Well, anyway

I've got one of the first edition LCD 56" 21:9 Philips TVs, which I got cheap when they released the current model. All I can say is, before you spark off about how pointless Ambilight is, or useless 21:9 is, or how the upscaling will ruin the picture, just try viewing one.

I thought all the same things, and then I gave one a viewing, and they are simply amazing. The upscaling is really, really, good. I simply can't tell from the image quality whether it's native resolution or upscaled. The Ambilight is brilliant. After a while you stop noticing it and it just helps draw you in to the screen. Turn it off, and the picture suddenly seems too large, imposing and eye-straining. If you don't like these features, that's fine, but they're hardly pointless and they do work well.

Yes, you do get black bars either side on 4:3 content. Yes, low quality SD content doesn't look great, but do you really expect it to on a 56" TV? On decent DVD or BluRay content, these TVs are epic.

Lovely guy

I had the honour of meeting him last year. An absolute gent, totally dotty but really charming and interesting. I'll miss him.

Aren't they dead yet?

The writing's on the wall if all they've got to fall back on is patent trolling.

Unlike Mondo's experience above, my own experience of Overland's products is that they were the worst-built, most unreliable, worst-supported tape loaders I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. When your tape library won't detect tape changes, and Overland's own technical support tell you that's normal and that you should reboot server and library every time you change tapes, you know something's up. (That was a fault, by the way, and after we finally convinced Overland it was a fault, they gave us a replacement unit which would happily identify changed tapes, and then simply mark them all as unreadable.)

Hmmmm

If it's anything like the DMR-BW780 BluRay recorder we've got here, it'll have decent recording quality let down by the most half-baked, frustrating, inconsistent and poorly thought through interface. 20 key presses to finalise a disc when you've just finished burning it? Failure to recognise a disc you've just formatted unless you remove it, and cycle the power? When editing the title of a recording, pressing Delete inserts a space, and pressing Pause deletes? That's Panasonic, that is.

Shades of Bromcom?

This reminds me of Bromcom who, because they had a patented product using hand-held devices for electronic pupil registration, started threatening any school that was doing any form of wireless registration, even if they were just using an Excel spreadsheet on a laptop.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/24/schools_patent/

How can they tell?

How could they tell it was running slow? The Autotrader site is one of the slowest, buggiest and most unreliable sites I've ever visited. Really really nasty, and that's before I get on to the advert pop-unders and bloody survey questionnaires every time you visit.

Five rounds rapid

Splendid chap, all of him.

And...

Galaxian, Gorf, Terra Cresta. Spy Hunter. Scramble.

LaHood?

When reading the quotes from LaHood, I can't help imagining him as the evil businessman from Pale Rider.

If he doesn't get his way, will he call in the Pinkertons?

There I was...

...just wondering whatever happened to FoTW, and what do I see? Hello old friend.

Not a patch of flames of old though. Not nearly enough spittle.

Fsck Barclays

As well as sharing the fraud concerns of other commenters, what about tracking? Why were we all worried about the RFID tag on our passports but now we're not bothered when it's on our credit cards we carry every day? Do we really think these aren't going to be used to record our movements? After all, shopping centres are already tracking you through your mobile.

Barclays sent me one of these cards when my debit card came up for renewal. I couldn't reject it via internet banking so I phoned them up. The gentleman on the phone told me he was required to explain to me the benefits of the contactless system, and then having done so (and me still wanting rid of it) told me he couldn't cancel it. So I went into my local branch. The cashier told me she was required to explain to me the benefits of the contactless system, and then having done so told me she couldn't cancel it, and I'd have to see the manager. The manager told me he was required to explain to me the benefits of the contactless system... in each case they said "You don't have to use it." Surely it's a cornerstone of good IT security to not leave a feature in place that you don't use, when you've no idea or control over what it's doing. Barclays told me that if I didn't want the contactless system they had to cancel both my old (still valid) debit card and the new contactless one, leaving me without a card for a week while a new non-contactless debit card arrived. The new one apparently does not work everywhere my previous debit card did, and is generally given to customers who cannot be trusted. Surprise surprise as soon as I got the new second-class-citizen-who-can't-be-trusted debit card, the interest rate on my Barclaycard credit card shot up. So, then, fuck Barclays. After 20 years I'm off.

@AC 14:48

"And then you could take her to Silverstone."

I think she'd prefer Goodwood.

@AC 14:12

"The point of VBS is to provides a single, one time clearance for people who wish to work with Children and vulnerable adults to replace the current CRB checks that must be done regularly and for each job you do. "

Except that the VBS check does not cover quite the same ground as the enhanced CRB check, so most people will end up having to get both.

@AC

"Frankly, they can fuck off if they think any of us field based guys are going to be doing any more than we're paid for after the email that went round explaining that we were taking unpaid holiday if we didn't drive on dangerous roads in areas that had severe weather warnings in place.

If I were a little more reckless I'd have gone out and wrapped the car up on purpose."

You only need about 3mph to get it irretrievably planted in a ditch. Hypothetically, of course.

@Sarah

"I'm not Bono's biggest fan, but in any case I am forced to concur with you all since you have each manifestly achieved more in your lives and done more for the greater good and suchlike than he has. I mean, it's self-evident."

Well, I didn't release The Joshua Tree, so if it's the greater good you're referring to I reckon I'm ahead on points, at least.

On the subject of whether "significant" numbers of people wouldn't have broadband if they couldn't download illegally, I suspect it's more the case that the ISPs are able to sell premium high-bandwidth connections on the back of that downloading. So the question is how much more money do the ISPs make off the premium connections, if any, given that they have to throw more resource at those heavy users? Only a couple of years ago, ISPs like PlusNET were trying to get rid of their heavy downloaders.

@luis sancho

Well, if it's going to destroy us all, don't sit around here moaning about it. Go and wave a placard or something. We'll still be here when you get back. Or not, depending on how successful you are.

I don't know about quark cannon destroying the universe, but I do know that oxymoron doesn't mean what you think it means.

@luis sancho

"A DAMOCLES MACHINE THAT IS HALTING THE ADVANCE OF TRUE SCIENCE"

Careful. Some spittle nearly hit me there.

"Astro-physicists fear that if enough quarks are pegged together in one of those condensates, they can trigger a mass-reaction that would attract all the other quarks of the Earth, transforming our planet into a dense pulsar or black hole."

Splendid performance. I'm an astro-physicist. I don't fear this. Smash them particles, I say, and let's see what falls out. Last one to get turned into strangelet soup's a ninny!

So that's...

...a take up rate of 0.04% so far? Those Mancs really are keen, aren't they?

@Dominic Contardi

"Still, why not go the whole hog and tattoo barcodes on the back of all citizens' necks for checking against the Good Law Abiding Citizens Thought Crimes Database?"

Because that's where they record a bishop's diocese.

@asiaseen

"So they're pissed off because he's copied their blotter book?"

Oh, very good. There can't be many opportunities to use that pun, but well done for finding one.

@AC 29/7 12:14

"What if she isn't moaner?"

She is with me.

Re: Pumped Storage

For those commenters who are bemoaning the lack of mention of pumped storage as an alternative to thermal capacity in dealing with intermittency, the basic problem still stands. Creating pumped storage is extremely expensive and the impact very large, and who is going to want to invest in it unless the returns are very large?

There has been a study, reported on by Lewis on this very site - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/20/mackay_on_carbon_free_uk/ - which took in pumped storage as an option. If I remember correctly, we're looking at having to convert pretty much every major body of water in the UK to pumped storage. What's that going to do to the ecosystem, particularly if some of it has to be sea water?

Is this guy for real?

Mr Sutherland seem to think we're only concerned about humans processing our personal data. We're not. A data-mining algorithm is just as bad, if not worse. If you're running your data-mining tentacles over a database, you're still processing the data in it, you're still - how can I put this? - running fishing expeditions on millions of people.

@Sarah

"No offence, boys. Most of you are barely evil at all."

How's that for damning with faint praise? Here we are, trying our level best to outdo each other with our eviltude, and there you are telling us we're barely registering. Sheesh, might as well go and bait some Scientlogists or something.

Rubbish

How can they say that password masking does nothing for security, and then in the next breath recommend keeping it on by default for high-risk applications, because "sometimes security should win"?

It either helps or it doesn't, and if it does help then it's a matter of weighing up the advantages against the disadvantages of password masking.

Advantages: if every password box is always masked, it provides consistency for the user. It reminds them that the password is something they should be keeping to themselves. It largely deals with shoulder-surfing which, judging by the comments here, is still regarded as a problem by a lot of people. It's a lot harder to read keypresses on the keyboard than characters on the screen.

Disadvantages: easier to mistype the password.

I don't think unmasking the password makes it any more likely that the user will write it down or store it in a file. The sort of people who do this are the sort who have difficulty in remembering the password anyway. They'll still write it down.

Reading the advice...

"There should be an audit trail within the organisation showing who has actually accessed personal data. "

Who currently does this? It would result in a lot of data being generated, is this something that is regarded as good practice for all organisations or just those working with particularly sensitive data e.g. medical, financial?