The point is to get the message across

Not to actually fully shut down.

An error code won't explain to the masses why you're going offline - it will just bounce people away without informing them and they will be annoyed with the website itself for not working.

A big banner saying "If X, then we're gone. Please pressure your representatives against X.", will let everybody who visits know what you are protesting against and how they can help if they want to.

A link to the normal site content is perfectly fine and sensible - once informed, people can continue on with whatever they wanted to use the site for, and they'll be annoyed at the "X".

Only thing is, this SOPA/PIPA won't be going away permanently, so we'll have to expect a repeat of this blackout later once the RIAA and MPAA have paid off another few congresscritters.

- That said, they'll be a bit more wary now. Some of them are going to lose their seats over this fiasco.

@Turtle. This is life under SOPA and PIPA:

I write to your boss*, saying:

"Turtle has infringed my copyright. Yours, Richard 12"

Your boss fires you. (Stops paying you, blocks you from the building)

He has no requirement to check that either I do actually own the copyright involved, or that you have actually infringed it.

The only possible way of getting your job back is for you to go to court and prove that you didn't infringe my copyright.

This may be rather difficult, given that proving a negative is damn near impossible, and of course you have no money on account of having no job.

Story ends.

SOPA and PIPA are designed to do exactly this to any online business.

Still like SOPA and PIPA?

That is why it is a piece of **** legislation that could only be drafted by somebody more corrupt then anybody you could possibly think of.

Protecting the rights of content creators is important, but SOPA and PIPA do not do this.

- It's important to remember that the RIAA and MPAA have no interest whatsoever in creators' rights - their interest is exclusively in record and film distribution company profits. Look at the lists of members, that's who they are lobbying on behalf of.

*Technically this would really be your bank and your office building management companies, but that's probably stretching the metaphor a bit far.

@AC 08:51

Would you care to point us towards said data then, instead of engaging in ad hominems?

Insults from one camp to the other merely reinforce each view that the other side are moronic Eloi who couldn't recognise evidence if it danced the cha-cha shouting "I'm evidence"!

It doesn't help those who are undecided and is actively hostile to science.

To be honest, seeing that the sceptical posts did not insult anybody, yet those agreeing with AGW immediately rained insults back instead of data implies that the data is really rather scarce and the "popular" view of AGW is verging on a religious rather than a scientific basis.

I'll assume you aren't a scientist, as I would hope they would not be AC or engage in ad hominems.

I still find it odd* that while I have seen many variants of an "If we do nothing" curve, I for one have never, ever seen a graph of predictions showing temperatures "With Kyoto Accord emissions limits acheived"** against "At current rate of emissions/expected rate of emissions increase".

Perhaps it is only the media and politicians who refuse to show the data.

*Extremely concerning

**Or some other arbitrarily timed limit or reduction in emissions.

Politicians and lobbyists appear fundamentally incapable of dot-joining

Given so many of their "We must/will do X to get Y result" pronouncements, when it's pretty clear that the result of X is either not-Y, or actually Z.

Then there is the fun and games of policy-based evidence-making.

That said, there have been occasionaly outbreaks of common sense - eg Gove - unfortunately usually instantly rebuffed by the lobbyists - eg a certain NASUWT general secretary who gave a response diametrically opposed to her actual members wishes.

The arguments against SOPA start with "Punishment on allegations alone is illegal"

And several other such fundamentals of common law.

They continue with "An Internet that works is a good thing".

The Yahoo summary Chris 3 linked to is a pretty good one.

Of course, if the SOPA & PIPA concepts did pass into law then the most likely and fairly rapid result would be to cut the US off from the Internet, rather than the other way around. This would be fatal to a lot of companies, most of the in the US but many elsewhere who rely on US customers.

Except of course that it cannot possibly pass, because the first time it gets used will end up going all the way to the Supreme court, who will then eject the whole legislation as the unconstitutional turd it clearly is. Microsoft (Bing!) and Google have deeper pockets than the MPAA and RIAA put together - and they would both be badly affected by it.

Our marketing dept bought some

When they are used for Flash presentations where customers explore the features of %product%, the touch is great and works brilliantly.

When they are used as actual computers, the touch is never used and we mess about trying to get a mouse and keyboard connected neatly.

Some of that is down to the software - few to no software applications are designed for touch.

The other is exactly what Jobs said - a vertical touchscreen is tiring to use. It is fine as long as you rarely use it - eg only for selecting an individual item of interest, then using alternative input to manipulate it.

The reason is quite simple - you cannot accurately position your hand in mid air for any length of time. That's why mouse and trackball work so well, because you're resting your arm on the desk.

In the consumer devices world, Linux won a long time ago.

Your TV, PVR and STB are almost certainly all running Linux.

As is your NAS, and in fact pretty much all "network appliances" including many ADSL and cable routers.

The code running on top of the kernel is usually a closed source blob of course.

I suspect that most Western households have more TV+STB+PVR devices than mobile phones and x86 PCs put together.

Just because it hasn't got an obvious desktop, doesn't mean it is not a computer. Running Linux.

Seems like El Reg have in fact sneakily replaced the photo between Dean4 posting and me reading his post.

Sorry Dean!

Back-of-envelope calc for Model B - approx. £30 delivered to UK

Unit: $35 = £22.84 to £23.36*

VAT @ 20%: £4.57 to £4.62

Postage: £1.58 (1st class) or £2.35 (1st class tracked)**

Handling (eg CC fee, box): £1 (estimate)

Total: £29.99 to £31.38

*Today's XE and Post Office rates.

**From the Post Office - anywhere in the UK, including the Highlands and Islands, Scilly Isles, and the Isle of Man.

To those moaning about PSU, SD Card, mouse, keyboard & display - at no point did the "quote" ever even hint at including any of those.

No, that's the real Model B.

Ok, not quite:

The GPIO pin header top-left is a do-not-fit*, the tiny blob of solder between the Raspberry logo and the CPU is a PCB errata fix that won't be on the final units.

The SD card holder may also be different, but that's not shown in the photo.

Other than those minor differences, it's exactly what I'll be buying in a few weeks time.

Yes, the "spider web" form factor is less than perfect, but the connectors (inc SD on the left) nearly fill the edges of the board, so what else could be done?

Expanding the board size would increase the cost, and it would be a shame to lose the RCA Composite video and stereo jack.

*They decided to let the end user solder on the GPIO pin header, as nobody has yet decided whether male, female, up, down or sideways connections is best for daughterboards.

Plus it saves a few cents - thru-hole pin headers are expensive to assemble.

"Ill considered"? I think not!

All those piercings in "private" places were obviously smart people getting future-proofed for devices like these.

Now they're all healed up and ready to clip their CPU up to their *ahem*, who's the foolish one now?

You know, it does bring a whole new meaning to the phrase "F***ing computer!"...

Ok, I'm going, I'm going...

Windows 7 Embedded only came out in late 2010.

Up until then Windows XPe and Windows CE were the only embedded MS Windows.

Ok, there was Windows Vista Embedded as well(!)

It takes at least a year to certify an OS for this kind of use, probably longer in military - important, as sometimes an OS can kick you in the teeth for unexpected reasons. (Resource allocatoion counter bug? You bastards!)

You really don't want to run a normal desktop OS for this kind of thing. You want to remove as much unnecessary stuff as possible, and for Windows that requires an Embedded version. (Linux is much easier to strip down to its underwear.)

They need learn to code *because* the jobs are going overseas

The only major industries we have left in the UK are Service/Retail, Banking and High Technology. There are others but they are pretty small and unlikely to grow in the near future.

Service and Retail don't actually make any money for UK Plc as you can't export either of them, they only redistribute wealth. Very important to society, and a lot of jobs here but doesn't affect the UK's import/export balance sheet.

Banking creates money out of thin air, but much of it is "economically useless" as Adair Turner said, and doesn't employ very many people and is unlikely to grow in terms of jobs as it's already mostly automated anyway.

High Technology is extremely exportable and the UK really does make a lot from this - things like satellites, electronics designs (ARM is *huge*), and software. Maybe we don't manufacture much of it - but we do design it.

Unless we get a notable number of our children into that high technology sector, the high-tech jobs that companies need will go somewhere else and the UK will be properly screwed.

So yes, we do need to teach our children to code, because then we'll find the x% that are great at it much earlier and can inspire them to be the next ARM. or CGI house. Or something else that nobody has even thought of.

At present we're teaching those kids an "ICT" that is really "How to use MS Office". And that is boring - for a start, there is barely enough to fill two terms, let alone a full GCSE course. To make it worse, the pupils that find it most boring are the ones with an aptitude for real IT - so we're deliberately discouraging the very people we need.

Step 1 has become unreasonably complicated

There are a huge number of channels, and repeats of a particular episode are hard to locate and identify.

- If you miss a particular programme or episode, it is incredibly difficult to determine which of the many repeats acros various channels is actually the one you want.

- Even if you don't miss one, it can be really hard to work out whether a given upcoming programme is a repeat of something you've already seen or a sequel/later episode/new series.

Most of the TV Guides are ludicrously hard to use, showing hardly any information at all.

Step 3 is very much out of date. I watch very little "Live", my PVR records it and I watch it later at my convenience.

Personally, I think the Space Shuttle ran for too long

Seriously, it should have been replaced with something better many years ago, instead of keeping the old dinosaur running. The Shuttle wasn't anywhere near as reusable as it was supposed to be, and a heck of a lot more expensive per launch.

Unfortunately, because it wasn't replaced and nobody was even working on a replacement, we're now in a situation where it got cancelled with no replacement the moment the economy got bad.

Orion looks like a bad joke - It's only a bigger Apollo, far too little, far too late. Hopefully cheap, but I doubt it given the main contractors. It won't fly for several years anyway.

At this rate, China will have cheap, manned heavy lift and return long before the US gets it back or the ESA (ha!) get any at all.

Solar panels are for sissies.

This one is a nuclear-powered LASER-armed tank of a machine.

More seriously, dust buildup on the solar panels of Spirit and Opportunity wasn't expected to be an issue because there's only a lot of dust during the stormy season, which was well after the original mission was expected to have finished.

WP7 plays really badly with your PC

It barely plays with your PC at all - instead, it connects to the Microsoft Cloud (Windows Live) or a corporate cloud (Exchange).

So you have to put damn near everything of interest onto that, and there is no other choice.

I would hope that WP7 does at least allow USB Mass Storage connections to download your photos and MP3s without sending those via the Cloud, though I don't know that for certain.

It is in fact the case that Android and even iOS play better with your Windows PC than WP7, as those allow contacts sync without using any Cloud.

They all want you to use their respective Clouds to backup and sync contacts, but only WP7 forces you to use it.

Dual core lets you do a lot of clever things

You can have two "slow" cores instead of one really fast one, with the same total MIPs, and still have a more responsive phone by reducing task switching overhead. This may also use less power while being faster!

You can turn one core off entirely when you don't need it - This saves much more power than slowing down a single core, because there's a lower limit to the clock speed you can go and still have the phone handle basic tasks. Like GSM.

Or even better, that big.LITTLE idea - fast core for high-performance stuff, slow core for small stuff, and turn off the fast core when you don't need it - saving a lot more power than slowing down the cores.

More RAM makes no difference to the OS in either case, but does mean you can run more memory-intensive applications - eg spreadsheets and PDFs can eat RAM for breakfast.

There are a lot of corporate Intranet utilities

that were designed specifically for IE6.

They are effectively screwed - they can't upgrade the browser because the web services won't run on the new versions, and they can't upgrade a given web utility because the upgraded/replacement version won't run on the IE6 that everybody has.

Thus any upgrade has to be absolutely everything at once - browser and *all* Intranet services.

To make it worse, a lot of these IE6 services are legacy with no support or upgrade path at all, so would need to be completely replaced to allow the others to be updated.

Thus a way to make IE8/9 handle their legacy applications transparently is quite valuable, as it gives them an upgrade path to escape the clutches of IE6, and then the risk of updating individual web services is greatly reduced.

Erm, no. Araldite is a two-part epoxy resin

Same kind of stuff that's used in fibreglass to hold the glass fibres together.

Superglue is correctly known as cyanoacrylate - the Loctite you are probably thinking of is cyanoacrylate, however Loctite make a great many adhesives (I *luff* 242 - medium strength threadlocker)

As to why superglue is best at sticking thing to your fingers - it was designed to be a quicker alternative to sutures in the battlefield, so the whole idea was to stick flesh together!

It's only an accident that it happens to be able to stick other things.

- It's also water-catalysed, so you get a much better result by ensuring that your fingers are absolutely bone-dry before starting.

They shouldn't have been doing that

You should report them to the FCC each time it happened, because it is technically against the law for them to transmit in the UHF bands without a licence, and interference with TV is the one situation where they actually care.

As an earlier poster said, TV may get flaky in places if whitespace devices really do take off so you're probably trading an intermittent problem for a permanent one.

Although thinking about it, if they were interfering with your TV then they weren't using whitespace anyway, so they will keep doing so.

My guess is that they don't

Perhaps a low-resolution stream from each 'segment', and then particular segments of interest can be chosen for full-resolution imagery.

Alternatively, a low framerate - 1 full-frame-per-minute is not a very high data rate, and something like that is probably more than sufficient for most surveillance purposes.

Again, segments of interest could then be chosen for higher FPS - once you see a possible target start to move, start following it at a much higher framerate while the rest of the camera continues at the low 'base' framerate.

Perhaps the whole image could be captured at the high framerate but stored locally until required, thus you can still 'rewind live TV' while the bird is in the air and also have the whole thing available for detailed analysis once the helicoptr comes back to ground.

I doubt it can stay on station for more than a few hours anyway, simply due to fuel.

TV UIs are really a solved problem

It's unfortunate that only some enthusiasts writing for the old Topfield have actually done it - MyStuff for Topfield was really, really good two years ago. Certainly the best multi-channel TV UI I've seen to date.

The current Humax UI is a close second - it's the best "out-of-the-box" TV UI I've seen.

The Sky UI is the worst I've ever seen - it shows you hardly any information whatsoever, most of the time you're better off channel-surfing to find the programmes you want.

Sony, Samsung and Panasonic have pretty poor onscreen guides, seeming to think that logos and graphics are more important than the TV guide itself. Hint - logos go on the box and during boot. Information goes on the screen.

- Sony also appear to think that users stare at the remote and press the buttons with a stylus. Seriously, who puts the menu home buttons that close to navigation arrow keys?

I have not seen the Virgin Media TiVO service - anyone used it?

So why didn't the patent guy say so?

As far as I can tell, that argument is specious anyway.

HP et al should only be granted patents for specific devices they've constructed. If somebody else comes up with a different way to make a "memristor" then all power to them, and if the owner of an alternative patent complains they should be thrown out immediately.

Rather like the NPN transistor, IGBT and MOSFET are rather different devices with quite similar characteristics.

If he's worried about this becoming a patent land grab then it's the USPTO that are at fault.

Your title and content don't match

LightSquared have licenced a band designated for Sat-to-ground communication, and are trying to use it for ground-to-ground communication.

Sat-to-ground means that the signal strength at all points on the Earth's surface will be below a certain threshold, regardless of location.

Secondly, the range of signal strengths in the 'coverage area' will also be very uniform as the distance doesn't change much within the area. Eg for US coverage you can't significantly change your distance to a geostationary satellite covering the USA without getting into a rocket.

Thus the signal strength of all competing signals in the band are within similar limits - a receiver will never need to cope with an unwanted signal more than a few dBm above the wanted signal.

All GPS (and satcom equipment*) were thus designed based on these fundamentals.

Ground-to-ground negates both of these protections - it is easy for someone to halve the distance to a ground tower, quadrupling the signal strength. If the system is designed with 100 mile range, then all receivers will have to deal with 1 mile range (and less!) as well as 100 mile range - thus the unwanted signal strength in a pretty close band could easily be over 40dB stronger than the wanted.

- Every halving of the distance is ~6dB increase.

That's a huge filter requirement (much tighter than WiFi), and I really doubt that any practical GPS receiver could really cope - tight filters are physically large, and GPS units are really, really tiny these days with very tight power budgets.

The real problem here is that LightSquared appear to think they were given a go-ahead for this a while ago, when there is no way this should have occurred. I suspect that what actually happened is that the FCC said something like "Ok, if you can prove it doesn't break GPS and other satcom", and LightSquared are now claiming "If GPS is redesigned it seems ok" as a yes. It's not - you do not get to move the goalposts after the game is over.

If this does get a go-ahead, it can only be in the basis that LightSquared pay the full cost of rebuilding/replacing all affected units - worldwide, including home visits out of hours.

- Tourists are going to be rather annoyed if their EU GPS navigation thingy doesn't work in the US after they shell out for the US maps.

*The ground end of Satcom almost always has a directional antenna. Even Iridium uses a "point it upwards" antenna, although it's clearly not as highly directional as a dish or bucket.

Gah! I hate this...

20% to 44% is a >100% increase in efficiency, or a 24 percentage point increase.

The difference is extremely important!

As an example, if your 5% AER mortgage interest rate goes up by "10%" then you are going to care whether it's gone up to 5.5% or 15% AER.

(If it's gone up by 10 percentage points then you probably need to remortgage, and quickly!)

HDCP was intended to stop this happening

In my experience, the primary effect of HDCP and similar has been to piss off business CEOs who want to show their home videos at conferences, but can't because it won't show on the secondary monitor. We had to set up some rather convoluted video paths to get around it.

- Amusingly, the biggest effect Windows Genuine Advantage has had on my life was to delay the launch of Intel Centrino/Windows XP Media Centre edition, forcing Microsoft to pay up for a satellite broadband link just to verify the computers they provided!

(They would not log on without WGA sorting itself out, and we couldn't use the manual method or even connect to WiFi without logging in. Well done!)

Which would be approx. £370 p/a at the domestic electricity price (12p/kWh)

23 year payback period for 20 or 25-year rated panels and 10 year inverter.

Or somewhere in the region of £150-200 at the commercial generation spot prices (~6p/kWh), a more than 40 year payback period. Try that with your bank manager.

They're getting that much *entirely* due to the domestic subsidy of 45.5p/kWh total.

Assuming your figures are accurate, they have generated approx. 3000kWh p/a this year.

Thus they are taking somewhere between £1000 and £1250 out of the pockets of everyone who does not have a solar PV array installed - eg those who don't own their property and those who don't have access to that much liquid capital.

If the subsidy does actually drop by 50%*, that means 23.75 p/kWh, so they'd receive about £700 and only be taking £400 out of your (and my) pockets each year.

This new breakthrough is a really good example of why this subsidy is stupid - solar PV is still new, still evolving. If that money went into research instead of the pockets of the better-off then we might actually get commercially viable solar PV or other renewable systems.

*There's a court action by the solar PV installation industry, who know damn well that without the insane FIT they are screwed. It's never been green, it's always been about money.

The TV guides are provided by each channel

As a broadcaster or publisher you get the data direct from the channels in question.

You can then ask for clips of specific programmes to do the mag writeups.

That said, you're absolutely right that TV guide info should never go through a censorship application. If there's objectionable material in there then that's the lookout of the channel - it's ITV that gets bollocked when the X-Factor offends, not Virgin/Sky/Freeview/Freesat.

Once Virgin re-write any of the TV guide data then they're opening themselves up to a bollocking from OFCOM, as it then becomes easy for the channel to claim they didn't put the objectionable content there, must have been Virgin - especially if nobody on other broadcasters objects!

That place is deliberately blackholed by my machines for being utterly useless and cluttering up my Google searches. "Pay for a result that probably won't be useful anyway". Nope. I'm not going to pay for support from a company I've no service agreement with.

It does look like PigeonRank agrees with me, as it didn't turn up last time I searched on a non-sanitised machine.