Does this guy have a defence fund we can donate to?

This whole case has been a ludicrous waste of time.

In fact, can you prosecute the police for wasting their own time?

Hardware sales chart - http://vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?cons1=Wii&reg1=All&cons2=PS3&reg2=All&cons3=X360&reg3=All&start=39880&end=40244

The Wii is still selling 275k/week, compared to the 360 and PS3's 153k and 168k respectively.

While I fully expect Wii sales to slacken more and more, it's going to take a lot for the PS3 to catch up and then overtake the Wii on installed systems. The Wii currently accounts for just under 50% of the installed market. That's a very big lead to catch up.

Neither the 360 or PS3 show any significant trend upwards for the first part of this year. Sony are going to have to pull off something special to significantly increase their sales.

But that's "analysts" for you. I have yet to read anything by an analyst that turned out to be right.

It's a shame that Sony seem to have forgotten how to innovate. I'll be interested to see how well the new controller works, but they could have tried to leapfrog Nintendo (as MS appear to be doing with Natal) rather than just aping them.

Currently PayPal are the cheapest way to accept payments online without forcing your customers to signup for an account.

All the other options, such as Google, require you to have an account with them. PayPal let you just use your credit card.

There is a huge potential for someone to develop a proper alternative to PayPal, that doesn't charge you a fortune for the privilege of just having an account, and then screwing you on charges.

With PayPal I only pay for what I use, no setup fees, no recurring fees, just about 3.5% of the transaction value. And there is no need to muck around with merchant accounts.

Annoyingly there isn't anyone that comes close to that. So for small operators like me who are just starting off, it's still the only viable option.

I'd love to move to something better, so if anyone can recommend something please do.

If he's dumb enough to browse porn on his work laptop then he's probably no great loss to the civil service.

While I would love to see people back on the moon and mars, sacrificing the ISS and unmanned missions to help fund it was just dumb.

We should be concentrating on developing cheaper ways to get to orbit by fostering commercial competition, combined with a station large enough to facilitate some real science and the construction of craft to head out into the solar-system.

Spend the intervening time developing some of the interesting new ideas for interplanetary drives.

Just building more big dumb rockets to chuck at the moon was shallow popularism by Bush.

You all do realise that part of the license fee has always been for the funding of the broadcast infrastructure and the work of BBC R&D in developing new broadcast technology?

Don't you?

How is this any different from the terrestrial broadcast system?

Personally I'd rather the 5p of the license fee was spend developing a joint internet delivery system that any broadcaster can use, then all of them developing different systems all based on shit like Adobe Flash.

Yay for common sense.

Err, that's the whole reason why things have slowed down.

If you take out a node in the network everything routes around it, but that means the remaining peering points have to take up more of the slack, thus the network as a whole slows down.

You might want to read the RFCs yourself.

@Robert Carnegie

Shut up.

Verity, as usual, an excellent piece, as all of yours have been for the many years that Robert Carnegie has apparently not been reading them.

His loss (along with his sense of humour).

Loved the Erlang bit. That should be given to every first year functional programming student to see how long they take to spot the problem. Those that can't see what's wrong should immediately change to a pure maths course to save the rest of us from their code.

When I logged in and it gave me this choice, all the radio buttons were set to keep my existing settings.

I clicked one button to continue and carried on with life as usual.

So this is either a cock-up, or a change of heart on their part, or you are misrepresenting the situation to try an make it seem more interesting than it really is by setting all those buttons yourself?

The article doesn't actually make clear if the second image was what you were presented with, or what you set them to based on a recommendation by facebook (which I obviously didn't read).

At least not this really close range stuff.

If it worked over several feet then that could be quite cool, but these inductive chargers just seem pointless.

If I plug in a device, at least I can move it around within the range of the cable while it's charging. With an inductive system it has to sit on the pad all the time.

And is it really that much of a hassle to take a matter of seconds to plug a device in?

The only advantage to this seems to be that it is a going to be a single standard, so at least you can use one pad for everything. But switching all devices to micro-usb would solve the same problem.

"It is remarkable that two designers working on their own could create gloves that meet the requirements for spaceflight - a task that normally requires a large team of experts,"

That sums up NASA's past problems, and exactly why this sort of approach to some (but not necessarily all) of their technical problems can work so well.

I would think that most netbooks get much more abuse than more expensive and larger laptops. I wouldn't think of chucking my laptop around, but I'd be much more rough with a lightweight, and cheap netbook.

For some people that's the whole point, most netbooks are so cheap that people are less bothered if they break and are more likely to carry them round.

I'd love to move there anyway.

Visited once, really lovely place, terrific people, gorgeous country (and people).

I remember a guide book saying that Lillihammer was in the midst of a crime wave with up to two cars a week being stolen :)

I'm sure it has its downsides, but i couldn't see any.

I've never thought of El Reg as an IT News site, more a news site for IT people, with the kind of stuff we are interested in, not just IT stuff. It's a subtle distinction.

I've been reading for about ten years (or there abouts), and the reason I keep coming back is stuff like this. The last thing I want is the Register turning into some turgid IT site that spends its entire time talking about RAID controllers.

More Lewis, and more Bootnotes please :)

Oh, and this story just made my afternoon.

Mines the one with the dictionary in the pocket... to look up "enervating".

I hope it isn't written by the same team that gave us Flash for OS X, that thing is an utter resource hog. On my three year old MacBook (not new, but far from underpowered) playing a movie off YouTube uses about 90% CPU.

On the iPhone you'd get about ten minutes of play before the battery ran flat :/

Having said that, I would prefer to have it than not have it, just make it not suck please, ta.

I just can't work out what the pressing need is for this stuff.

If it was true, long-range, Tesla style, wireless power then I could see the point: walk into a room and you phone immediately starts getting a charge but can still be moved around.

These inductive pads still tie your phone/laptop to a specific place, which will still have a cable running to it (to power the pad).

All this appears to save you is the couple of seconds that it takes to plug in the device.

The funny thing is that this inductive charging is actually less useful. My mp3 player is currently plugged in while I'm listening to it, and I can pick it up to operate it and it will carry on charging. Do that with an inductive charger and you'll be running on batteries again, unless you pick yo the inductive pad as well.

Am I being thick? Is there some genuine benefit to this, other than saving a matter of seconds a day?

It's a shame that a lot of the press (excluding El Reg) miss the point of them. In their own words:

"Improbable research is research that makes people laugh, and then think"

It's not just sill science stories which the press then utterly misrepresent. A good example was the outrage that Defra spent money researching that ducks like showers. They were actually researching the best ways to improve hygiene on duck farms to reduce disease and improve animal welfare.

Of course all the papers could do was shout "Tax money spent to prove ducks like water!". And they wonder why scientists don't like the media.

While a lot of stuff in the ignobles seems weird or silly at first glance, when you actually look into it they are often quite interesting. And they often demonstrate the importance of researching things that are obscure, odd, or otherwise niche, and not just how to make the next shiny gadget.

I'll have my lawyers on you for libel for suggesting such a heinous thing. Shopping in Currys is up there with kiddy fiddling and listening to James Blunt in the league of shame.

I didn't say I *shopped* in Currys (or Dixon's as I still think of it), I just go in there to try out the radios in the hope that they've actually improved.

I swear most of the people in our Currys just go in there to take a look at things in the flesh, and then go home and order them online. That and annoying the staff with blindingly stupid questions.

There aren't many gadget shops in Bath, we take what we can get (or go to Bristol). There's a choice of Comet, Currys, or M&S's TV section. Not great :(

Oh, and I concur, DAB is German one-handed truck-driving technique.

If the panda was a form of giant cockroach, it would have gone extinct decades ago. It needs to eat an utterly useless food almost constantly to stay alive, and doesn't like sex.

There are far more important species (e.g. the bee, lots of amphibians) which appear to be going extinct at a disturbing rate, but because they are not cute and cuddly it's hard to get people interested. It's hard to get people worked up about insects and fish being wiped out, despite them being utterly critical to the rest of the system.

The irony is that without these lower order animals, half the higher order species will die out anyway, no matter how much people try to save them.

Oh, and pass the flamethrower....

Given all the hoops you apparently have to jump through to move data oversees, can someone explain how all those oversees call-centres work?

Is there some loophole that allows you to use thin-client style systems where the data all resides in the UK, but the operator is looking at it in India (or wherever)?

@Rob

You do realise that you have to pay your several thousand pounds tuition fees upfront from these loans?

Guessing you (like me) went to uni before you had to start paying £3k a year (plus top-up fees) for the pleasure of shit lecturers and substandard facilities, on top of having enough money to live.

The really dumb thing about this is that the hardest hit will be exactly the poorer kids who the government were supposed to be encouraging into higher education.

All the middle class kids will get mummy and daddy to sub them the money until the loan comes in.

With moving footage, rather than still images, it is possible to build up a depth model of the footage based on the way objects move in the field of view.

You can also to analysis of the images and glean a certain amount of depth information based on shadow and texture.

Modern image analysis is actually more advanced than many people realise.

This is one of those areas where CSI is not quite so far-fetched. The main difference is that it normally takes some pretty impressive computer grunt to process and quite a bit of time, rather than the few key-presses and a five second process time for the boys at CSI.

With the 1953 footage of the queen it is entirely possible that this was originally shot in 3D (hence the "rare" comment). There have been 3D systems kicking around for quite some time. Before the coloured glasses systems were invented there were viewer based systems where you looked into something akin to a pair of binoculars and the two sets of footage were fed to each eye. If this is the case, it would just be necessary to convert it to the amber/blue system, which should be pretty straight-forward.

@yinn

Agreed on the BMW-alike, especially the lights.

Still very pretty though :o)

With the 300mile extended range battery I can see this being a nice package (assuming you have a garage to charge it in).

At least Tesla are pushing things forward (albeit a bit slowly) in the leccy car field rather than ponsing around with silly hybrids that don't actually get the efficiencies they claim.

Battery tech is advancing very quickly at the moment, and workable ulta-capacitors are about a decade away, so I think the range will become much less of an issue in the next few years. It will take a while, but I fully expect to be driving a leccy car in about 20-30 years time.

Putting the issue of security measures to one side for a moment...

Why would a "trade body" need details of driving offence convictions, and the personal details of 37,000 people?

And why was it on a laptop in the first place?

Also, until companies start getting properly fined for stuff like this, they won't bother to act responsibly. The worst the ICO seems to give out is a mild rebuke, which is just not good enough.

@Mike 119

I don't know what they are, but it would be fun to find out