Long term, it may be worse.

Once .music is established and is the main place to go to buy music, expect to hear the licensing groups start pressing the labels to stop selling on any of the other domains.

This will, of course, be done to avoid "confusing the poor consumers". However look at what may happen if they succeed.

1. All "legal" music is now on .music

2. Any music not there must be "Illegal".

3. Threaten to take down any site with music on it that is not on the gTLD. No need for any nasty expensive court hearings the site is, by definition, a pirate one.

Am I being unduly cynical here?

Nick.

One problem with making the inner tube from perspex / polycarb for the camera is that it is an insulator and will slow the rate of cooling.

Why not make the lower part of the tube i.e. from the top of the CO2 level down, from metal & the upper part from plastic.

This would provide maximum heat transfer for the cooling & insulate the top part which is exposed to the ambient temperature.

The drawback to this is that you will have introduced another, potentially leaky, joint to reduce the obtainable vacuum.

Incidentally, will you need to top up the CO2 whilst it is cooling down?

Nick.

The Lobster Pot of theology

When viewed from the outside creationists & young earthers appear incomprehensible. However when you remember two items of their faith, 1 The only way to heaven is through faith & 2 Every word of the Bible is true then you can see why they twist around desperatly trying to make the facts fit their theory.

Failure to do so (and indeed believe their strange theories) means that they no longer have faith & will therefore go to hell.

So, like a lobster pot, it's easy to get in but very difficult to get out of again.

Nick.

Why would I need a licence to call a function?

When I use a function within a programme all I do is something along the lines of

FunctionName(Par1,Par2,.....Parn) {

I neither know nor care how the function works, that is the job of the company that provided me with the function for use within that enironment.

In effect none of my code executes the technique that is licenced, this is done by code that the providing company has written (& I assume has a licence for).

Nick.

A problem I came accross.

A few months ago my neighbors bought their children a new (second hand) laptop and an internet connection. They found it impossible to set up themselves.

They spent many hours on the helpline which did not resolve the problem. When I got home that day they asked me to help.

After a quick look the 'problem' turned out to be that the router defaulted to WPA2 & that their PC could only use WEP. It was easy to go back to my machine, armed with the relevant passwords, and drop the wireless encryption back to WEP. Problem solved.

The problem is, I now know their passwords and the ISP spent a lot of time (failing) to help.

What is the ISP to do? Push the default security settings as high as possible and accept that this will increase their call centre costs or keep default security low and get crucified for that?

Nick.

"will remove the right of employees"

If it is a 'Right' how can it be removed?

It would appear that we have a temporary license, until a politician, changes it's mind.

In despair, Nick.

Is anyone else reminded

of the 1950s "Duck & Cover" campaign used to show children how to survive a nuclear weapon?

This looks just as silly.

Nick.

Given my state of mind in the early moning,

I prefer a wake up that (quietly) goes "beep beep beep....".

Nick.

(I could tolerate Also sprach Zarathustra). :-)

Why Metres / Miles?

Surely, if you wish to cater for people as ancient as I, you would use yards.

Nick.

This should be easy to break.

There are a number of add-ons that fire off random search requests to stop profiling (TrackMeNot on Firefox). A change to the programme to follow one of the returned urls in the background should swamp the collected data with noise.

A Question.

QKE relies on the fact that the state of a particle changes if someone looks at it.

What happens if, rather than just examining the data stream, I intercepted the data stream? At that point I know the quantum key (and the intended recipient does not). I can now reconstruct the QK and send a good copy to the victim as easily as the original sender did to me.

At this point all three of us know the key and can read any subsequent data.

So; what is wrong with this method?

Nick.

Clean water does not cause damage

My wife dropped her phone into the toilet (fortunately before use). We removed the battery & then washed the phone thoroughly with de-ionised water.

After the phone was dried out (24hrs on a radiator) it worked correctly.

That being the case, why does immersion invalidate the warranty?

Nick.

I almost feel sorry for Meg

Imagine the scene. You are waiting by the phone for the call that tells you that you have reached the peak of your career... You have been promoted to minister!

Then you discover that it's "Minister of going around sounding like a fool". What a crushing anticlimax it must have been.

Nick.

The sixteenth century called:

They would like their fruit cake back.

Nick.

Does anyone else remember......

...a company called Stac Electronics?

They also had a "partnership" deal with MS.

There are, of course, no similarities between the two cases.

Nick.

This is standard practice.

Years ago Digital Research discovered that DRDos ran better if it identified itself as MSDos. When I wish to see an I.E. only web site I tell my browser to lie, this is widely done and often works.

Now Palm does the same thing & there is an outcry from some people. Why?

Nick.

One simple change.

It would be nice if MS changed the behaiviour of their installer, at the moment a Windows install will nuke a dual boot MBR & boot straight into Windows.

It would be polite of them to do what the other OS installers do. I.E. check to see what else is there &, if necessary, ask!

Nick.

Survey Bias?

If they surveyed all G rated films this must bias the selection towards heterosexual content because anything overtly homosexual will not get a G rating.

Nick.

@ Roger Jenkins

I suspect that the reason PR / Marketing people pepper their conversations with phrases like 'moving forward' is because they are brain dead.

On the other hand, moving forward, they will probably have a new phrase next year :-)

Nick.

"Surely that would be distribution of an indecent image..."

No!!! Don't you realise that the internet has "magical" powers!

It's ok, if tasteless, when used on printed media.

On the Internet: It will corrupt you beyond redemption!

Nick.

@AC 2049hrs

An old chip & pin bank card showed blistering on the surface after 3 seconds in a 650W microwave oven.

An RFID card with an arial would absorb more power so less than a second would probably kill the chip but someone would have to experiment to see when the card showed obvious signs of dammage.

Nick.

According to the BBC....

"The failed box will be replaced by astronauts" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7670412.stm

I do hope NASA have some nice small astronauts.

Nick.

So the next one should be called

The Terafly!

It would certainly frighten me.

Nick.