion", where the Doctor lost a hand and grew a new one? And how Captain Jack was toting that about as a Doctor Detector through Torchwood season 1? That's been hanging about in the TARDIS lately.

See also the publicity photos for this two-parter featuring both David Tennant and Camille Coduri, who wasn't in the first part.

But more importantly: since Steven Moffat of "Coupling" fame is about to take over as show runner, I anticipate that Doctor Who will soon become substantially less gay and there will be five assistants -- although one of the girlie assistants will pretend to be bisexual.

After all, how many words and euphemisms do we have for the sexual act, or ordure, and a bunch of other things? Surely we can safely withdraw some of them?

"Hello children. Today we are going to read the Decimated English edition of A A Milne's classic, Winnie The Shit"

"I can't believe you guys left out this one...you suck!!!"

... I myself would be loading that device with something cheaper than Ilford pro film stock.

... if the DoD were to ask nicely, perhaps the PLA might do it on their behalf.

Yup. MM = mei mei, "little sister", just how Simon Tam used to refer to River, his little sister. See also the Firefly Chinese Pinyinary...

Most cellphones aren't stolen because the thief wants the phone. Most get stolen because the thief wants the money/cigarettes/lighter/drugs/whatever that are in a bag that also contains the phone, and it's easiest just to take the bag.

If instead the thief is going through your pockets with one hand while holding a knife under your nose with the other (actually most thieves aren't that dextrous, they generally leave one of these to an accomplice), they will generally take your phone just to prevent you from using it to dial 999/911/112.

'Met Police study showed that a lot of "stolen" phones were insurance fiddles to get an upgrade' -- I suggest what this study really shows is that there *isn't a problem* in the UK with street robberies and the police *do respond* to 999 calls, in spite of what I happen to believe because of my experiences. So who did the Met survey then -- themselves?

OK I confess that I have actually read "Footfall", which as cited was co-written by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

That actually featured a coven of sci-fi writers being used as a thinktank. Isn't this all getting a bit recursive?