Well ...

>> I've never found anything on the other side of the garden wall that was sufficiently amazing, or consistently stable enough to warrant all the effort.

It all depends on your needs.

For work, I wanted a WiFi scanner - verboten by Apple, available once jailbroken.

I wanted to use the Bluetooth GPS I already have - not on the approved list from Apple, works just fine with RoqyBT4 installed.

These were the two key things I wanted.

Then other things are a bit more subtle. SBSettings from Big Boss allows you to show more in the status bar - like the WiFi you're connected to and your IP address. That's useful for some of us, of no interest to others. It also gives a very useful option to swipe the status bar and turn stuff on/off (eg Bluetooth, Location, etc) in a tap or two.

So far I've not installed anything else - partly because Cydia seems to require the use of Google or Facebook identities, neither of which I have or have any intention of having.

Yes it's a big deal

>> Is an electricity shortage such a big deal anyway

OK, we complain as it is that the UK cannot compete with <insert foreign land> manufacturers. Now add into the mix that a business won't know from one day to the next what the energy costs will be, or even if they'll have any at all.

When the lecky goes off, or just goes so high in price as to be unaffordable, then the business has to stop production. Then what ? Will the employees say "no problem boss, we'll go home without pay and not complain" ? I don't think so.

So the business either pays staff to do nothing, or it quickly find it can't get anyone to work for them (without paying inflated wages to cover the dead days.)

Either way, the business finds it's costs vastly increased and becomes even less competitive.

The alternative is that many, many people will start fitting their own diesel generators - not too inefficient if you use heat recovery on them. So the mad rush to intermittent renewables will lead to even worse shackles on business, AND a rise in the use of local diesel generators. That will really help the economy recover, reduce CO2 emissions, and improve air quality ... or rather it won't.

For small loads, could use a UPS - but then you have a load of lead acid batteries to manufacture - and a round trip loss that will actually increase overall electricity usage.

Yes, the "smart grid" stuff is mostly about "load management" - more or less a euphemism for rationing. Yes, some things (like electrically heating water in a storage cylinder) can be fairly easily used to manage demand, but many uses can't. "Cup of tea darling ?" ... "Oh sorry, it'll have to wait until we can afford to boil the kettle !"

Re: Just to be clear

>> The problem with nuclear fission is the waste produced and its storage.

Correction, the problem with "currently used" nuclear fission.

And why do we only use low grade reactors that make lots of long lived waste ? Why do we insist on dealing with it now rather than leaving it for 100 years when it will be much easier and less costly to handle ?

The answer to both is politics - and in particular the "oh no it's nucular and must be bad" response from certain quarters. We've had the technology to built "better" reactors for many decades - better as in produce more energy from less fuel and have less bad wastes at the end. But there's only one word that gets people frothed up more than nuclear - and that's plutonium. Hence it's been impossible to build the better reactors because all those hippeis would be even more woulnd up and teh red top readers would blindly follow them in ignorance.

Re: MAC Address

Bear in mind that on some systems - particularly cable which is more common in the US than here in the UK - the MAC address of the cable modem is the primary access key. The cable modem is ISP supplied, provides an ethernet port, and the user connects their own equipment downstream from that.

So for that type of system, it is not silly to ask for MAC addresses which will be fixed and uniquely identify the subscribers connection - while an IP address may be more open to challenge where they are dynamically assigned.

Re: "for purposes of tariff comparison"

>> Variable charging rates are going to do nothing more for the customer than confuse him; turning hardware on and off depending on the rate requires significant infrastructure changes (and incidentally, I want to run the washer *now* not when the leccy say I can!)

And *THAT* is what all this smart metering is about. It will save very very little in overall consumption (government officials have already admitted as much), it's there pure and simply to allow variable rate pricing - also known as price based rationing.

You see, with all those windmills we are subsidising to be built, power supplies are going to get more and more intermittent. We are already up to 4 1/2GW of metered capacity onto the grid - and output can vary in a matter of an hour or two between "F**k all" and "nearly flat out". Not to mention, that many of our peaks in demand (like December 2010) coincide with extended calm periods when there's no wind.

This means other generators (most notably gas turbine) have to keep turning their output up and down to compensate - so they are having to do a lot more starts and power changes to compensate for variable renewables supplies as well as variations in demand. Of course, the very significant costs of this are external to the windfarms and so are cleverly not included in the cost of wind lecky. The "simple" answer from the pro-wind camp is one of the following depending on who you ask :

1) wave their hands vaguely and insist that the European super grid will deal with it as we can buy any shortfall from abroad. Except that is, when the rest of Europe is short of power because their windmills have stopped too and they've been too short sighted to build some more nuclear plants.

2) wave their hands vaguely and insist that "smart metering" will deal with it. What they really mean is the power will be rationed, and unless you have lots of cash then you will be forced to use power when the wind blows rather than when you want to. So when the wind drops, your lecky will go up in price to suppress demand. Of course, no-one (or very few) will admit this even though it is the only way huge quantities of variable wind (and other intermittent renewable) power can be accommodated with current (or likely medium term) storage technology.

And if that doesn't work, the remote turn off can be used to create rolling blackouts like I recall from the 70s. I know of more than one person thinking in terms of a small diesel genny with exhaust heat recovery ...

Re: What is Apple (supposedly) guilty of?

> It hasn't been proven yet

Err, yes it has - there's nothing top prove as all you have to do is read the contract where Apple require that the goods (and it applies to Apps as well as books etc) are not sold anywhere else for less. That means, if someone else thinks they can sell an ebook on 5% margin, they cannot discount the retail price - because the publisher will have contracted with them on an agency model as well in order to comply with Apple's contract.

This is sufficient in it's own right I believe since it prevents competition. SInce it prevents any seller setting their own price, there can be no price competition, and that means prices are highly likely to rise - and guess what, they did.

Incidentally, Amazon do the same thing. If you sell "stuff" on Amazon, under the T&Cs you aren't allowed to sell it cheaper elsewhere.

Re: Hear hear

>> My super told me that PETs had a lock on data collection in labs ...

Maybe not a lock (by which I assume you mean a commanding market lead), but I recall they were popular for one good technical reason ..

Fitted as standard on the back of the PET was an IEEE-488 bus (aka HPIB or GPIB) - although they used a cheap and nasty card edge connector rather than the quality ones in the standard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE-488

There were (at a price) many lab instruments with an IEEE-488 ports on the back, so it was easy to hook them up and send/receive commands/data. So it would be fairly easy to (for example) send a command to a power supply to set a certain voltage on it's outputs, and then read in the outputs from the device under test using a GPIB equipped voltmeter.

There were other computers that could do this, such as some rather neat jobs from HP - bet you can imagine the relative prices ! That gave the PET an edge.

There were lots of other stuff that would hook up to GPIB - printers, plotters, floppy drives, ... In some respects it was to connectivity back then as USB is now - and in between we've had the good (SCSI), the bad (pick any one from many proprietary systems), and the ugly (parallel port disk drives, yuck). I can think of 3 reasons IEEE-488/GPIB never became ubiquitous - it probably was "not cheap", it was probably seen as "belonging" to HP, and the cables/connectors were fairly bulky (but they were stackable which made daisy chaining very easy).

IIRC it was also fairly easy to program with as well. I recall "some years ago" getting paid for a data transfer job off a PET based system (running a database off floppy disks !). I borrowed an IEE-488 card for an Apple II and wrote a program to handshake like a printer and slurp the data to a file on disk. A quick report to dump all the data out from the database, "printed" to this other computer, then load into new database and job done.

Ahh, nostalgia.

But there's more. There were (from memory) three competitors for the desktop at this time. Two are well known - the PET and the Apple II. IIRC the third was the TRS-80. My memory is a bit vague from that long ago, but I think any one of them could have made it - but Apple won for one simple reason. When Visicorp brought out Visicalc, they looked at what was available and decided that Apple had the better specs - basically more memory with up to 48k on-board and up to 64k on an add-in card. Visicalc brought automation to spreadsheets (yes, they existed before computers and calcs were done by hand) and was snapped up by ready users (especially department managers keen to escape the tyranny of their IBM centric MIS departments). That meant sales of Apple IIs, and the others lost out. The rest, as the saying goes, is history - the TRS-80 disappeared into oblivion along with a myriad of others, the PET struggled along for a while (especially in niche areas such as lab work), Apple did "fairly well".

@Paul

> There are many people who bought Freeview dvb-t1 TVs which could decode such HD and didn't know they'd be stuck with SD

But that's an argument for OFT/Trading Standards/ASA getting involved and stopping what were blatantly misleading descriptions.

I can't get any HD channels as I don't have any compatible kit - but I do support having used it. You yourself make the point about OfCon failing to mandate DAB+ compatibility and thus leaving us stuck with the inferior DAB. In this case, putting HD on DVB-T2 has inherently forced all manufacturers (apart from the liars who sell DVB-T kit as capable of getting HD transmissions in the UK) to incorporate T2 receivers in HD kit.

They *could* have put HD out on DVB-T - but then people would be moaning about why the UK went with DVB-T (DAB) when we could have had the better DVB-T2 (DAB+) standard if only "the authorities" had mandated T2 (DAB+) compatibility.

Give it a few more years and I can't help thinking we'll start to hear talk of switching more muxes to T2 to get more capacity (adding any more muxes has already be ruled out, especially when the spectrum has been got rid of) - but that would really need T2 capability being mandated for anything sold as "Freeview".

As for transmitter power, as others have said, the actual power isn't as high as you might think, and when you divide that by the number of people served, the power/person is very low - many of the figures are under 1W/person. There is no way whatsoever that you could get the same service* to lots of people without using more power. Even if you have existing kit (end user routers etc) already running, the incremental power from putting the extra data through the system will probably exceed the savings from shutting down the transmitters.

And that's before you start talking non-cabled systems to support mobile users.

* Note service, not data. Where service means any user can pick any of the programs being transmitted.

Re: Rod vs Rail

You mean ... like a lot of curtain tracks ?

Confusing names ...

>> There will never be a broadband only product

Actually there are ISPs (or at least one, Gradwell) doing MPF (Metallic Path Facility) lines where all you have is the broadband.

But does anyone else think the definitions seem designed to confuse ? At least the descriptions in the article are confusing - "broadband only" is actually a line connected to a BT phone port at the exchange, so the low rental is in addition to the "phone line" rental.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/faq/sections/migration.html#247

Re: International treaties?

You mean the Berne Convention.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Literary_and_Artistic_Works

Yes, I'd find it hard to believe that France wasn't a signatory, because if they weren't we'd have all sorts of "issues" with them. And this new law is completely incompatible with the Berne Convention. Two areas come to mind :

1) "it is prohibited to require formal registration"

This new law effectively imposes a requirement for your to register your 'opt-out' of losing control of your rights. Incompatible.

2) "all works except photographic and cinematographic shall be copyrighted for at least 50 years after the author's death"

Not any more, under this new law, (some) authors will effectively lose their rights within their lifetime, and the estates of deceased authors will also lose rights before the 50 years is up. Incompatible.

France would have to withdraw from the Berne Convention - and that would cause a s**tstorm of problems for them. It would mean no other country signed up to the Berne Convention would need to honour copyright on French works. And I'd expect (as another commentator said earlier) a sudden raft of "not to be exported to or published in France" clauses.

I wondered how long ...

... it would take for someone to say it.

>> Unlikely the architects would have wanted to have opening windows because it screws up the aircon....

Indeed, I expect a large space like this will come with highly specified environmental controls - not just temperature controlled, but maintained with filtered, temperature and humidity controlled air. Anything else would be a terrible place to work.

Opening windows work in small room, but when you get to larger rooms then you have the problem that for people away from the windows to get any air, those near the windows get "an excessive amount" of air - typically they get frozen in UK climates.

Correct, aviation fuel is not taxed

>> As far as I and Wikipedia know, jet fuel is not taxed, not even VAT in the UK. This helps to reduce the airline bancrupcies. This is also handy for people with their own jets ...

The reason aviation fuel isn't taxed is because of international treaties - it's nothing to do qith reducing airline failures which has never been a consideration for the tax man. If (say) the UK imposed heavy tax on aviation fuel, there would be a big economic incentive for aircraft to arrive in the UK and only take on enough fuel to reach their next stop outside the UK - in principal they'd like to have just enough to land and taxi to the stand but no-one would push it *that* far*. They'd then fuel up outside the UK, cramming as much in as possible and minimise the amount they need to buy on the next stop in the UK.

* There are in fact rules on minimum reserves to be carries, but even with these, there have been incidents where aircraft have run out of fuel. Some of these have been due to errors (lookup Gimli glider), some just down to using more fuel than they expected. Running out of fuel during a flight is not generally considered a good thing !

Such is the cost of fuel to feed a large aircraft, if there is enough differential, airlines will re-route and/or add addition stops if that will reduce their costs.

Clearly there are significant safety issues if airlines are pushing things to the limits, and so there are international treaties that aviation fuel isn't taxed by any country so as to minimise such incentives.

Not only is this a source of envy to non-flyers, it's also a source of envy for those flying at the lower end of the scale where fuels (AvTur (for turbines) for non-commercial use, and AvGas (petrol) for all uses including commercial) is heavily taxed with fuel tax and VAT on top of that.

RE: Or just hide the SSID

>> If you don't broadcast it, it won't show up.

Wrong, so very wrong !

If you turn off SSID broadcasts, you can actually increase the number of packets transmitted with the SSID in them. You also increase the workload on both your access point and attached devices as attached devices will keep actively looking for other bases with the same SSID rather than passively looking for broadcasts.

In short, "hiding" your SSID just doesn't, and it increases the amount of control traffic required to make the system work.

But I agree with the others, this is just typical Google - "we're going to do it, and as a breadcrumb tossed to refusenics we'll allow you to ask us to remove it if you actually find out there's a away to ask". In my case, I can confidently predict that if I changed my SSID as suggested then it would ... have absolutely no effect whatsoever for a good many years. Google streetmap cars have only been round here once, and I doubt if they'll come by again any time soon.

One fairly useful strategy would be to use a system where the MAC address can be changed, and script something to change it very frequently and randomly. Once you change the MAC address, then the data they have becomes useless. Not to mention, it increases their storage requirements keeping track of all the random base stations that do get reported by automated snitches.

Err, that's it !

>>> ... is a US law ...

Simple really, if you want to be able to sell your product in the USA, you have to comply with their laws. In effect, that means you need to be able to prove to your purchasers that you've complied, and that all the components you've used come from suppliers that comply, and that their suppliers comply, an so on all the way back to the source.

So the tantalum processors are taking the view that since they cannot **prove** the provenance of the ore from the Congo, they cannot therefore satisfy the requirements of their customers. Thus the only safe option is to not buy from the Congo at all until it's all resolved.

The other option is to keep two supply chains going - the US acceptable supply chain (all the way from mined ore to products in consumers' hands), and one for countries not so restricted. Put simply, unless alternative sources were significantly more expensive, then no-one in the electronics industries wants that level of complexity and cost.

Isn't it obvious ?

>> What's the difference in having a SIM as part of the main board & one in a socket?

Apart from the fact that it instantly means Apple both control which networks you can connect to (even retrospectively changing this **after** you have bought the device) and knows which network you are using ? If Apple have a disagreement with a network, they can simply not put that network's keys into future devices - that means the network will effectively be forced to play to Apple's tune in everything it does which I cannot see as anything but a bad thing.

But wait, there's more. This doesn't just apply to new devices, since you will have to get Apple's blessing to switch networks, Apple can disable the ability to switch to any network it doesn't like for devices it's sold in the past.

And as others have already pointed out, it stops you swapping SIMs at will - whether that's swapping SIMs in your iWotsit (such as when travelling), or swapping one SIM between your iWotsit and something else. On the latter, I have a 3G dongle which I occasionally use with my laptop - I don't have a separate SIM for it, I just borrow the one from my mobile.

Lastly, ever looked at mobile options ? Look at most operators an they have iPhone and normal options for SIM only tariffs. So you can pay more for a contract or PAYG SIM for an iPhone, or less for a generic SIM only deal. Once you can't put "any old SIM" into your iWotsit, then the operators can also ensure that you can't buy a cheap contract instead fo the more expensive one.

No, I see nothing good about this - not for users at least.

It's coming ...

Whilst many ISPs still have their heads in the sand, others are working on it. Plusnet are currently running a limited trial (only 20 people I believe) specifically to work out what works, what doesn't, and what needs to be addressed for it to "just work" with end users. I believe they already have core networking supporting it. Some of the users on the trial are reporting good results with standard routers - but as you might imagine, there are only a handful doing IPv6 at the moment.

At the moment IPv6 is work. Give it a few years and I think we'll start to see some adoption - and once the ISPs start supporting it, and the customers are using routers that support it, we'll find ourselves with a growing number of people using it without actually knowing it.

Yes we need to sort out firewall stuff, yes there will be hurdles along the way, but if we all start looking at it, and adopting it (even if only piecemeal) then it will come and it will get easier. The hardest thing is the change in mindset required.

@ Terry Maguire

>> We use the internet for B2B marketing and were shocked to find that we could be blacklisted without any warnings and only found out via our customers.

Ahh diddums.

Quite frankly, most "marketing" is spam. Apologies if you genuinely only ever send mail to those who genuinely and **knowingly** opted in - if you are then you are in a very very small minority. Note that failing to tick a box, hidden at the bottom of a long form, drawn in pale grey on a slightly paler grey background and labelled with pale grey text, does **NOT** constitute an opt in.

If you were prevented from sending emails because of being on a blacklist then the reason is that the recipients had made policy decisions that they don't want to receive mail from the sort of outfits that find themselves on the blacklist(s) they use. Once you realise that, then your complaint becomes "I couldn't send mail because the recipients didn't want it", and the logical extension of your comments becomes "people shouldn't be allowed to block our emails just because they don't want to receive them".

As an analogy, I'm sure some (for example) minicab outfits have policies about the types of people they want to have in their cars. Some may have a policy not to take bookings from the "rougher end of town" - if that is the case, then your complaint that they won't pick you up is down to you choosing the wrong place to live. The internet is a bit like that - if you make the mistake of setting up office in a rough neighbourhood (ie an ISP that supports spammers) then I'm afraid you'll just have to live with the fact that you won't be able to deal with the people who don't want to deal with email from "the rough end" of the internet.

That is a policy decision made by the people who set up their mail servers. The blacklists simply provide an opinion about any particular bit of the internet. They don't block any mail, and no-one is forced to use them if they don't want to.

I run the mail service for a small ISP/IT services company. Yes we occasionally get blacklisted, and it's almost always because one of our customers has been a d**khead with the stuff they send. However, I find dealing with blacklists a lot easier than dealing with the f***tards at the likes of AOL.

>> Of course such a vehicle would have the normal steering eccentricities of its parent - turns one way when accellerating, the other way when braking

Actually it wouldn't if the "outboard" wheel were driven as well as the inboard one. The reason a motorcycle and sidecar combination does what you describe is because it's one wheel drive - with the driven wheel offset from the centre of gravity (CoG). Make the drive match the relative positions of wheels and CoG and it would drive normally.

On the other hand, I;ve been wondering about the inclination of the sun, and whether there is any scope for improved orientation of the panels towards it. Probably not as the additional complexity (and weight) would probably be more of a hindrance than you'd gain.

>> Presumably the side of the earth that is facing away from the burst is OK initially.

But only for up to 12 hours ? I'd hazard a guess that these vents, while only being a 'blink' in cosmological timescales, could actually be of considerable length. We're talking some very massive bodies, that even at massive speed could take days, weeks ?, more ?, to finish their collisions.

So if the burst lasts more than a few hours, the earth will simply rotate in it, much like the meat pillar in a kebab shop, and we'll all get a nice uniform roasting.

I was thinking that too, what on earth are they doing spoiling good grub with rabbit food ?

And the other looks rather like a rather plain pizza.

Doubt it

The same laws would apply - if Sky have sold the rights to publicly show their logo etc in Greece, then it is illegal for them to restrict the transfer of those "goods or services" within the EU. That's exactly the same argument the premier league used - they'd only authorised the showing of their copyright material in Greece via that provider, and so argued that showing it in the UK was a breach of copyright.

Err, yes you can !

>> I just purchased Star Wars Complete Saga on BluRay and my Samsung BD-5300 BluRay player can no longer read the disks so I have an $86 set of disks that cannot be returned since i opened them to play them and a BluRay player that is rendered "unfit for the intended purpose" by DRM.

Well if the disks are faulty then you CAN return them (I assume you are in the UK ?). Any statement that you can't return them because you've opened them is in conflict with your legal rights and therefore null and void. If they are sold as BlueRay discs, and won't play in your BlueRay player, then one or both is not fit for purpose and your rights under the Sales of Goods Act and Sales of Goods and Services Act come to your rescue.

Between them, they state that it is an implied term of any contract between a consumer and business that the goods are as described, fit for purpose, and reasonably durable. If a BR player won't play a BR disc then one or both is "not fit for purpose" - though your difficulty is determining which if you don't have another player to try the discs in. Of course, if you ask at the time of disk purchase if it will play in "<model X> BR player" then they will say yes - if they don't then the "fit for purpose stated at the time of purchase" bit kicks in and it's the disk retailers problem even if the incompatibility os the fault of the player.

But if your player plays other disks, then you can infer that it's the discs and return them to the retailer. IMO it is ones duty to do so - unless people stand up and pass the cost and inconvenience back up the chain then there isn't any disincentive for the vendors to keep heaping up the midden. If they find it's costing them hard cash then they may, just, start to think again.

What would be ideal would be for enough people to take discs back that a major chain (such as ASDA or Tesco) threatened to drop the output from a manufacturer on the grounds that the returns were too high. That is what it will take for anything to change. One can but dream !

Don't leave it at that !

>> I got an iPad a year and 2 months ago

>> The ensuing hubris was surprising in this day and age. £200 for a refurbished replacement with 90 day warranty. Pay up or f*ck off.

If this was in the UK, then go back and demand a repair for a faulty product. The manufacturers warranty is completely irrelevant - you have LEGAL RIGHTS which no vendor can take away from you. Note that your claim is against the retailer that sold it to you if you didn't buy it direct from Apple.

The key words are "not reasonably durable", and the fact that this comes up as a known problem supports the view that this is a design/manufacturing defect. Note that the law does *NOT* set any upper limit, but effectively it is 6 years in the UK as that is the limit for bringing any action in this sort of case.

Look up The Sale of Goods Act 1979 and the Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982

Once you know your rights, then I suggest you go back to Apple (or whoever you bought it from) and politely request a repair for this obvious manufacture/design defect. If they aren't accommodating, then point out that the above acts impose an implied term that the goods are fit for purpose and reasonably durable. 14 months for a "premium price" is not a reasonable life and therefore it has not proved to be "reasonably durable".

If they still won't play, then I suggest you get out the forms which you downloaded beforehand and start filling in their details. This is pretty well guaranteed to get the matter escalated and will probably result in a "goodwill" repair.

Whether you choose to go to the next level is up to you. Your legal rights are to have your iPad repaired (or replaced if repair isn't possible) and to claim the cost off the retailer. Any retailer with two brain cells to rub together will know that it will cost them more to defend such an action even if you lose (they won't get their costs back) and will not let it reach court. Apple in particular would not want such a case to happen - the bad PR would hurt when they claimed that an ipad is only good for 14 months or less !

More information at http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/MoneyTaxAndBenefits/ManagingDebt/Makingacourtclaimformoney/index.htm

Businesses only get away with s**t like this because too few people know their rights.

Err ?

>> This Free software lets you define your own XHTML based forms:

What the guy isn't asking for is some software that lets him create forms (of any type). What he's asking for are **standards** so that the businesses he deals with can easily create structured documents **in a common format** which he can then drop into his own accounts software (which will read them as standard with them being a common and well used standard) and save the rekeying.

EDI was supposed to do that, but grew into some horrible mess of multiple incompatible file formats, but most importantly more or less requires complex (=expensive) software and services in order to shunt documents about.

It's a pity ...

that certain financial institutions don't heed common advice ! Yes PayPal, I'm looking at you (though others do it too).

PayPal are constantly sending out emails of the "have you checked your online activities lately, click here to login" style. Yes they are genuine, and they excuse themsleves by saying "you can tell it's genuine because we've included your full name".

I've had similar from a bank, and another bank is quite happy to phone me up and expect me to prove who I am !

Didn't stop if being 'sold' like that though

>> HD Ready has only ever meant that sets can display an HD picture via a suitable input; it has never meant that people could receive HD broadcasts

But that subtle distinction was never explained to most people - so yes, there are a lot of people who thought they were buying TVs capable of showing Freeview HD because the sale-droids were more happy taking the commission than putting them right. That, of course, assumed the sales droids even knew themselves.

Err ...

>> The power company can't force you to give them control over it.

Wrong.

If they come along and tell you they are going to change the meter, your choices are to :

a) let them

b) let them disconnect you from the supply

And someone else questioned the ability to remotely turn off supplies. It is my understanding that this is one of the key parts of many smart meters, so whilst it may not be mentioned, there's a good chance it will be there.

When you hear of large companies getting huge fines for their poor customer service, and the legendary billing cock-ups, the bet shouldn't be on whether there's an erroneous disconnection but when.

Like this ...

>> The faked certificates allowed websites to pretend to be authentic? Does anyone know how these were actually used?

I can't say how they *were* used, only how they *could* be used.

Without SSL, anyone who controls the digital path between your computer and another site can intercept the connection and pretend to be the other site. Having done this, the options are quite varied - they could forward all the traffic so the site still works but they can read it all in transit , or they could completely replace some or all of the information (ie feed you false pages). This si the basis of a Man In The Middle (MITM) attack - you sit in between two communicating parties and spy on or even alter the messages being passed.

SSL is supposed to stop this, because your client software (browser, email program, whatever) and the site negotiate a secure connection and your end can verify the credentials by following the cryptographic chain back to a root certificate. The MITM attacker won't have a valid certificate, and your client software can then flag up the "there's something wrong with the security" alerts.

But, if you've managed to get a fake but valid SSL certificate, then when you do your MITM attack, you do have a valid certificate, and so the end user never gets any alerts. This means if you are a government intent of suppressing dissent, you can eavesdrop on (in this case, it seems emails) that your citizens think are secure (the service is off-shore in a country hostile to your government, and the traffic is protected in transit by SSL).

Obviously, if you are planning an uprising and think your communications channel is secure, then you are likely to divulge details that would be useful to those that you are planning to rise up against.

Pah, you youngsters

I remember paying £320 for 2off 1MB SIMMs - and that was second hand and considered good value for the time !

Going back a bit further, I can't remember what it cost me for the 1kx4bit chips my first computer took.

Eh ?

>> MAC filtering

Because MACs can't be faked, right ?

Err, don't forget ...

This is the same OfCon that still won't accept that PLTs cause any problems worth investigating. The same OfCon that kept claiming they had seen no evidence of a problem a full years after it turned out they had a report in their hands that effectively said "massive problem".

This is the same OfCon that will quite happily sell the same spectrum twice. This spectrum already "belongs" to someone - you can be quite sure ofCon will extract licence fees from others to use it as well.

So do I ...

without paying anyone for a "service" to do it or having to contend with whatever clunky interface some vendor wants to inflict on you.

Recipe: Take one installation of MythTV, add as many networked frontends as you want (watch any recording on any TV), add recording rules to taste. Allow programs to record, then sit back and enjoy.

Of course it doesn't help if a program is never repeated for you to record ...

RE: So what innovation is really being killed by patents?

>> I reckon quite a lot but you don't generally get to hear about most of it.

The problem now is that patents are largely a tool owned and used by big businesses. They amass **HUGE** quantities of them, and keep patenting every more varied derivations from the same basics - as well as new areas.

The problems are many fold :

1) They no longer work as intended. Many patents are so "wooly" as to be virtually useless in actually understanding what's going on - and so society isn't actually benefitting from publication as was intended.

2) Because of the sheer number and breadth of scope, it is impossible to do a full search and find all patents that may, or may not, apply to your new widget.

3) Because of 2, it is now almost impossible to make anything that doesn't infringe on someone's patent. Your only way of knowing is to see how many letters arrive accusing you of infringement.

4) The system is broken. When the letters do arrive, unless you are also a big business, with your own arsenal of patents, then you have just two options - shut up or pay up. In effect, it matters not whether you actually infringe on someone's patent, it will cost more than a small business can afford to go to court and win. If you do win, you will still be out of pocket as you won't get your legal bills paid by the other side - perhaps in part, not in full.

5) The system is broken. If someone does infringe on your patent, unless you are a big business (note the pattern here ?), then it's unlikely you'll be able to afford to defend it. In effect, a big business can just take your invention, steal it, and screw you in court until you run out of money and fold. It's happened time and time again.

The original idea behind patents was that in return for publishing details of your invention, and so enriching scientific knowledge in general, you got a limited time in which you could prevent anyone else using it without a licence from you. So if you came up with a great new idea, you could share it (society benefits) and you could also still benefit from it. This was seen as a win-win situation as it genuinely encouraged innovation as you actually had a chance to benefit before others just copied you.

Now it's stifling innovation. It's a brave inventor that tried to get anywhere now without backing from a big business. If you do come up with something genuinely new then it's expensive to get a patent and even prohibitively expensive to actually use it. Meanwhile, those same big businesses will almost certainly find a patent they can accuse you of infringing, and so can effectively shut you down - even you aren't at fault.

That brings us to the argument in the article - that Google was stupid not to buy Nortel's patents when it could have done. These days, as explained above, business is done like the cold war - you need to have enough weapons (patents) to shut down the opposition so that they'll be too scared to use their's against you. That was a big problem for Apple when it started making phones - people like Nokia have so many relevant patents that Apple could not avoid infringing on them, and not having anything to fight back with, Nokia (and others) could effectively name their price.

So the current patent system, especially in the US, is broken. The period of protection is too long. Patents are awarded too easily. It's too costly for small guys to get a patent. It's too costly for a small guy to enforce one. It's too expensive for a small guy to defend against an infringement charge.

unlikely

>> ... lawers will split into into a change per infringement so say they've found 1,000 mp3 tracks on your hardware which look suspect then of course you can appeal but that's 1,000 infringements.... cost to yourself of £20,000 ...

But it's going to cost them a lot more than £20 per charge to submit the charges - so they aren't going to spend upwards of £100k or more unless they really, really, REALLY think they'll not get kicked out of court by a judge (or out of the tribunal by the panel). And talking of being kicked out of court by the judge (or out of the tribunal by the panel), I suspect a stunt like throwing 1000 separate charges would be thrown out as an abuse of procedure.

All in all, I think that bit seems proportionate.

What really irks is that the "you can steal copyright by a lame search intended not to find the true owner" measured that have resurfaced. As the article points out, that will fail again as too many people will be against it, AND I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't conflict with the Berne Convention.