Escape plan?

Have they got two Soyuzes docked then? I thought the constraint keeping them at 3 was that a Soyuz only carries 3. Or if they need to evacuate do they leave 3 behind?

Handling liquid nitrogen

No more dangerous than handling boiling water. Only issues with using it in an enclosed space is filling the whole space with gaseous nitrogen to the exclusion of all oxygen.

John Smith's "replacement by Neil Kinnock"?

John Smith *replaced* Neil Kinnock, and was in turn replaced by Tony Blair (following a brief interlude where Margaret Beckett was acting leader).

European vs US market

How is the European market 'small'? Both Europe and the US are around 10 million sq km in size, and the population of Europe is at least twice that of the US.

Choosing them over a standard cable tie

My understanding (from the programme) is that you buy them in a roll, tie up tight around your cable bundle and cut off the excess which can then be used for the next cable bundle. With a standard cable tie, you throw about 90% of it in the bin.

There's certainly no doubt it's Andy's idea -- I was at university with him 17 years ago and he was wittering on about them even then. I think he'd already filed a patent.

poxy exchange rates

My 3.06 GHz iMac was £1500 last year. Now what appears to be a very similar spec machine is £1900.

more extensive list of satellites to choose from

Choosing which satellite isn't like selecting channels by doing a channel scan on a Freeview box. You have to choose one of the satellites that the dish is pointing at. So if your dish is pointing at 19.2E (I think this is the original Astra 1 constellation) then your chances of getting the Astra 2 satellites at 28.2E are zero.

Migration Assistant

My memory might be failing me, but I'm pretty sure I used the Migration Assistant over Ethernet about 6 months ago when I bought an iMac.

It doesn't surprise me

When you paste a filtered table from the Mac version of Excel into the Mac version of Word, it all appears to go swimmingly. Later you discover that whilst it looked like it had only pasted the filtered cells in, it's actually pasted the whole table.

Sounds like the same thing has happened here.

@Paul Buxton

An automated telephone system that definitely isn't "monitored or recorded for training purposes" right?

Presumably it would have some sort of voice recognition -- "did you say 'banker', that's 'b', 'a', 'n', 'k', 'e', 'r'?"

@Paul Buxton

That's great, but how would you set up a telephone banking password like that in the first place? Maybe make 3 calls to 3 different operators and give them 2 characters at a time?

Reminds me of the Python sketch where they tried to translate the world's funniest joke into German by having one person work on each word at a time. Somebody saw two words and spent several weeks in hospital.

@Tim

They *are* offering to return your files to you for free. As it's a backup service you should already have a local copy. If you don't, then you have until 30th October to retrieve one from their servers.

And to those touting USB disks as an alternative: what happens if your computer and USB drive are destroyed in a fire or stolen? My kit's insured, but the data (documents, financial accounts, etc.) is irreplaceable.

Always best to use a paid-for service for important stuff. By their nature free services are best effort and liable to be withdrawn at any time.

Scotch

The only things you should refer to as 'Scotch' are whisky, broth, mist, pancakes and eggs.

@mod cons

Don't fighters have ABS? Large commercial aircraft certainly do, in fact did so long before cars.

Richard Pryor?

I think it was a Ferrari 308

Construction and Use?

Surely an ordinary car with a contraption that size on the roof can't be legal in the UK?

jamming GPS

Jamming civilian GPS may be easy, but jamming military GPS (P-code) is bloody hard. The people who designed the system did actually consider that it might be jammed. One of the advantages of the signal being below the background noise (you can filter the noise because you know the pseudorandom code you're looking for) is that broadband noise jamming has no effect. And what with steerable null-point antennae, Kalman filtering, etc...

@big net

Missiles and bombs tend not to get on well with saltwater.

@Solid State Drive

Solid State Drive isn't really correct, as nothing is being 'driven' (no tape or disc spindle). Unless you count electrons as being 'driven'.

graphics card

Actually the top spec model has a 512MB nVidia GeForce 8800GS

It's already here...

They have this system as Lisbon airport. My current success ratio is 67%: I've been through the scanner 3 times, and it trapped me in the cubicle once. I think that was because I'm not wearing glasses in the passport photo and I was in real life.

@Richard Porter

Are you 'sniff petrol' Richard Porter?

@Space

Actually getting rid of heat from electronics in space is harder than you think. You have one side of your spacecraft heated by the Sun, and the other side at 3K or some such. And you have a bunch of electronics that gets hot and can't get rid of the heat via convection, only radiation.

It's for this reason that IR telescopes generally carry several years' worth of liquid nitrogen.

use cable and ADSL?

Would be great if you could use cable on one router and ADSL on the other, effectively using both NTL's and BT's broadband networks. That would offer proper diversity (or is it separacy, I can never remember which is which).

@Mark Otway

Don't you live in Edinburgh now though?

Anyway, if everyone did like you and turned up at the station early we'd be back in square 1...

Mars or Tattooine?

Looks like a Tusken Raider to me.

@Neil Robertson

For many years, Peugeot sold an electric 106 which did exactly what you require. However, I don't believe they ever marketed it in the UK although it was reasonably popular in mainland Europe.

Re: Search area

10,000 sq miles is not bigger than the UK -- by your figures it's about a tenth of the area of the UK.

10,000 sq miles is 'only' an area 100 mi x 100 mi

RE: Just a way of charging for nothing in particular

@bluesxman: that much is clear. 1571 is a free service. It costs BT to provide it. Therefore at the very least it must be revenue-neutral, which means it recoups its costs through charging the ringer the minimum call charge for connecting the call. I suspect it generates a fair bit more revenue than that though...

I don't think they understand rounding...

'Rounding up' and 'rounding down' refers to what you do with the case that is exactly halfway between the boundaries (in this case, whether you bill 1 min or 2 mins for a call of 1 min 29 s).

If they're rounding up it means they should charge nothing for all calls where 0<call_duration<30 s and 1 minute for all calls where 30 s<=call_duration <1m30s

500 rpm centre, 200 rpm edge

The reason for the difference is that the track goes past the head at constant linear velocity (unlike a record player). So the motor spins the disc at 500 rpm when the head is in the centre, dropping to 200 rpm as it moves towards the outside. That's why when you stick a duff disc in you can hear the motor spinning up and down as the head seeks from the inside to the outside.

regardless of the merits of -ize vs -ise...

...both are correct in (British) English. So Office shouldn't throw a wobbly if I choose to use "randomize" instead of "randomise". The only way to stop it doing this is to choose (US) English, but that has other problems.

no, I mean -ize

Check the Oxford English Dictionary, or Fowler's "Modern English Usage". -ize is the preferred form in British English, except for some specific words (e.g. advertise, advise)

correct spelling of words ending in -ize

I'm waiting for MS to realize that British ("proper") English allows, indeed prefers according to the OED, words to end in -ize rather than -ise. I have to set my dictionary to US English to avoid all those words getting little red squiggly lines under them, with the obvious effect that it puts red squiggly lines under "colour" instead.