They'll want to tax sex next!

Better not tell him that the act of having sex frequently results is increased levels of cardio-vascular activity, respiration and breathing... OMG now we're all at it! ... killing the planet that is!

... Better tax sex!!

Mike

PS. Paris because she knows how to make CO2 ;-)

For Nominet read "nanny state"

I was one of the people that responded to the consultation.

It was clearly a badly thought out mixture of:

a) how do we make more money from this

b) attempting to appease government with ill thought-out identity verification

c) security theatre (scanning websites, shutting them down)

d) DNSSEC (something that actually might be useful)

In what appears to be "Nominet become Nanny State" and "Nominet become policemen of the interwebs".

If we're going to have our own registrations in the .uk TLD then I want the good bits and not the bad bits...

Identity - if you want to fix this then simply say "UK companies, charities, partnerships or other legal entities only" and make registration require UK company number, charity commission number or similar - no need for envelopes sent via the post which can be diverted, or handled via accommodation addresses - what does that prove? Only that you posted it to *someone* via an address that was valid on *one* day... great!

Security - DNSSEC if you will, but optional - let me choose if I use it

Security - scanning my website? I don't think so... my website is my property... it might well have 10 million pages on it -- are they going to pay for the bandwidth?

Security - shutting down my website? what's it got to do with you, Nominet? You are *not* the internet police

Overall I give Nominet a 3/10 for a badly thought out, jumble of Nanny State proposals.

Mike Tubby MJT4-RIPE

THORCOM tag holder

Look, lets sort this out...

I suggest we send each of the wannabe space captains/deputies (Kirk, Spock, Picard, Janeway, etc.) up to the ISS for a month or two and see them "Celebrity Big Brother" style in space ... then we could vote for the *best* one ;-)

G

Check your logarithms!

El Reg: "The increase in transmission power is 3dB, which is marginally more exciting when one remembers that decibels are logarithmic (so a 3dB increase is eight times the power) but it's still well within safe margins and more about increasing coverage than microwaving locals..."

I think you'll find that 3dB is a power doubling ...

dB = 10 x log(p1/p2) [log to the base 10]

So if we go from say 10 watts to 20 watts:

dB = 10 x log(20/10)

dB = 10 x log(2)

dB = 10 x 0.3010

dB = 3.01

commonly known as 3dB.

Incidentally, due to the inverse-squared power law this will increase the range by the square root of 2, for example 5Km -> 7km or 10Km -> 14Km which is a modest amount.

Mike

Mr. Jobs or Mr. Black?

Looks like a young (and thinner) version of Jack Black... perhaps he'll burst forth with a rendition of the "greatest song in the world" -- or a sonnet to Mr. Jobs?

G

Paris should listen to the Tenacious D album ;-)

Erm... exactly why do we need PLT anyway?

I'm still not convinced what the business case for PLT actually is? To laxy to install CAT5? Then use WiFi?

G

Where is my LDOS V7?

What about us TRS80 and Video Genie-II types?

My Video-Genie-II was hacked with a Z80B running at 6.144MHz, had 64MB RAM and ran LDOS 7 from a 5.25" double-sided 80 track floppy...

After that a BBC model B with a external 6502 CPU (over-clocked until the Plessy ASIC got hot of course) with homebrew hard-disk controller, Shugart 501 HDD controller and a second-hand Rodime 20Mb hard disk drive...

After that it was a PDP11/23 and Ultix ;-)

Huawei HG612 replacement?

Are we talking about the Customer Premises Equipment (CPE), i.e. the Huawei HG612 VDLS2 modem?

If so mine gets rather warm and the connection drops out from time- to- time, but I'm with Zen internet - I wonder who will replace mine...

Mike

But...

But... what's the weight in Sheep? Come-on... we have used Sheep in the Standard Model for some time now... usually for height, but they also have an average weight of 58Kg according to the Welsh Halfbred Sheep Association.

So... what's the saving that BT are going to make in standard Welsh Halfbread Adult Ewes?

Mike

"lose two demerit points" - I win points!!

Unless I'm missing something... " The government is quite happy to legislate that people can lose two demerit points for having music up too loud in their cars..." if I loose two *DE*merit points then I gain two points!!

What do points make? PRIZES!

Mike (tongue firmly in cheek)

... why Paris? Because she probably doesn't know the meaning of "double negative" lol

First CME hit approx 1-2AM

There was a weak aurora around 1-2AM local time this morning that didn't amount to much.... few ham radio signals from Scandinavia were copyable here in Blighty.

This page:

http://dx.qsl.net/propagation/

has a useful "Aurora Activity" diagram approx half way down the page which is built up from statistical information gathered from satellites by NOAA.

Bottom of the page has a colour world map that shows the extent of the auroral oval - two bright green lines at the stop of the map.

Mike G8TIC

DAB Chicken or Egg?

I am a relatively "early adopter" of DAB and have had two Blaupunkt Woodstock DAB radios in various cars over the last 5-6 years.

DAB was rolled out to main BBC sites but the program of secondary and tertiary fill-in transmitters still does not appear to be complete. As a consequence there are many significant stretches of main roads and motorways without coverage from the BBC Mux. Likewise, in the centre of Worcester (my home city) there is little coverage.

My tuner spends more time on 693 and 909 for Radio 5 Live than it does on DAB!

I wrote to the BBC regarding poor coverage in Worcester and around M1/J33-J36 and got a fairly "snotty" reply saying that they could not guarantee coverage for various reasons.

How can Auntie Beeb decry a lack of uptake when it has only half-delivered the goods? What we need is for the Beeb to get their finger out - and:

a) complete rollout of the network and provide UNIVERSAL coverage, ie. to a handheld device *ANYWHERE* in the UK mainland

b) turn off the medium-wave and long-wave transmitters and save pumping hundreds of kilowatts of RF in to the ether and "go green"

This would result in:

* significant uptake of DAB (by phasing out MW/LW)

* improved quality of radio programs

* save huge sums of money (by decommissioning MW/LW) - just the electricity bill alone!!

* allow Auntie Beeb to claim green credentials

Mike

Looks poor from here!

Zen Internet, ADSL2+ 14Mbps Sync with exchange (1.3Km distant)... this lunchtime *very* sllllooooowwwwww and dropped packets:

root@cruella:~# traceroute dns.thorcom.net

traceroute to dns.thorcom.net (193.82.116.5), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets

1 router-zen.tubby.org (82.68.212.70) 1.520 ms 1.736 ms 2.336 ms

2 losubs.subs.dsl2.wh-man.zen.net.uk (62.3.87.147) 174.112 ms 174.494 ms *

3 * * ge-2-1-0-164.cr1.wh-man.zen.co.uk (62.3.87.165) 176.706 ms

4 * ge-3-0-0-0.cr2.th-lon.zen.net.uk (62.3.80.45) 182.866 ms *

5 * * linx-gw.ltn1.intl.telstra.net (195.66.224.14) 184.507 ms

6 154.32.3.142 (154.32.3.142) 185.234 ms * *

7 * * cr-1.LDN4.intl.telstra.net (154.32.3.241) 176.118 ms

8 154.32.9.17 (154.32.9.17) 176.559 ms * *

9 6.57.32.154.intl.telstra.net (154.32.57.6) 192.808 ms 210.686 ms 210.327 ms

10 ns0.thorcom.net (193.82.116.5) 194.420 ms 195.919 ms 199.638 ms

root@cruella:~# traceroute dns.thorcom.net

traceroute to dns.thorcom.net (193.82.116.5), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets

this afternoon things picked up again:

root@cruella:~# traceroute dns.thorcom.net

traceroute to dns.thorcom.net (193.82.116.5), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets

1 router-zen.tubby.org (82.68.212.70) 1.569 ms 1.775 ms 2.212 ms

2 losubs.subs.dsl2.wh-man.zen.net.uk (62.3.87.147) 27.572 ms 28.733 ms 29.719 ms

3 ge-2-1-0-164.cr1.wh-man.zen.co.uk (62.3.87.165) 30.191 ms 30.786 ms 31.428 ms

4 ge-3-0-0-0.cr2.th-lon.zen.net.uk (62.3.80.45) 38.553 ms 39.520 ms 40.255 ms

5 linx-gw.ltn1.intl.telstra.net (195.66.224.14) 41.477 ms 41.685 ms 42.703 ms

6 154.32.3.142 (154.32.3.142) 43.449 ms 42.513 ms 43.154 ms

7 cr-1.LDN4.intl.telstra.net (154.32.3.241) 44.731 ms 35.937 ms 35.922 ms

8 154.32.9.17 (154.32.9.17) 35.905 ms 36.494 ms 36.543 ms

9 6.57.32.154.intl.telstra.net (154.32.57.6) 46.054 ms 43.126 ms 49.067 ms

10 ns0.thorcom.net (193.82.116.5) 48.031 ms 46.817 ms 47.053 ms

root@cruella:~#

No hosts or users on my circuit.... you can clearly see that the first hop from my router to Zen (via BT 21CN) was rubish at lunchtime, yet my Cisco router showed "5 min input rate 31kbps, 10 packets per second" which is hardly stressful :-(

Mike

Yup... truly nerdy

Yup, this has to be up there with the Blinkenlights crowd that turned the whole of Star Wars in to an ASCII animation....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDS7lRcGxgI

or for those with telnet capability:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Mike

Workarounds... more

Nickrw is indeed correct!

The 64-bit version appears to fail at the end of the unpack but has not. Once unpacked attempting to run the Setup program fails with an x86/64bit incompatibility error and initally this stumped by 16 year old son...

However a bit of googling reveals an M$ program called oscdimg.exe on Technet:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749036(WS.10).aspx

that's able to take the unpacked box files and make an ISO from them... run this process (takes about 15 mins) and burn the resultant ISO to a DVD (I used Infrarecorder - but Nero should do too) and you end up with a bootable DVD that works 100%

Ok, so a bumpy ride and an extra hour-and-a-halk but the 16 year old has his Windows-7 student edition installed and is back up and running... me... I us Ubuntu :-)

Actually I welcome this!

I welcome YouTube's stand against the PRS! As an owner of several small businesses I am fed up of PRS's continued persual of me an my companies for licenses that I do not need! Their (PRS) tactics are not much short of outright harassment - I have received tens of telephone calls and letters despite writing to them and telling them that I do not use music in any way in my business [except the license-free music-on-hold that comes with Asterisk PBX that is].

PRS have changed - they have gone from being an "in the background" organisation that you sort-of knew that you had to get a license from if you ran a pub/shop/club to a greedy "property grab / money grab" type organisation that seem to be using the drag-net approach to bothering every name that they can find at Companies' House - even if its a non-trading company that exists to protect a product name or trademark!

I'm sure that the reason that YouTube can't deal with PRS is because they have an overly optimistic idea of what their 'property' is worth and egos that are way too big to go with it!

PRS wake up! Get with the plan! Nobody likes you - nobody wants to deal with you!

Mike

Sounds like MS-DOS?

Surely its ABORT, RETRY or CANCEL?

or if you go back far enough REDO FROM START?

(Why Paris? Coz she wouldn't have a clue :o)