It's worrying (for values of "worry" that include mild peeves) that the usually mathematically-strict XKCD should mix Old English with Metric measures, and worse, not clarify, in an article about British confection, whether the Old English units are British Imperial or American Customary Units. XKCD, hand back your maths-nerd credentials at once!

OpenDNS Family Shield for typos + spend time with them, job done

What's working well for my five-year-old daughter so far, is OpenDNS FamilySheild to protect against accidental typo-squatting pr0n, and then just spending time with her when she uses her netbook (and by "her netbook" I mean my old Eee 901 netbook, only her login has a stripped-down Openbox desktop with only the launcher icons she uses).

One thing I don't let her do is use the netbook on her own. For example she can't take it into her bedroom and shut the door. Mostly we use it on the kitchen table or in the lounge.

Oh, and I wholeheartedly recommend getting a cheap graphics tablet for young kids. The Trust Flex Ultra Thin is less than 20 quid delivered and, after a bit of xorg.conf wrangling, has done wonders for her Tux Paint masterpieces.

There goes the shipping forecast... and your power supply

Pundits wondering why they can't just keep their existing electricity meter, might want to ask BBC Radio 4. Many electricity meters use a longwave radio data service, carried alongside BBC Radio 4, to synchronise Economy 7 times, clocks forward/backward for summer time etc.

http://www.energynetworks.org/rts/

Which is all fine until the BBC's Radio 4 longwave transmitter blows a valve.

Because there are no more valves.

And nobody makes them anymore.

And the BBC have said that once one of the two remaining valves blow, Radio 4 Longwave becomes Radio 4 DAB. Which the electricity meters don't listen to.

But nobody has stopped to ask "what happens to the data service, and the electricity meters which rely on it?"

So, whilst we can argue all we like about exactly what the new meters should do, how smart they should be, and who should pay for them, what you can't argue about is that pretty soon we are definitely going to need new meters.

Anti-capitalism but PRO-sweatshop?

So basically the anti-capitalism protesters are basing their campaign around mass-produced imported electronics made by sweatshop workers who have to pay their own employer for their mandatory food and accommodation?

I wonder how much a netbook or a smartphone would cost if the factory workers were paid a Western minimum wage?

LOLcats overload?

Glowing kittehz AND an STD? I predict 4chan will melt.

Transmitters

You can buy a decent community-sized FM transmitter over the counter in various European countries for less than a hundred quid, so I find the argument that raiding their equipment is effective at keeping pirates off the air, is highly dubious at best. It's certainly cheap to do, but it's whack-a-mole. Pay a couple of hundred euros and you can get a high quality quartz-locked TX with RDS and all the bells and whistles, that won't wander all over the band and won't interfere with anything except stations on that specific frequency.

Previously the biggest threat was the DTI confiscating the DJs' record & CD collections. Now everything is on MP3 and backed up at home, that threat is gone.

The days of pirates blocking emergency comms is long gone. The emergency services moved off FM nearly three decades ago. The last pirate to block an emergency frequency was Radio Caroline in 1989, on 6215kHz, an emergency frequency that was so close to the 49m band used by the BBC World Service, Radio France International et al that nobody had used it to make an emergency call for well over a decade even back then.

What are valid arguments, are interference in other officially-licensed broadcasters, and health and safety. Health and safety, in particular.

Typically when the moronic surveyors turn up they inevitably find a tower block. Now their triangulation kit will easily identify a location on the horizontal - i.e. long/lat grid ref on a map - but it won't help them identify which floor the little bastards are occupying. So what they tend to do is trip the fusebox floor-by-floor until the signal goes dead, then they have found the correct floor.

To get around this, decent pirates take their mains power supply from something else. And this is where health and safety comes in. The AC's story about taking 3-phase off a lift shaft using a couple of nails sounds pretty typical. I've known a pirate in the West Midlands take power from a street light mounted to the side of the tower block - leaning out of the window on the 5-6th storey, disconnecting the bulb and attaching wires directly to the socket. A professional pirate will use a "cat and mouse" relay system, with the studio some distance from the transmitter connected by a HF link, and an early warning system (typically, one of the DJs' girlfriends monitoring the output) to tell the studio to scarper once the TX gets busted. You then get into a battle of wits whereby the pirates try to create an HF receiver that can't be broken into or the source studio identified without triggering the early warning system.

Wicked!

Am I the only one dissapointed by the lack of Sophie Aldred-flavoured late-80s classic Doctor Who content in this article?

Acorn, whatever happened to them? THEY BECAME ARM!

Um, the author of this article does know that Acorn went on to become ARM, the designer and patent-holder of the CPUs used in almost every smartphone and low-power device on the planet, right?

Superb

Just superb. A bunch of tech journos and backroom geeks put a paper aeroplane into space. That's an outstanding achievement, and all the better for being almost entirely pointless; it's great to do something this significant just for the fun of it.

For further reading into the field of boffinry and half-arsed over-achievement, take a gander at "Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin" by Francis Spufford.

This would have flooded Oldbury nuclear power station

Whilst it's all very nice to talk about how abandoning the barrier plans has "saved" the wildlife sanctuaries along the estuary (notably, Slimbridge Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust), let's be realistic here.

The barrage plan would have flooded Oldbury nuclear power station, currently being decommissioned.

I really don't think the plan was a goer from day one. Nobody in their right mind wants to put a 1960s decommissioned nuclear power station underwater.

Does pedaling/flapping add anything that gliding/car-tow does not?

As the video shows, the craft is launched by a tow-rope from an automobile. It fails to gain any significant height in the video.

I am really not convinced that the pedalling/flapping wings is really adding much here.

I suspect that a control experiment, of a rigid glider pulled by a car tow-rope, would achieve much the same result.

Requiem for Pop Will Eat Itself

God help us. Trent Reznor has become the new Clint Poppie. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clint_Mansell

Now replaced with a Press Association picture!

You're not gonna believe this. They've replaced it again, this time with a Press Association image.

http://www.aoakley.com/misc/peston-pa.png

So that's two image royalties plus timewasting for the teaboy. Good to see the budget cuts working hard at Auntie.

But when you take your WiFi router from one rural location to another...

I discovered that by taking my WiFi router from one part of the Cotswolds to another part of the Cotswolds, neither of which had neighbours with WiFi, resulted in... all WiFi geolocation tools giving my location as my old address.

It's driving my wife nuts. Even changing the SSID hasn't made a difference. I think I'll have to try to assign the router a new MAC address.

Makes them stupid...er?

I like El Reg's assumption that poor == stupid already, and that therefore computers must be making the children stupid-er, rather than perhaps being responsible for making otherwise intelligent poor people become stupid in the first place.

DAMN YOU, disgusting FREETARDS

Surprised to see this Reg hack not adhering to the editorial line that FREE IS BAD, M'KAY? I expect John will be sent for capitalist re-education camp in the Arizona desert by the end of the day.

Don't these freetards know that almost half a dozen civil service contractor's girlfriends may be relying on the income from this two million pound government overspend nobody ever thinks of the henchmen's families etc. etc. etc.

It's the handsets, stupid

The plethora of proprietary VOIP handsets is the problem. The way to make this work is to buy a Linksys SPA3102 (£45) plus a BT socket master adapter from Maplins (£5) and plug in your normal, existing, BT-compatible handsets into that. Hey presto, you can get VOIP on normal phones. Then just pick any of the gazillions of domestic/traveller-oriented VOIP SIP providers, such as webcalldirect, sipgate, budgetsip, justvoip etc. etc. etc. and enjoy free landline calls plus dirt cheap international and mobile calls. I wrote a guide: http://tinyurl.com/aovoip

wallhack =

wallhack = backstab + headshot

A local writes...

The problem is the audience, not the participants. It's just a large local hill, there is no car park, there is no significant access for anything. It's densely wooded, other than the bit that people throw themselves down. The bits that aren't covered in trees are covered in mud. They put up a rope bannister along the side of the hill, and you haul yourself up the rope to watch assorted rugby-club veterans and peer-pressured teens injure themselves.

There is simply no infrastructure to cope with the increased audience. There's nowhere for them to leave their cars. There's nowhere for coaches to pick up / drop off people.

It worked fine as a local event for local people. But there is simply no way for this to work as a national or international spectacle.

Long/lat 51.831,-2.158 if you're interested.

Shropshire - disputed territory

"Wales' Welsh-speaking community, and apparently a number of English speakers who have maladjusted TV aerials." - or English Welsh speakers from Oswestry and other parts of Shropshire where Welsh is the language of choice in the home.

He has a Facebook page

Top Google result for "Pritesh Hathalia" is a Facebook page with that name from Leicester. Could it be..?

Always the bloody tube

What is it with El Reg and their presumption that the London Underground is the only place that broadband / streaming / 3G / WiFi is not available?

This app would be ideal for me, commuting across the Cotswolds. We get 3G in the larger villages and market towns, but in the open countryside, you're lucky to get EGPRS. And we all know (or should know) that 3G mast handover doesn't really work at anything over 20mph; try using 3G on an intercity train, even on a "posh" route like Oxford - Paddington, and it's a whole world of fail.

Stop wittering on about the damned tube as if it's the only disconnected place in existence.

(And yes, we get the Metro on Cotswold buses. It has theatre reviews for Bristol, for some reason. Dunno why the buses need flat-screen CCTV, though, given that the most anti-social behaviour we witness is some deaf old dear failing to thank the driver as she disembarks. And yes, we do actually use buses. Just because I own a 4x4 for scuttling around the countryside, doesn't necessarily mean I want to waste time driving it through Cheltenham or Oxford city centre traffic jams only to fail to find somewhere to park. A £70/month bus pass takes me anywhere from the M50 to the M4).

Bunny?

The IEEE pick a black female role model, and her employers describe her as a "Bunny"?

Class. You couldn't make this stuff up.

Metadata, not data

Was Echelon really ever about real-time speech recognition? I doubt it. Most of the power would have surely come the enveloper - from knowing who was phoning who, from where and when. If a chap you suspect to be a religious fundamentalist phones a chap you suspect to be a passport forger, then that is surely already enough to flag up the communication as worthy of further investigation, without having to pick out key words or whole conversations.

CPU grunt not storage space

I'd have thought that Ubuntu's decision to ditch OpenOffice on Netbook Remix has nothing to do with storage space (as El Reg suggests) and a lot more to do with processing power. Most netbooks are single-core 1.6GHz affairs which lack the oomph to run OpenOffice - which is not only already bloated, but also runs in Java. If Sun made a native X86 version of OOo then I'm sure it would be a much better experience all round. Sun could also cut down the bloat by moving much of the "features" into plug-ins (OOo 3 already supports plugins).

Joiku

And this has an advantage over the existing, working, popular Joiku Spot app how?

Pigs ... In ... SpaaaaAAAAaace!

Strangely, the Peppa Pig space rocket toy *does* have seat belts, although the car toy does not.

Can't believe you missed...

...the opportunity for a Peter Ustinov "One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing" headline

After 8 years, still can't Print Selection

Given that in eight years, Thunderbird still hasn't fixed basic functionality bugs such as the inability to "Print Selection" ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66806 ) I wouldn't hold out much hope. It's an excellent traditional SMTP/POP3/IMAP client, but it needs to concentrate on finishing off the basic bugs which have been around for nearly a decade, before worrying about webmail and modern frippery.

How do you get out in a car park?

Given the enormous size of the gull-wing doors, how do you get out in a typical car park where there are other cars parked within 40cm either side of you?

Birmingham is in Liverpool now?

Since when as the West Midlands had access to the coast?

Reassembly is not the reverse of disassembly

Given that most of the lander is still in situ on the Moon, and most of the rocket burned up in the athmosphere, it would appear that this is the one Haynes manual where reassembly is not the reverse of disassembly.

Hope they come back soon

I lost my virtual server there too. I thought, and still think, their price, terms and conditions are ideal for non-mission-critical stuff run by people who have sufficient Clue to organise their own backups. Their network connectivity, for the price, was excellent, the support very quick, and their choice of pre-installed operating systems (notably, Ubuntu 8.04) sold it for me.

One of the few affordable UK VPS hosts, I do hope they stay in the market for a long time.

Fakes? Or reproductions?

Are these items actually fakes - ie. the seller claims they are genuine when they are not - or are they reproductions - ie. the seller notes their similarity to the original but is clear that they are not the original?

I'm not a billionaire and I don't know any antiques thieves. I wanted a good copy of the Mappa Mundi on my study wall. So I went to Hereford Cathedral and paid thirty odd quid for a nice reproduction (and given plenty of choice, I deliberately chose English labeling over the original Latin).

Was I swindled? No.

Did I get what I wanted? Yes.

What the professor seems to not understand is that there is a massive market for reproductions, especially if they can claim some local link with the original. A reproduction Mappa Mundi purchased from Hereford Cathedral is worth more than a reproduction Mappa Mundi purchased from a history museum in London. Equally, a reproduction Egyptian artifact produced by Egyptian craftsmen is worth more than the same artifact produced in a factory in Spain.

These people haven't gone more illegal (thieves moving info forgery), they've gone more legit (theives moving into craftsmanship).

Licence covers hand held TVs away from home

Absolute tosh. The TV licence clearly states that you can watch TV away from home using a TV that has its own batteries contained within the device. This exemption has been in place since the Casio hand-held TVs of the late 70s / early 80s.

You show me a mobile phone that doesn't contain its own batteries within its case, and I'll show you an aging pre-GSM car-phone that can't receive video anyway.

"internet pages"

"internet pages" ? Oh dear. Those two words demonstrate how completely and utterly out-of-touch governments are with the Internet. Do they mean "web pages"? If so, why bother, given that the vast majority of illegal content probably lies in torrents, not the World Wide Web? Is this law going to be aimed at novice child pornographers, whilst the expert kiddy-fiddlers are deliberately left alone?

Sounds like yet another announcement of a half-baked scheme which will only partially be put into action and never meet any its goals.

Best. April. Fools. Ever.

Best. April. Fools. Ever.

(Of course, the real answer is Ubuntu. Everyone knows that my Commodore 64 is better than your ZX Spec... er... I mean, my Ubuntu is better than your Red Hat)

Most people don't spend every night down the boozer

This article appears to assume that all people of all ages spend every waking hour in the off-licence, pub or nightclub. It may come as a shock, but the majority of people - EVEN YOUNG PEOPLE - rarely visit any of these establishments. For the vast majority, it's a once-a-week event at most.

The connection, therefore, between proof-of-age to buy booze, and some kind of stealth introduction of ID cards, is patent b*ll*cks. A scheme which only means you might voluntarily carry ID on the odd Friday or Saturday night can hardly be described as compulsory.

Of course, for Reg hacks, Booze Is Life.

But for most people, it's an occasional light beer a couple of times a month.

A Fan

I use the previous version - Ubuntu Eee 8.04 - on my Asus Eee 901 and it knocks ten shades of poop out of Xandros. Even my rich Mac Air-owning friends were impressed by it.

As well as the Ubuntu Netbook interface, with large panels and buttons which work so well with a netbook's small screen, it features a kernel specifically designed for Intel Atom CPUs which boots up in next to no time. The Ubuntu Netbook interface also boasts a neat feature that automatically maximises all suitable windows, again ideal for small screens.

I did make a couple of tweaks. I installed eee-control which is a tray applet to allow you to quickly turn wifi, bluetooth and webcam on/off. This is included in the repositories that are set up by default. I also repartitioned the drive so that /home was on the faster SDA SSD; then created /home2 on the slower SDB SSD and symbolically linked my Music, Pictures, Videos etc. folders on to /home2/myusername . This means that .preferences files in the user's home directory are loaded faster.

Symantec's letter to its own hosted email customers

http://tinyurl.com/4x984c makes for an interesting read

Ubuntu doesn't automatically fall back to mirrors

Pierre: "So it would be 100% uptime from the client's point of view then?"

Sadly not. Ubuntu's update system doesn't automatically fall-back to the mirrors. I sense a feature request...

Soylent Green

"algae as a cure-all for everything: carbon sequestration, water purification, automotive fuel and energy"

Algae. Yeah, right. Algae. That's what they said Soylent Green was made of.

Green biofuel is people!

No neeeeed

http://tinyurl.com/49apnd

Malicious Communications Act 1988, section 1.a.iii "Any person who sends to another person ... a[n] ... electronic communication ... which conveys ... information which is false and known or believed to be false by the sender ... is guilty of an offence".