Errr....what?

The entire point of disabling autorun, as with most of the conventions you mention for coding, is to avoid potential pitfalls for those who aren't aware of them - ie if you really want to ignore it you can do, but you should only do so if you properly understand the issue. Given that MS have (probably unintentionally) made it harder to effectively disable autorun than it necessarily has to be, at least from the view of Joe Not-Particularly-Technical, this isn't a bad thing. I'd love to see more user education before people are given machines, but complaining about actions intended to correct existing insecure behaviour is a dumb way to try and bring it about. Unless I've missed your point completely, that is...

That sounds about right, actually - I still find my first-gen 3EPC 701 to do everything I want it to, but that's because it's not replacing an existing piece of kit for me so much as providing an alternative. It's meant that I've had decent mobile web access available that I otherwise wouldn't have had and, on one memorable occasion, allowed an entertaining overnight videoconference between Dublin and Belfast that just wouldn't have happened if I'd needed to bring my full-size 15.4" Dell with me to do it.

That doesn't mean that the mass market is really ready for these things though, and with a recession looming people will try to use the smaller ones as a substitute for a full machine rather than as a complementary device. (I'm kind of surprised none of them have shipped with a "proper" Linux distro and a Citrix-client to allow workers to connect to company-managed production servers, since that would be the kind of cloud-concept thinking you could easily sell to corporations...)

I've long been interested in the idea behind the Long Tail, because of the possibilities it seems to offer to those who implement it. However, I have the impression that the Long Tail for retailers and the Long Tail for creators are two different things, and that may be muddying the water further.

Case in point: webcomics. There are significant numbers of artists out there making daily or several-times-weekly comics and making a living out of it. Not even close to all of them, of course, but then again not everyone who plays in a band makes their living out of it. The point as I understand it with most of the high-profile and successful webcomic crowd is that they find ways to get paid for the same thing multiple times. So the comic shows for free on the website on the day (but money comes in from ads). Then the comic is collected into a dead-tree-edition and sold. Then the original art for the strip is sold (assuming someone wants to buy it, that is). If the largest part of the work is creating the original artwork, that's 3 revenue streams for the same piece of work (over enough time to make them all viable). Not to mention the possibility of special editions of books, sketches sold at conventions, and merchandise.

This all relies on the cartoonist being able to establish the comic and find an audience, but that's a pretty universal issue for entertainers. While it may not be possible to find exact analogues for these revenue streams for musicians, I would be interested in seeing someone write up a detailed analysis, and particularly to find out whether there are singers/musicians out there working to the same model and making a living out of it.

The Berlin crowd sound like they're being a bit daft, but the Dutch crowd may have a legitimate complaint if the relevant individual is selling an app that carries out its tasks by placing an extra load on their servers. Not sure why the copyright to timetables is being protected at such lengths - perhaps their legal team have suggested copyright protection as the best means to prevent 3rd party sites/apps from scraping data from their publicly accessible database? (In which case I'm curious as to why they decided against redrafting the terms of use for the site and database to include a clause whereby only official tools may be used to access the database).

The licence fee is always an awkward one. I'm in favour of it in principle - it's not that expensive and it funds some great programming (especially if you compare it to the programming the Irish system funds for a not dissimilar amount of money per household per annum). Thus enforcing it is something I'm also in favour of.

However, I do wish that the paying public had more say in what the money gets spent on. I'm not talking about the Paxman-style criticism of some of BBC Three's lineup for example (although God knows that he had a point when he questioned the merits of programmes like "My Man-Boobs And Me"), but more on cash wasted on twits like Jonathan Ross. I don't have any objection to paying for a licence, but it's irksome to see so much of the money it raises spent on some waste of space. At least with the likes of the Mighty Boosh the budgets are small and they can recoup cash via DVD sales...

and upgraded the Oyster card system....wait, what's that? They did nothing and hoped the problem would go away?

*sigh*

So Sega are going to release a new handheld console, despite having been out of the hardware market for the last two generations of consoles? The same Sega that basically admitted their hardware business died on its ass because they tried to over-saturate the console market with too many options, and then failed to properly support and promote the one console they'd come up with in years that people actually wanted to buy?

It's got less chance of beating the PSP than the Pandora, I'd say...

Google may well have found the answers for me, but do you really think I want to search for information on how to make an explosive agent out of Tang and hydrogen peroxide while at work?

Chances are, carrying out that search would answer my question while also potentially leading to pages/discussions I don't really want to be associated with. Whereas the author posting the explosive agent that he postulates is at the core of the plan, and possibly the active ingredient in Tang that will allow its manufacture from hydrogen peroxide, would mean I could research the chemistry angle at my leisure from academic sources that are less likely to cause me grief.

Now, all that aside, the hexamethylne triperoxide diamine you mention is, as I understood from the article, used in the detonator rather than as the main explosive agent. Are we talking about a bomb that's all detonator here, or a bomb where the detonator sets off a larger explosive charge? I'd like to understand what's being postulated here so that I can make my own mind up, assisted with further research if necessary, rather than just being expected to take someone else's opinion at face value about whether the threat is real and whatnot.

I may have misunderstood, but it appears that part of this article's argument is that the accused had planned to use a completely different set of reagents to those which had previously been debunked as possible implements of terror, and that this differing set of reagents would in fact work, thus justifying the whole liquids ban.

However, the author has not specified what the explosive agent would be (other than to refer to it as a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and Tang). There's a reasonable amount of detail about how the detonator would be assembled, but nothing to explain what it's going to detonate. Without telling us what the chemical basis of the explosive agent is, we can only take the author's word as to whether an explosive agent can be made with those ingredients. Which isn't a very good starting point for an article discussing the relative merits of controvertial (albeit relatively minor) travel restrictions...

So cloning dogs creates "unnatural spawn of Satan" but using electronic equipment to post on interweb pages doesn't? Good to know, I'd be up to my eyes in cackling, trident-waving puppies otherwise...

I think the "check" card is in relation to the Yanks calling "current accounts" "checking accounts", rather than the usual linguistic incompetence.

It's still funny to see someone defend a corporation so rabidly...

Re: the "convicted felon" - I agree completely. If he was convicted, served his time, and openly admitted to it when applying for the job, where's the problem? I didn't think El Reg subscribed to the Daily Mail's "once a criminal always a criminal" policy...

Folks buying the One or One+ were given the chance to upgrade to the OneT (but not the OneT+, I don't think) for £50, but their stated retail price is supposed to be something like £200-220, afaik. (I'm going on memory here, She Who Must Be Obeyed was finally invited to put her full order for a One+ through yesterday morning and mentioned the upgrade offer).

Because we all know how, when a case comes to court, the verdict is dependent on what the legislator *wanted* rather than what they actually put down as law.

Ah, but it *is* the issue. There is a fundamental difference between an individual taking pictures for personal use (whatever that might be), and a representative of a company taking pictures AND PUBLISHING THEM for commercial use.

The publication and the purpose of use is where privacy becomes a fundamental aspect of this issue.

"I'm sure I was taught to have a sense of humour when I was there."

You had to learn to have one? At university? This may explain a lot...

Hmmm, evidently I'm missing out on the entertainment here. There again, I find that "tongue-in-cheek" is often slang for "not actually funny" so maybe that's it...

Curious to see it compared to the English/French and English/German rivalry; as an Irish citizen, quite a lot (though by no means all) of proponents of the "Ah, mocking the French is all just a bit of fun" theory take extreme exception when the tables are turned by the Irish presenting the "800 years of oppression, you bastards!" variant.

I'd take this more seriously if it wasn't an american psychiatrist saying this. In a country where taking anti-anxiety medication, anti-depressants or even anti-ADD medication is considered the norm, are we really surprised that someone's trying to resolve yet more issues through medication? (Do we know whether this psychiatrist is being bankrolled by one of the big pharmaceutical corporations, incidentally?)

How, exactly, are they hoping to dupe people into going along with this gadget-restricting tech? Effectively this is the same mindset as DRM, and I imagine it will die in the same way - if it requires everyone to opt into it, all you need is one person not doing so and the system falls over. And lets face it, no manufacturer wants to be part of the group that lost millions of sales by opting to be part of the "restrict your device's freedom" group.

(Aside from which, the assumption that stopping new tech from doing things = stopping people from doing things is misguided at best; if people want to break those rules they'll find a way of doing it...)

As the happy owner of a EEE 701, I like the idea of an equivalent approach to desktop computing, but it looks like the Linutop crowd got there first (I'd never heard of them, but a mate working for Blackwater in Ireland says they've started rolling them out in at least one office...)

http://www.linutop.com/linutop2/index.en.html

...It sounds like the idea behind the BugLabs modular thingamabob:

http://www.buglabs.net/products

Only with a product that you can actually sell - "phone with optional expansions will be easier to sell" than "generic gadget that doesn't exactly do anything until you add bits on and configure it", especially if they want to expand its appeal beyond the gadgetfreak market...

I love the "against" attitude expressed here:

eBay tries to force high-volume sellers to provide information normal RealWorld 2.0 businessses are required to provide

world+dog complains that this makes them vulnerable as they are running a business out of their home

Here's a tip - if you're running a business out of your home, and have goods of enough worth to make you fear burglary more than the average Terrified Citizen, *invest in home security*. Other businesses have to do this; why should you be exempt from displaying an address and thus being "vulnerable" just because you don't have a high street shop?

(Given the lack of concrete information on what the cut-off point is, I'm inclined against believing that Granny Goodness who sells two embroidered doilies a year via eBay will end up assaulted and burgled because of the nasty new policy, but that's just me and my cynical ways...)

An interesting read, and it's certainly good to see that someone involved on the record companies' side is aware that they have to provide an incentive to consumers in order to get them buying again, but I can't help feeling that he's either inadvertently or deliberately avoiding 2 particular ideas:

1) It's the larger record labels that have created the scenario of 12-track album with full price tag, of which only 2-4 tracks are actually worth a damn. Music may be more popular than ever now, but the majority of music out there is cruddy filler material, at least when it comes to the more famous/succesful artists. The easiest way of addressing this is to remove the pressure on the artist to release an entire album, and shift away to releasing individual tracks as and when they are ready for release. There's something to be said for the notion of an album as a complete package, but there's also something to be said for a consistent quality level. What alternative systems to the "get artist on contract, lock them in a room until they've got an album, release album and hope it does well" method are they considering or trialling? Or is this just another example of looking for a bigger stick with which to beat people back into the habit of paying for a full album when half of it isn't worth listening to?*

2) For all the talk of "Value for money", there's remarkably little talk of adjusting the existing mechanism for distribution of money when shifting from physical product to digital product. If people feel that an album priced at £15 is too expensive and they only want 5 tracks, why should they still be paying £5 for those 5 tracks when they don't get a physical copy or any of the stuff that allegedly contributes to the £15 cost of the album in the physical world?

3) How is the music industry going to adapt to the shift away from physical media, given that there have been several instances of shifting from old to new media which allow them to artificially boost sales by re-releasing their old back catalogues in the new formats? Presumably this is why they're so terrified of DRM-less digital music sales with implicitly perpetual licensing schemes, but they're going to have to address this sooner or later....

* Personally, I'd like to see something like a subscription-based channel mechanism. You pay your x per month, you get a new track every 1-2 days with a perpetual ownership license attached, and the incentive is that the artists involved in this channel are being commissioned to create individual tracks. Sort of like a singles club, really. You could even have a tiered mechanism - lower tier gives you a time-limited version via stream or something, higher tier gives you the perpetually-licensed downloads. With an option if you're on the lower tier to upgrade individual tracks to the perpetual license.

Apparently you *can* run Vista on a EEE, though why you'd want to do that is beyond me....

http://www.modaco.com/content/Asus-Eee-PC-http-www-EeEasy-com/261965/Installing-Vista-on-the-Eee-ive-done-it-and-it-works/

Well yes, but as of the release of Leopard, a DVD drive is an OS requirement for Apple machines. What happens when 10.6 hits? Oh, that's right, you get to use Remote Disc and piggy-back on someone else's optical drive (assuming you've got another Mac in the house), or you get to fork out $99 for the external drive...

There are other issues, such as that highlighted by the recent Apple iTunes shift - what about region-specific pricing? Why is the same content worth more on a disc formatted for EU-standard DVD players than on a disc formatted for US players?

What about content that is not available in the country of residence at the time? (I'm thinking films here, but you get the idea). If there is *no* way for me to legally view or purchase, say, Season 2 of Heroes in the UK....where's the lost sale caused by me downloading it? It's not as simple as saying "Ah, but once you've downloaded it you'll obviously never pay for it".

Besides which, there is an abject failure of the Government to address the kind of cultural shift consumers as a whole want from media providers. The whole DRM fiasco has shown that the attempted business model of stopping you ripping a CD of music you've paid for, and then trying to get you to buy the same music again as a set of mp3s or whatever, is not acceptable. The cultural perception of art is "if you've paid for it, you should be allowed to view/listen/read it as you see fit". This does not have to involve any violation of copyright; in fact, you'd think that an industry that keeps its profit margins healthy by regularly devising new formats in which to re-sell the same product would be in a good position to devise a cross-platform standard that allowed consumers the portability of product they desire...well, until you re-read that bit about keeping profit margins healthy, anyway.

(On a separate note, it's heartening at least to see that we're not quite as screwed as the Americans with their constant re-extension of copyright...personally, I'd quite like to see the kind of cultural shift that rewards artists come into place, but only if artists also realise that they don't get to retroactively raise the price thirty years after the fact...)