@hate to say it

"But these are WILD animals whose behavior is unpredictable. "

That's not true, so long as you listen to them, pretend to enjoy the stupid chic-flic and feed them enough chocolate they can be quite placid

DVD vs Streaming

Yes, downloading the entire DVD or Blu-ray isn't going to work at the moment for most internet connections.

But people that want the Blu-ray version, or want to watch every extra on a DVD aren't Netlfix's market. Those people buy the disk, and the directors cut, and the collectors edition, and the special metal tin. Netlfix's competition is renting from blockbusters or buying a Fox movie package.

Compared to regular cable viewing quality Netflix's streaming is fine.

No you can't buy DVDs to rent

You need to buy an expensive license to rent out the DVD.

There was a company (can't remember the name) who were doing a Netflix type service where you rented the physical DVD, but instead of shipping it to you they physically put it in a drive at their site and streamed the content to you. Their claim was that since they weren't copying the disk and only the single viewer was watching it a time it was exactly the same as a rental.

- They got slapped to death.

First sale doctrine doesn't give you unlimited rights to copyrighted work.

Control group

Perhaps it's the bikini that is protecting them from the sharks?

Where is the control group of bikini-less young women ?

It was broken!

Does anyone seriously think that shipping physical DVDs to people is the future of watching content at home? If they do then my new, "web page delivered on a floppy" service is for you!

The same people who said this was crazy are the ones saying that Blockbuster should have got out of physical stores and gone online 10years ago.

They definitely botched the launch - they could have done it better. Or kept the DVD business in house but wound it down - separate prices for new customers, make it an extra charge option for existing renewals. Although supposedly one of the reasons for spinning it off was that Hollywood were charging twice as much for DVD+online rights as online - irrespective of how many DVDs actually shipped.

The bad thing about netflix here is that the choice is terrible., Except for a few old BBC programmes and some art movies you have never heard of - you had better like "straight to service station bargain bin" sequels. But until Hollywood realise this is the future nobody else is any better

Re: Sorry

Then that's even worse. They have had cheap technology for putting low data rate sideband info in audio streams for years, now the solution is for a toy to connect to your wifi (how do you enter a WPA password on a Dalek?) and then to the BBC servers and hope the latency isn't too bad.

Good job subtitles have already been invented or they would be using twitter - or sending you SMS texts !

@Intellectual armed robbery

Before publishers - institutes used to publish their own journals and swap them with other institutions. Then in the 20c it became too expensive and inefficient to run your own printing press and so commercial journals took over.

Now it seems that universities would be better off running their own on-line journals again.

Sorry

But is this supposed to be impressive ?

Inventing searching the text of subtitles - just as real image search "find an image with green tree on rainy landscape" is starting to work.

Adding RDS to a digital radio standard that everybody except the BBC has abandoned.

And a sound activated toy that was on Tomorrows world 20 years ago. 10 years ago I worked on modifying it so that the hidden audio codes could survive MP3 - and it was old boring tech even then.

@Absolutely

Sensible policies for a fairer Britain!

DD Limits

The reason for the limits generally have nothing to do with safety and everything to do with politics.

Set the limit at 0.8 = 1 drink and the opposition accuses you of being soft on drunk driving, so they propose 0.4, you counter that you are tougher on drink-driving and make it 0.2, .....

Then somebody who has no idea how science (or possibly counting) works decides to make it 0.

Pretty impressive technology though - to pick up a single O-H bond in 250 moles of blood volume (say 10E26 molecules) just by blowing into a bag.

How do you know?

You compare your time with the average of a bunch of other clocks around the world.

Some individual clocks drift faster or slower - if yours stays at the average you are the winner.

You have to love the NPL attitude, leap seconds will become unworkable in only 1700years and if a massive comet hit the earth everyone would have to adjust their watches.

@cool

Lowest point is Antoiniadi Crater -9.12 km, highest is on the dark side so doesn't have a name - it's romantically called (latitude 5.4125°, longitude 201.3665°) about 10,786 meters

You can get much higher mountains on the moon because the lower gravity doesn't pull them down and with no liquid mantle there is noting for them to sink down into.

Sea level on the moon is simpler than on earth, the moon is much more spherical (because it's solid and doesn't spin as fast) so you just pick an average distance form the centre. No two agencies seem to agree on the distance though

@Possibilities

Sufficient silicon, only need to brush up against them, convenient height for turnstyles and bars

Knocker-Knocker communication could be big!

@Lydonator

Like the way that the $79 kindle shows you an ad before you read the book that you paid for ?

Not just curry cooks

What about all those other foreigners that come and work here?

Surely we should be retraining British unemployed to be priests, imans and rabbis?

Alongside the opportunities for stripping shouldn't Sheffield job centres also offer the opportunity to retrain as religous leaders to redundant steel workers?

Needed - actor with stubble who thinks they are Jesus

Surely a role for Mel Gibson ?

@out of curiosity

Yes the UK uses a circular target with lines about the thickness of a road. For secrecy these are combined with the normal road network - the use of 1000s of them suggest a massive fleet of UK spy satelites.

however the Hanger Lane gyratory is still believed to be a message to aliens

But if you can't trust the professional cabin crew

Can you trust the flight crew, the maintenance crew, the cargo loaders, the fuel truck drivers?

If the cabin crew think that a phone in flight mode can crash the plane - perhaps the pilots believe that waving their arms around and making jet noises keeps it flying, perhaps maintenance think that engines should leak oil and tanker drivers think lbs and kg are the same thing.

Odd choice of camouflage

The natural enemy of ultra-flat, ultra-reflective, ultra-expensive dielectric laser mirrors is dust.

Judging from the colour they painted it - they don't seem to have realised this.

Can we think of any circumstance in which the American's might want their army to be used in a dusty sandy country ?

Sinclair

Sinclair's ability was not only to employ bloody good engineers - but to let them get on with it.

He's quoted in one of the books about British industry that "employs an engineer on a salary of 20,000 but quibbles over buying them a 20quid tool to do their job" .

Unfortunately this attitude eventually sent the TV outfit bust when everybody in the village could apparently bill anything to Sinclair withotu question

Ermmm

As a mere astronomer with a PhD working on AO and high resolution systems - I would hate to suggest that they are "aving a larf"

There is a very big difference between an atmosphere very close to you tilts the angle of parallel light arriving from a distant object - and the disturbance of light with an atmosphere all along it's path.

Without getting into lots of details of Cn2 profiles and near-field phase screens - it's the difference between pressing a body up against a bathroom window and looking at that from a distance, and pressing your eye up against a bathroom window and looking at a distant body

Goldman Sachs

If Goldman Sachs announced it was wednesday you wouldn't believe them!

"removing roofs or cutting holes in walls?"

Massive floods tend to handle roof and wall removal for you quite efficiently

Degree a bit of a waste of time then

Degree + experience OR 1000 jet experience.

PhD OR 3years experiences teaching kindergarten.

So they can have scientists or just a bunch of people with experience of bombing Iraq and another set reading them a story and telling them it's nap time

OpenACC

Translation - we like CUDA, write for CUDA and you have to keep buying from us, please ignore openCL. But we have to look like we are open, standards compliant and no-propriety to get government contracts so we will simply propose our own.

Ironic because if you use the non-proprietry, open standard, openGL on PCs you are pretty much stuck with buying NVidia because nobody else writes drivers worth a BEEEP

I feel old

I'm the same age as the 8008 !

And on the reg...

All users posting as Anonymous Coward will have to prove that they are not only anonymous but also a big girl's blouse who is afraid of spiders

Burn the heretic

"put the paper outer-casing in the bin"

Anyway shouldn't really greenies be making their own wine and thus stopping the global exploitation of French peasants?

Bomb belgium

Obviously evidence of a secret Belgian nuclear weapons program.

Never heard of a Belgian nuclear weapons program? Well that shows how secret it is!

.... News just in .....

Following the discovery that Belgium doesn't have any oil it has been decided to invade the Shetlands instead.

@Mayan Balderdash

But what about all those old Cobol programs written by Mayans that only used 4 digits for the date?

Gravity no big deal

Gravity is pretty insignificant compared to the magnetic forces on the plasma. And the main problems is keeping it away from the walls as it goes round the donut - rather than it falling onto the floor.

This setup is just useful for research because it lets you have a very small bit of plasma just sit there for a moment while you measure it.

Re: Not knocking ARM

1.9Bn cores, $20M profit - so 1c per core

While Samsung makes perhaps $5 on fabbing the chip

And Apple makes $300 on the phone

ARM makes less/unit than the chinese peasant putting them in the boxes

As I said, it's not an attack on ARM - but on all those politicians/economist/business leaders who announced that the UK wasn't going to any of that old fashioned metal bashing "making things" but was going to lead the world in intellectual property and financial products.

How is the financial products industry working out by the way?

Not knocking ARM

It's just that on the global scale of computer companies it's like promoting Dutchy Original shortcakes as a great British success alongside McDonalds, or comparing Morgans to VW or Toyota.

And these are the greatest success that has come out of the country that invented the computer in the first place!

Single UK currency

It did always used to confuse me how London and Frankfurt were SO different economically that they couldn't possibly share a currency while Chelsea and Barnsley were so similar that it was ridiculous to suggest they couldn't

I suppose it's the same logic that says decisions mustn't be taken by distant bureaucrats in Brussels, but it is essential that decisions about Gateshead are taken in London.

A 'British' success

ARM while a clever model with lots of clever people made a profit of $20M last year - Apple made nearer $7Bn

While licencing and intellectual property is a nice business it's putting products into people's hands that really makes coin

@Strange

WWI was partly over German access to Iraqi oil.

Navies had started fueling their fleets with oil rather than coal and so it was vital that the Hun didn't get an advantage over the Royal Navy.

The first battle of WWI was ironically on the road to Basra

Non-euro solution

For Britain thenm is to "do a Lira" - just print more and more pounds.

So the pound goes from $2 to $1 to a fraction of a euro.

It does mean that a lot of British brick layers will be hired in Poland as cheap labour and Dutchy-Original biscuits will look like a bargain in France. Good job we don't have to import any raw materials for our non-existent industry though.

@Soros

It will be interesting if the truth ever comes out as to why Britain didn't join.

Did Brown have the 'real' figures for Greece/Portugal/etc - and if he did why didn't Kohl?

Was it just domestic politics - he would have lost the NF vote if he had introduced foreign money?

Was he afraid of the house price boom if interest rates suddenly halved to German levels.

Did the city fear losing it's currency trading?

Did the Americans 'persuade' Blair to stay out to keep the Euro cap under the $ and stop it become the default oil currency?

Since British banks are still on the hook for euro debt anyway it's not necessarily such a blessing.

According the US GAO

Last year they intercepted 1.5M kg of drugs entering by land, 24,700kg by sea and 12,000Kg by air.

Since that 12,000kg includes all the stuff coming in as commercial air cargo, stuff hidden on passengers and all the small (and not so small) private planes used by smugglers - it suggests that the amount carried by ninja stealth radar avoiding ultralights might be a bit negligible and the whole project is rather more a cool toy and grants program rather than a serious effort.

What about GSM

Surely the underage 9 x10^8 Hz band should ban content while the adult 18 x10^8 Hz band could allow it?

In the US of course you would need to be over the 19 x10^8 Hz for porn and over the 21 x10^8 band to see mention of booze.

See once you explain the technology in terms a government minister can understand it's easy!

We must burn the gas to save the planet

Methane is about 75x more powerful a greenhouse gas then carbon dioxide.

The only safe way to dispose of the billions of tons of this dangerous planet destroying time bomb under our feet is to burn it

Did this begin 'once upon a time'?

The police actually solved a crime - quickly and efficently

Without needing the police helicopter or involving a high speed chase?

And it wasn't just a crime where they get a few hundred quid in fine income for a victim-less offence.

Simple solution

Along side your Apple/Crackberry/non-fruit-related-Android-unit you also carry a Nokia1100 in order to call the bank when you your NFC smart phone is stolen.

It's also useful for calling other people when the battery on your smart phone is dead by 10:00 am because you watched a video on the tube.

Lecturers due for a pay rise then

Alternatively we could close down a lot of science depts

Ultralights????

Does DARPA really think that majority of drugs are brought into the US by ninjas on stealth ultralights ? Have they been reading too many Tom Clancy books?

@Particularly

Isn't there already an app that tells you the location of all the massage parlours and donut shops?

Smallpox

The difference is that the US one actually protects against the strain of smallpox which would have been used in weapons (if anyone had ever considered using it in weapons and developed a stockpile of them of course)

The UK one which was bought in huge quantities by the last government, from a major donor to the last government, only protects against the natural form which is extinct.

The US one does have the unfortunate side effect of occasionally killing family members of those vaccinated.

I love industry reports

Ultrabooks are cool and sexy and expensive and desirable - but have a limited market.

But if we made them cheaper (obviously at the expense of thin and cool and sexy) we could sell all those old crap laptops we have stuck in Dixon's warehouse - all we have to do is stick an "Ultrabook" label on them

And how are they going to enforce that?

They can get Facebook/Google etc because they have an Eu office in Ireland.

If Facebook (Bermuda) is using data centers in Russia to serve web pages to a european how exactly is the Eu data protector going to enforce it? Invade Russia, threaten to cut off trade relations with the USA?