Re: Yeah

As the standard response to someone worried about flying in an old aircraft goes: "How do you think it got to be so old?"

Re: Not Related?

*Ahem* Did you not read the bit about them coming from completely different directions?

Re: Rebekah Wade / Brooks is about 45, isn't she?

Brooks is 44, more's the pity. On the bright side, she has already been arrested by Operations Weeting and Elveden.

Re: Why bother?

For reasons best known to themselves US operators don't use the IMEI blacklist, so your nicked iPhone is fully-functional in the 'States. Except for the Maps, of course.

To be fair, I believe they are just about to start enforcing the blacklist, like operators in most of the world have been doing for years.

Re: Next step...

Apple will countersue with their design patent on parallel lines.

Do the SBB set new clocks by looking at the timetable?

I love the way the second hand *doesn't* move continuously. Or at least, it does move continuously for fifty-eight and a half seconds, then it *stops*, and clicks up to the twelve o'clock position as the minute hand moves from one minute to another. If I had found a replica that duplicated that feature when I was in Switzerland, I'd have got it. As others have noted, you can buy souvenir SBB clocks all over the place, but they're usually just a cheap (by Swiss standards) movement with a ticking second hand.

Re: Probably not such a great idea

The other advantage of the taxed bag system no-one seems to have picked up on is that it neatly sidesteps the whole creepiness of having to present ID to throw stuff out. I don't know how the Dutch do it, but if UK.gov implemented this, you can bet they'd want everything logged and made available to the authorities for fishing trips.

Re: There used to be a time

A rapid and dynamic entry that took thirteen minutes to find the guy?

Re: Knowing humanity's rotten luck...

I think it's more likely that the message would be notification that the plans for the new hyperspace bypass are available for viewing at our local library.

Mine's the one with the towel.

Re: As a paraglider pilot...

Is being called Neil mandatory?

Re: What kind of...

*ahem* The M3 Lee/Grant.

Re: It's a trap!

Also http://xkcd.com/488/

Re: I wondered why ?

No, no, no. You're just holding it wrong.

In defence of PIPA

I hear it has a lovely bum.

Wikipedia's down? How do we fact-check?

Well, with Twitter gone, where would the mainstream media regurgitate most of its stories from?

If an aircraft leaving A travels east for ten minutes...

Given initial speed ("at rest") and position ("at my base") you can use those accelerations to figure out your speed and thus position where you are. It's called an inertial navigation system - essentially dead reckoning on steroids. Military aircraft have them because they're not always guaranteed to have line of sight to enough GPS satellites when they're doing their low flying thing or because they're being jammed. Similarly, commercial aircraft are fitted with them - they were essential for oceanic flights before GPS became ubiquitous, since you can't pick up many navigation beacons (at least any that have much accuracy) in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.

That said, like any form of dead reckoning, INSs drift over time - around half a nautical mile an hour - so most automatically update themselves from other sources when they're available, which nowadays usually means... GPS. So an INS isn't necessarily much help against Iranian GPS hackers, then.

Smart move...

That is the point. The bystanders need to suffer in the short term to make them sit up and take notice and hopefully put pressure on those who can solve the problem the protestors are having - usually politicians.

For that matter, in all the examples you give, in the long run the "bystanders" could quite likely have everything to do with things - commuters getting poor service from under-paid employees, consumers having to pay more for goods because fuel for lorries is so expensive, and Wikipedia users not having Wikipedia at all because it got SOPA-ed. Granted, you could debate whether the consequences would be that severe, but when you do - as the protestors do - the protest is entirely defensible.

This title was wiped as a cost-saving measure

Firstly, tapes were much more expensive in those days - hundreds of pounds for a single tape, not twenty quid. When my dad was at Grampian in the early seventies, the station's *entire tape library* was about two dozen one-hour tapes.

The second reason was that Equity was against repeats - unlike a stage show, a TV show could be repeated without involving any actors, depriving them of their livelihoods. They thus had high fees negotiated for repeats beyond an initial few showings, which means that your comment about reshooting for £50K is closer to the truth than you may realise - with the amount a repeat would have cost, you might as well shoot something new.

In the BBC's case this was exacerbated by the fact that there was a conflict between two departments - the Engineering Division, who recorded the program on videotape and stored it until broadcast, and BBC Enterprises, who transferred programs to film (because it was cheaper and universally-used) to flog to other countries. Both felt that long term archival was the other's job, and thus neither invested in the infrastructure to store programs in any format. As a result, stuff just got wiped or thrown out - by Engineering because they wanted to re-use the tape; by Enterprises because they'd sold it to everyone they could, and didn't want cans of film cluttering up the place.

In theory, theory is the same as practice, but in practice, it isn't

That wold be a reasonable thing for a copyright holder to require, and, indeed, they do require it with their licence. Unfortunately, that's just not how DRM works. The very nature of DRM requires that it prevent you from doing *everything* that you're not explicitly allowed by the provider to do (even if such things are permitted by the law, for instance making a backup copy), and furthermore from doing it on platforms and devices a DRM client hasn't been provided for. Far too many people are seduced by the idea of what DRM *should* do, and ignore that in reality what it actually does falls far short of that.

The alternative is to say "well, you've shown evidence of your bona-fides by ponying up some cash, here's your DRM-free version to do what you wish with; we'll trust you to abide by the licence". This is more or less what iTunes is doing now. Yes, some people will have it on the Pirate Bay before they've finished watching it, but most of those people would cheerfully crack the DRM if it had it, too. In short, all DRM does is make it more difficult for people to make legitimate use of things they've bought, while being little more than a speed bump for the pirates.

Still not much lighter or smaller

Pilot + associated sundries is a drop in the ocean* compared to the things that unmanned aircraft still do need - engines, control surfaces, weapons, sensors, fuel (especially fuel: 200lbs of meat in an F/A-18; 14,000lbs of fuel - without drop tanks) not to mention a structure strong enough to carry all of that.

*perhaps this isn't the best metaphor to use when discussing carrier aircraft...