Love the Spirit of your Comment

I love the Spirit of your Comment, but while 4G may become a viable alternative for those in the worst served places for BT, 4G simply doesn't offer the bandwidth to support mass take up on a fast broadband service in areas with a moderate population density. Even if it looked good at times, peak demand just wouldn't fit.

Instead of 100Mbps max for one cell, try more like 1 or 10 Gbps. Certainly more so in that direction.

I don't mean to piss on your cornflakes though, I do see this putting the wind up BT's rural ADSL offerings.

Don't forget the effect of a dynamic equilibrium, the services attractiveness causes demand, making the service progressively less attractive as it slows under load.

Re: Lost inventions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4nnLP--uTI

Starlite was very interesting, but it really baffles me that it hasn't been replicated or repeated since. Legend has it that Maurice's family still know the secret.

Best theory I can come up with is that it is in use as a classified material. I just find it very difficult to accept that a wonder plastic was created and then didn't escape into the world to be used.

Maybe Maurice stole the secret from the future and the time police have been busy mopping up :P

Re: I doubt it

You don't think organised crime would want to groom a Fraudster who managed that? Really? I think any gang would want him to be in their debt for their protection services.

Re: A real driver's car...

"Real drivers don't need a rev counter, they can hear/feel the engine." - Exactly the thing that people without a rev counter say.

I'm not going to outright disagree either. With my old car I could accelerate hard from a stand still and instinctively stop bang on 30 mph without looking at the instrument cluster, I just felt and heard the engine note for the gear.

What you're missing is that without a rev counter, you never get to calibrate your ears to a car. You never get to learn what 6500 RPM sounds like for sure, you just take guesses. I don't like taking guesses myself, but horses for courses (especially at Tesco).

Re: Renewable Energy

Dodgy Geezer...

I like a lot of what you said, but despite myself being a huge fan of nuclear power and believing it to be something that could still change our world enormously for the better, bringing people out of poverty, it could by no means be free.

Nuclear fuel isn't a significant cost in nuclear power. Complex highly regulated buildings and designs, millions of man hours of professional work and planning followed by millions more man hours running reactor designs that are small evolutionary changes over reactor technology that has been around for decades, that makes current gen nuclear expensive, not as expensive as wind perhaps (unless they really do crack mass energy storage), but certainly more so than a normal coal plant.

Nuclear is the one energy source that can solve our problems for thousands of years and it's also the one we're least excited about benefiting from.

Re: All those pretty words and not a single mention of WebM

VP8 never stood up against H.264 in quality tests at the same bitrate. We'll just have to wait and see how VP9 does.

Patent free video codecs are a false economy if you have to pay more in bandwidth and storage than the amount you saved on the codecs.

Re: Yay!

Anyone else wondering what the Brotherhood of Nod are up to?

Re: 4G - what is the point...

I've been with 3 for ages and I haven't had your troubles in the West Country. I've only had trouble with 3 in Scotland myself.

Re: Does anybody really???

"Maybe they [Greenpeace] can patent a power system that run's on their userbase smugness"

Well... that should be able to power the world for millennia with no carbon emissions! What an amazing thing that could be, if only we could really power the world on that.

Such a shame there isn't actually a low carbon form of power generation that's reliable, affordable and could last us for millennia. If only.... Greenpeace would love it! ;)

Anyone sufficiently intelligent to do something this amazing would have no problems remaining anonymous if they really wanted to and it occurred to them (it's amazing how smart some people can be and still lack common sense). I'm aware of the different ways remaining anonymous can be achieved as an IT professional as will many other reg readers. *coughs* PRINGLES *coughs*

* I would like to add for the record as an IT Professional that I don't endorse anything unethical or illegal in this statement.

Re: "Super-fast broadband by 2015"

20 Mbps is the BDUK super fast definition, unlike the broadband definition of 2 Mbps, though I'm sure when they lay back-haul to rural areas it will feel like 2 Mbps broadband to the locals regardless of the technology at 8pm on a weekday.

Re: I have to say that what strikes me about this is Cupertino's scorched earth policy.............

Apple was such a much nicer company when it was eating humble pie:

When Bill Gates bailed out Apple:

Youtube: Macworld Boston 1997

iUSPTO

I was thinking that before you said it....

Apple's cunning plan to crush the USPTO. Send in a mind numbing amount of patents and watch as the poor staff are slowly overwhelmed and are turned into mindless, broken shells of people, just wanting the endless torture to stop.

When they're broken, they'll approve anything, even something as obvious as a magnetic holder.

HTML5

Since you don't like being able to do more on web pages, may I suggest something like IE8? That should stop that pesky HTML5 humbug coming onto your computer nicely. :)

Re: There's a storm coming-

Not content with me understanding the situation, clearly you had to imagine that I didn't and interact with me on that imaginary basis.

Thanks.

Re: Links? Links! to Global Warming?????

There's a very strong link between Mozilla Crash Reporter and Mozilla software crashing. As such I've decided I need to uninstall the Crash Reporter to see if it makes Mozilla software more stable :P

Oh I'm sorry was I confusing correlation and causation?

Re: There's a storm coming-

Unwanted crap?

I have Ubuntu running on Android running on my Nexus One and it runs like a dog, a dog that's been shot in the leg, no, two of it's legs.

I'm hoping that the native version of Ubuntu on the Nexus One may just offer a low power raspberry pi like computer for my old phone. If it does, I will find a way to use it! I think it's exciting. I want this, but possibly not for the reasons that Canonical decided to go down this route. I'll use it as a graphic-less task master that I can SSH into and get to do my bidding.

Re: How will this help?

Newcomers to hard-line telecoms? You're optimistic!

With the government's tax system on optical fibre links the small guy gets the most squeezing. With no finalised system for sharing ducts and poles, how would a new operator even begin to invest in new Infrastructure?

BT want more money than Dr Evil just to hook up people with fibre, so are we being realistic with this idea that we can have effective competition with telecoms in the UK? The best you'll get is Virgin Vs BT. Virgin are in monstrous debt from their existing deployment and leave a significant proportion of people unplugged.

The UK is a hostile environment to telecom start-ups. One would almost think it had been engineered so too.

Re: 4G/3G

Talking solely about bandwidth is an oversimplification. LTE latency is supposed to be improved over HSPA too. I think the decreased latency will offer some of the nicest improvements myself, but I'm waiting till 3 roll it out on their network.

Re: Accounts

I think that was 4.2 and only for tablets, phones were excluded from this feature.

Re: Stiff Windows

They seem to be making good progress in that field according to their diminishing market share. You must be proud.

Re: Power consumption

Disabled by default, i.e. not working completely reliably yet.

Chrome wasn't the first browser to get this anyway, IE has had full browser acceleration since 9, which is a while ago now.

I used to get Opera to test websites against. When it was the one with the worst rendering with the most bugs I stopped bothering with Opera testing. The sites were strictly HTML5, CSS3 and worked beautifully on IE9, Chrome, Safari & FIrefox.

So nearly a great mail client though, shame about the issues.

Re: Radioactive Food; Radioactive People

@Tim Parker

First, a genuine thank you for the link.

The scientists I've heard talk about it are renowned scientists in their fields that have been talking on BBC's Horizon Program and they're in contradiction of the information you're linking to.

Let's be clear that according to the conventionally applied Linear No Threshold model of radiation harm the increased risk of cancer from 250 mSv is around 1.5%. Compare that to smoking which is somewhere north of 400% increased risk.

I'm certainly not saying that you're information is invalid, it has caught my interest and I'd be happy to chat further about things. However, it's quite normal for some studies to show high and others to show low and it tends to be a balance of these studies over time that go into providing consensus.

Here's a study showing a lower risk of cancer for people in higher radiation areas in Ramsar.

Re: "I see that Lewis hasn't filed this one." Judging by the thumbs there are at least.......

IF (and it's a big if) nuclear decommissioning costs are paid at the beginning of a new reactor and sealed in a bank account with interest for the life of the station, it's actually pretty cheap. Granted you have to be responsible.

Shale gas of course is economically superior to nuclear by today's numbers, I won't deny it! Also transition from coal to shale gas means a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions. Shale gas is an immediate solution to our energy troubles that doesn't require government subsidy.

Re: Nah

"Give it a couple more months and buy AMD once their management have finished crashing it into the dust."

Do you think that by then someone might be competent enough to write an HDMI output driver for a graphics card that doesn't screw up the output to an HDMI TV?

Neither ATI nor AMD seem to be capable of doing this. (The drivers do this mind boggling stupid thing of resizing the output for overscan when there is none for DTV and then resizing back, completely messing up the 1:1 pixel mapping.)

Re: Goody

Let me ask you this question; do you think she'd have made this much sense if so many eyes weren't on her decision?

Re: Inquiring minds...

There have been a metric 'funk tonne' of studies done on any health effects from radio comms and the only thing proven were slight thermal effects for when you're holding a 4W transceiver to your head (using a mobile phone).

The problem is that people who want to find something just say that 10 years of research isn't enough. They'd like the scientific community to keep putting 2 + 2 together in the vain hope that they get 5 one day and prove them right.

That's the sort of thing people say at the pub that's full of crap.

Who the hell wants to pay over £1,000 of wages just to make a daring remark to a customer?

Re: You'll fit right in: Believe in Better

Frankly I think the Sky customer in question would have let it slide.

But this is Sky...

They believed in better.

Re: Radioactive Food; Radioactive People

Well all of my food is radioactive. All of your food is radioactive.

We're all radioactive. It's how we can be carbon dated.

So many nuclear explosions occurred during the early days of nuclear testing that normal carbon dating is pretty screwed for us lot. And yet... life goes on as normal.

Life goes on as normal for the people of Ramsar Iran, inhabitants of the most naturally radioactive place on the earth. They have no higher cancer risk or higher risk of birth defects. They live at a yearly dose that substantially exceeds the normal emergency limit for nuclear workers.

Nobody tell Stan Lee. :P

Re: "I see that Lewis hasn't filed this one." Judging by the thumbs there are at least.......

I know the deal, an operator ignoring risks is pretty awful... but...

With the political elite forcing the long impellers of wind power down people's throats, driving people below the poverty line in some cases. With an energy policy that could be written better by the Cookie monster, it touches a nerve that some people take very seriously.

You think France has energy problems? No it doesn't. Some smart ass will no doubt make a quip about France having nuclear waste problems, well it doesn't have that either.

All people want is to see sanity follow here. They want cheap, affordable energy and you know what, they might just be OK with reducing their carbon emissions, but when you tell them that we're not going to use shale gas or nuclear....

Someone is really taking the piss.

That's why some people lose their sense of humour.

Re: "All Aplle had to do was just put on some various strokes and an uncopyrighted face"

"It's almost certainly an oversight. Big companies don't normally knowingly invite lawsuits over what - to them - are trifling amounts."

I upvoted you (I think you're bang on the money), as for the 5 downvotes, it must be the linux Jihad started against you.