@JP19 Re: Microwave Oven

With my old microwave oven, I noticed that my Wi-Fi speed dropped noticably when the oven was on. I suspect that this was not microwave radiation leaking out, but mains radiated interference from whatever crappy power supply module they used to drive the magnetron.

Re: Pass the parcel

That's right not-Spartacus, it's the modern way :)

re. making it complicated

Maybe there has to be an 'element of skill', otherwise it's an illegal lottery? (Just trying to think like a lawyer here - makes me feel dirty).

re. 'deal'

So, RBS agreed to let the government pour money into them, provided the government didn't interfere with the future running of RBS? That doesn't sound like a 'deal' to me; it's sounds like a charitable donation.

The situation was probably more complicated than that, I'm sure.

Re: re: Why were they storing credit card data?

I thought they stored an authorisation code (from the credit card provider) that was time limited and unique. That way, only the hotel could steal from you (if they wanted to) and nobody else could.

Re: Fair use

In terms of context it may be obvious and 'fair use' as you say. However, did you consider that Sooty (or the administrators of his estate) may object to his picture being used in an article in The Register?

Sooty had a clean and wholesome 'family' image and there are often obscene words in El Reg comments and many articles contain less than 'wholesome' humour. As such, this could tarnish and dilute Sooty's brand image and marketability. Just a cautionary thought.

I like the T-shirt ....

.... but you can't buy it on its own.

Re: A shame....hmmm.....

It's nice to have it written down, for reference.

Re: *to accommodate high-penetration renewable energy"

Possibly; but what does it actually mean, in technical terms?

@Thorne re. puppies/kittens

Your story does not make easy reading and is very confusing. Is there any way you could explain this 'scam' better, because it doesn't make sense to me, not as you've written it. (Note: I'm in the UK and if I was selling puppies, there is no way I'd ship one abroad so your example had my barriers up immediately.)

three hours eh?

Did you consider using Google Maps (or whatever) to show it to him, on the map?

re. collision avoidance on aircraft

Also, for large aircraft, there are ATC systems which have collision prediction and flagging tools to alert ATC staff; and large aircraft fly on predetermined routes at predetermined times. When they converge at at airport, there are established systems staffed by experienced people to monitor and direct them. The PAV will not have these systems (apparently) and so it will be a couple of orders of magnitude more difficult to predict/control and avoid accidents.

As for cars: In the town where I live, there are cars for hire that will take you where you want to go and you don't need to drive. They have built in AI that understands human speech (usually). They are called taxis.

Re: Utterly pointless effort by Google

Steady on Jon. You're talking about old fashioned analogue technology, which was replaced by the new digital methods to avoid all the problems with fidelity and copying distortion that went with that old fashioned and discredited technology. And you'd need another computer to convert and record the first computer's audio output; it gets silly.

Re: The only time I've previously heard of Habbo Hotel

When I first started running around the internet unsupervised, at the tender age of 40, I was shocked, saddened and annoyed by trolling and griefing in various places. After a while, I developed coping strategies and recognised behavioural patterns and markers that alerted me to the type of people I was dealing with. Now, it's water off a duck's back.

Maybe it's good for children to see trolling and griefing on the internet before they encounter the real thing in the real world.... develop their recognition and coping techniques at an early stage?

Re: Good for them

Is your real name Sidney?

Re: Tumbleweed-plagued Google+

"...most of Google+ activity is in private circles."

So, do you spend your evening jerking from one circle to the next, or can you take part in more than one circle at a time? (I do have a Google+ account but nobody has invited me to join a circle. I was thinking it might help if I made myself visible.)

Re: I'm so over pendantry.

I'm not. 'Birth' as a veb is often used for the physical act of giving birth, e.g. as in 'birthing pool'. The verb 'bear' has the implied sense of carrying along a burden (joyfully we hope) during pregnancy and also supporting a child after the moment of it's birth.

As such, for inanimate objects such as stars, to say that a galaxy is 'birthing stars' seems fine to me.

Re: Tense is everything... (but common usage prevails)

It's a standard way of talking about visual records. When you show a picture of a family gathering that was taken 10 years ago, do you say, "At the time this picture was taken, my brother was eating lots of cake", or do you say, "There's my brother, eating lots of cake."?

@Tigra 07: Re: My only question.... Point 2)

"...hanging around tall people will make you tall."

I tried that for a long time and it doesn't work. I know this is only anecdotal evidence but I thought I should share my observations on this one.

Re: As somebody...

Ok... set up and use icannstuff@mydomain.com, filter everything to go to spam unless it's from icann.com (or whatever they use). This is the technique I use to get rid of 99.99% of spam sent to my 'mydomain' email addresses. I also use yahoo adresses and autoforward them to a collector address at my 'mydomain' email address, with similar filtering techniques.

Re: As somebody...

You should have used a disposable Yahoo e-mail address for the application.

Re: The plural of 'chaos'

Chaos is a state/condition and is not countable, hence it has no plural. Consider 'happiness', 'loneliness', etc.

Re: Cern LHC has become the Augean stables

After reading that, my mind is now in a Perpetual Harmonic Oscillatory state.

Re: There must be

I think the sheer amount of data would overload all the public ISP routes across Europe.

Re: So..?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadoop

Here's a starter for you :)

Re: FOSS to the rescue?

"...you can make your software speak English like a butch German woman."

Whatever appeals to you AC :) For the child-user market, I'd think that the parents (and the children) would prefer a synthesised voice that sounded like a child. It may be possible to do this with clever signal processing or existing library modification. Otherwise you'll need some volunteer children to get speech samples from, to produce a 'better' sounding output from the speech library.