So all you need is a really deep mine shaft, with a very large cavern at the bottom, in watertight rock, where it's geologically stable enough that dropping a billion tons of water into it won't have any effect.

I suppose there might be bits of Scottish granite mountains where you could dig one, but it's going to be quite an impressive feat of engineering.

That's cos Forgemasters are dee-daas and therefore thick.

If instead of trying to borrow 80M they had bought derivatives in a credit swap in wippet futures the government would have given them 80Bn to bail them out when the deal went bad.

They ship dirty lignite coal to Poland, burn it there and pipe the electricity back.

The Germans get cheap power and clean air, the mining unions get to keep their subsidised jobs, the greens vote for the ruling coalition who got rid of nukes - everybody's happy.

The Poles get the shitty end of the stick - but that's what they are there for.

And the €0.1037 costs don't include having to keep an army in the middle east to protect 'our' oil supply or having to deal with rising sea levels putting London underwater.

Although personally I'm prepared to pay a lot more for electricity if it means the south east being underwater

The free market solution would be to have a refundable deposit on satelites, then people could collect them for scrap

Assuming he doesn't want paying.

eBay, all the credit cards and almost all banks do whatever the USA wants

Actually Mussolini just ordered the burning of waste shrubs in order to save coal.

He made the trains run on thyme!

I'm here all week .... try the veal ... remember to tip your waitress ....

If they find a wooden crate in a giant warehouse with millions of other wooden crates - they would be well advised not to take the lid off. At least if they don't want their faces melted.

It's all the moon's fault

I vote we blow up the moon!

Trouble is then you don't know in advance how long a second is going to be - the rotation is constantly changing - Which makes timing stuff a little bit tricky

Yes, but even if you are losing 1second per year it's going to take 12 * 60 * 60 = 43,000 years to accumulate 12hours of difference.

I think the proposal is to have a leap hour every few millennia to handle this.

That's about the least imaginative use for a computer.

The ethernet port shares the bus with theUSB so the throughput isn't great and you can get a Linksys router running Linux for about the same price with more hardware.

It clocks in at around 500bogomips, the Sparc2 I used to do Hubble image deconvolution on 20years ago was around 1/100 of that - so for advanced space research it will be great!

It does anything a Linux PC can do and plays 1080p video with hardware decode if your queue of pre-cospar Hubble images is running low.

The big problem with this fine is it's going to mean a return to the IBM / CapGemini / WAACTW getting all the contracts just so managers have their arse covered.

Indeed - risking your OWN money on what a company might do in the future, what kind of job is that ?

Ordinary people should go back to betting on serious stuff - like which horse can run around a field with a short arse on their back the fastest.

Didn't MSFT claim that the TCO was higher on Linux because you had to hire expensive Unix admins - instead of presumably worthless bargain rate windows BOFHs ?

Not often that a company tells you that if you want to be well paid and respected you should learn to use a competitors product.

Yes - if only you had instead learned the job control language for a 1980 Tandem Q42B you would be employable today!

School is about learning not training

How many olympic runners does the country need?

So why should PE be compulsory?

If you never expose the kids to something how do you know which are going to be the ones to take to it?

Which windows8?

So far there are three OSes for PCs tablets and phones - all called Windows8

It's not clear how compatible they will be with each other or with existing Windows code so most statements about supporting it at the moment are marketing speak

Windows8 for PCs is already out - just another gui rearrange.

I was hoping for roles as a hot asian chick before IMDB unfairly - although totally accurately - identified me as a 40year old Yorkshireman.

Or

I just duct-tapped a knife, nailfile, scissors and corkscrew together to make my own swiss army knife!

Obviously

If you are listening in to communications from all over the world - you have to be at the centre of the world - hence Chelmsford.

A similar reason for the UK space center being in Leicester

>I couldn't imagine anywhere worse to live.

Try being a nuclear physicist and working in the picturesque village of Aldermaston half way between the brightlights of Reading and the fleshpots of Basingstoke.

It's called jurisdiction

In international waters the pirates attack a Liberian flagged vessel - exactly what rights does that give the British navy to charge them?

You might also like to consider why you are spending British tax-payers money and risking British sailors lives protecting ships that their British owners registered in Liberia to avoid paying British tax or requiring British crews.

ps I not sure of the link between this and me ripping a CD to my iPod - but no doubt the RIAA can show that I'm funding terrorism somehow.

plastic sheeting ? you were lucky!!

we had to work out in t'car park, under a ceiling of crisp bags,

in a hurricane......

Imagine having a classroom of 20 2nd hand PCs which run a mixture of XP,Vista,Win7, where the 6 at the back don't have enough ram to run the compiler and the 3 at the front have weird issues with the video card if you run program X and 2 don;t boot unless ......

It's hard enough supporting that in a research lab with a bunch of grad students - no way does it work in a school.

Then with hopefully millions of these devices out there people will develop, and publish free online, teaching materials courses, tutorials etc.

so what

The fakes will still be buying the Broadcom chip.

If you have the tech to do a gate level clone of the Broadcom chip and can fab it in quantity for less than you can buy in bulk from Broadcom then you would already be in this market