Imagine That !

"...rather more difficult than calculating the square root of -1."

Easy, it's 'j' (or 'i' if you're a physicist or a mathematician). No calculation needed.

Details?

"...to help kids from cash-strapped families do better in exams,..."

When I was a kid, I didn't have access to a computer and my family were cash-strapped, but I did very well in my exams. So, how does that work?

"...we want every home linked to a school."

I could throw a network cable over the fence to the infants school adjoining the back of my property, but I don't see what purpose that would serve and who it would benefit. (Having said that, I'm sure the kids would enjoy access to my large collection of music, films and cartoon series but they'd have to accept bandwidth throttling from my end).

Has any of this been thought through?

Believeable?

They may be efficient and effective, but would you believe a leaflet given to you by a robot?

Just wondering

Is that a bottle of Mateus Rose on the window sill? (I gave up trying to figure out what was happening on the bed).

More details needed

"...it will only run on a flash drives, and not traditional hard drives."

If it will only boot from a flash drive, I see no problem with that, since flash drives of adequate capacity are heading for a reasonable cost. The question would be, 'can it interface with a hard drive?' and the implication seems to be that it will not. Is this the case?

What about USB drives and network drives? So many questions.................

Are They Claiming Copyright?

It doesn't say as much in this article but it seems that Royal Mail are claiming copyright over the postcodes and their association with geographical areas.

I thought that for copyright to be claimed, there had to be evidence of creative effort, of some kind, that could not be easily done by someone else acting independently.

I could churn out a UK post code listing of my own devising with not much intellectual effort and the only reason it would be of no use is that no one else would be using it. Royal Mail claim they have put lots of work into this PAF, which is true, but that work was done in the furtherance of their own business activities, not for the purpose of selling the database as a desirable creative work.

If my post code is X21 2LM, that is a simple fact, with no artistic or creative merit and it is a fact that has been forced on me and everyone else who wishes to use Royal Mail (effective monopoly) services to contact me. They should have no copyright over simple facts which they have forced onto everyone else.

Maybe the local council will start claiming copyright over street names next. After all, it took a lot of creative effort to come up with Dangleberry Avenue and many a late night head scratching session was needed to assign my house the number '37'.

(I believe this has a good comparison with the TV channel programme listings, which are also simple facts.)

History is a valuable teacher, if you pay attention

I'm sure these publishers will get their act together in the same way that the major record labels have got their act together.

I can understand their concern.............

.......since when I was a child, my mother made me wear a blindfold whenever I did pee-pee or poo-poo. I still have that reticence and cannot open my eyes from start to finish until my body is safely tucked away and covered again.

The idea of seeing someone else's body fills me with horror and disgust. They are protecting us all.

Every little helps

"It’s a welcome that suggests you’re going to be helped through this experience rather than left to fumble on your own."

They seem to have got the psychological engineering sorted out nicely :)

Hello, hell, hello !

"Mark Stokes, head of the Metropolitan Police's Digital and Electronic Forensic Services ..."

"..Stokes, an electronics engineer who uses TrueCrypt on his own home computer."

I wonder what he's hiding on there? I wonder if his colleagues will ever ask him to hand over his encryption Keys under RIPA?

Is this where the money went?

"..the compute-intensive Black-Scholes financial modeling app,.."

This is just a renaming of the 'Black-Hole' financial management system that banks have been operating for the past few years. If it gets automated, we can go into recession faster and more effectively.

@John Square re. They had this idea

Perhaps in honour of the glorious Gordon, they can all wear Brown shirts.....?

It's Tough At The Top

"PCs belonging to individual councillors are scheduled as next on the list to be checked."

So, roll the checks out on the minions, catch a few and create internal awareness, then check the high ranking people - after they've had plenty of time to 'sanitise' their PCs. Brilliant!

From what I've read (a long time ago), these checking routines search for groups of pink(ish) pixels. Given that it's Nottingham, there may be some coalminers there who would be immune from these checks.

Understanding Going Down

"Free speech comes naturally here"

But surely you can't speak freely if your mouth.......................er...have I understood this properly?

@AC 06:44 re, Re:Re:Absolute pish

"You're brought up to be told what to do, and although this breeds people with a high IQ due to the comprehensive and exhausting education system,.."

Quite a mix of biological, educational and social assumptions there but I'm not qualified to say if you're right. Are you?

Back To The Drawing Board

"...a radical mix of Victoriana and sci-fi, represented brilliantly by Engineers of Desire.."

A reasonable starter description of Steampunk there. However, those Engineers Of Desire are just producing soft porn with a BDSM fetish base and a badly done Goth topping.

If a woman wears a corset, it doesn't mean she's Victorian. If she also wears welding goggles, it doesn't mean she's Steampunk.

Methinks a niche style bandwagon has been jumped on by people who haven't really made much of an effort.