Battery life

Even if the infrastructure of these communication systems survive, how long are the hand held units going to stay charged for? Or maybe I missed the bit in the article that talks about local power generation.

Welsh?

I particularly like the link to 'new leaflets' which goes to a welsh language version of the Ofcom site.

Actually I've looked at the English version and it's pretty much as useless to me.

So last Century

There is a lot of BT bashing going on here, and I'm no big fan on them myself, but I can see their point. Why should they invest Billions of their money into something without then being able to control their own property? At the end of the day they area private company who's purpose is to make money for their shareholders. If they cannot see a future profit to be made from it there is no point in the investment.

If you have a problem with BT's monopoly then you're a couple of decades too late to fight that one. I wonder how many of the BT haters tried to fight it's privatisation back in the day.

The only way the state can legitimately keep control of the future network infrastructure is for the state to stump up the cash for it in the first place. Although a large investment the money would be made back over time by leasing the network to private telecoms companies. If the state aren't prepared to do that then they need to let the private companies get on with it, even BT.

BT was privatised to try and create a free market in telecoms (and of course earn a big lump of cash to finance tax cuts and stay in power), and it's not really BT's fault that the plan was poorly thought out and bound to fail in its aim.

Change is good.

Florence, you should try change. Change is good. Are you still using Windows 98 too?

Warranty

"Shure's two-year warranty is also a good indication of quality, as well as a good fall-back if you happen to work with anyone who uses scissors regularly."

And their warranty covers physical damage with scissors does it?

Screen for what!?

So people can be screened to see the likelihood that they could be addicted to a criminal act? So if you get the all clear you can just go right ahead and break the law in the knowledge you probably won't get addicted. Alternatively people could not take the drug in the first place.

I'm not anti-drugs as it happens, but it seems a pointless task to be screening people for this gene.

Re: Just get rid of timezones

How would it help though.

For example instead of knowing that it is GMT +5 in somewhere, and therefore being able to work out what time they start work there, you'd have to remember work start times of countries around the world.

Getting rid of Timezones won't make it any easier as you'd still need to know what time people did things in other countries. The only way your plan would work would be to have everyone go to work at 9am GMT, whether it was day or night there. It works for me in the UK, not so sure the Aussies would be so chuffed though.

@Greg Fleming

Good for Dublin. However:

Dublin 44sq miles Pop:Just over 1 Million.

London 609sq miles Pop: About 13 Million.

You see the problem with your comparison?

Experiment

Whatever your opinions on the bands involved Radiohead and NiN have shown what can be possible using the Internet. As the first people to try out new ideas I commend them, even if they didn't necessarily come up with the ideal formula.

I'm a fan of both Radiohead and NiN. I paid £5 for the Radiohead album (including fee). I like the album. I also paid for the lossless files from NiN. I'm not so keen on that one.

If every album was released at the £5 mark I would buy loads of them. As it is with the rip-off cost of albums these days I buy very few.

Croydon

Anyone who knows Croydon would know that this kind of stuff happens all the time there, and it's not because they play GTA. A colleague of mine recently visited the local college where they had metal detectors on the door.

Just one Earthquake?

Here we are in the UK all excited about this little quake (the Media are anyway). While looking at the EMSC website I noticed that Indonesia has had 10 earthquakes in just the last 48 hours of about the same magnitude or higher than the ONE we got this morning. That puts it all in perspective.

Re: Unthinkable? Think harder.

"That said, interviews with passengers on the British Airways plane say the engines were very loud just prior to impact. That suggests the engines were in workable condition, and the pilots inputs to add power eventually got through to the engines."

Aaahhh. So if the engines were slow to accept the command it must be that they ran out of RAM and it was using the swapfile.

RE: Distance isn't everything

The key is LINE distance and not how close you are geographically. Your line could do a several mile round trip before it gets to you, particularly in an area with a lot if streets. Lines often run up one side of a street then back down the other side, and then on to the next street etc. This means it can take in a few sights of your town before it gets to you.

Personally I have no problem with the 'Up-to' description of broadband. At least it is a grammatically correct statement unlike the use of the 'unlimited' term on capped broadband accounts.

Longer than 2 hours.

The patch was available for much more than two hours, as I had updgraded and was playing by about 10:30PM GMT as they had completed the upgrade early.

Although I did install it on two XP machines and neither had the problem.

Aimed at fans?

Why would a hardcore fan, prepared to spend over the odds on a laptop, want another copy of the game?

Meaningless Poll

"The survey... demonstrates that when it comes to meaningless celebrity, the UK punches far above its weight."

Does it? This was a poll based in the UK. If the same question was asked in the US I'd expect there to be few if any UK entires on their list. They will have their own bunch on wasters who's 'fame' has not crossed the pond. If anything the fact that there are Americans on the list at all is embarrassing for them!

I also find it odd that Johnny Vegas makes the list at all. It's not a name I would immediately think of when answering this question. Surely the 'researchers' didn't pre-list the candidates for people to choose from did they!?

Don't let it put you off online poker.

It's good to see that the authorities have jumped on it and investigating.

Whenever people tell me a site is rigged I tell them to go practice and become a better poker player. If you can't handle the bad beats (sometimes several on the run) you should really be playing the game.

I have been following the threads about this on 2+2 forums and this is the first time I've actually believed that there was dodgy going on in online poker. It is important that the authorities handle this well to maintain the integrity of online poker as a whole.

The thing that strikes me here is that the cheater didn't do a very good job at it. It wouldn't have been too difficult to hide the cheating by playing a few bad hands and letting themselves get beat. To go and win virtually ever hand made it very obvious.

Making it worse

So all this company have managed to do is draw attention to a forum that most of their user and potential customers probably didn't know existed.

A better plan would have been for them to participate in the discussion to help their users and better understand their bugs.

Every piece of software has bugs and most users understand that. As long as a company is being seen to be doing something about the problems most people are happy.

RE: My first encounter with Vista.....

I don't understand this bit:

"She bought her laptop from Dell with Vista regardless. In her own words, "it would have cost another £130 quid for a Windows XP license buying from Dell"."

I have just double checked on the Dell website and they charge the same for Vista or XP installed on their systems. What's this £130 extra all about!?

Vista isn't the only OS

"If Linux would only stop having 40 + distributions and settle on 1 then games manufacturers could get involved"

You make it sound like Linux is owned by a single company. It isn't and this means there will never likely be just one flavour of Linux. But that's the beauty of it, developers will create niche versions that support specific tasks and users. While there are loads of distributions they are all still based on a Linux core and therefore software doesn't have to be written differently for each distribution. Sure there are sometimes incompatibilities, but it's not like that's a foreign problem to Microsoft.

Back on topic... I and many Windows users know from experience that you don't install an MS operating system for serious use (of course we have installed it, played with it, and consigned it to the 'what a load of rubbish' pile) until SP1 is available at the very least. If MS delay this SP there will be a lot of customers, in particular corporate customers sticking with XP for as long as they delay it.

Not so plod?

Maybe they really had to get somewhere to help someone! True he drove in far too fast, but I think they did a pretty good recovery job the way they all jumped straight out of the van and got pushing.

Yes, USA looks after it's own interests...no kidding.

"I think we can all agree that North America and it's allies don't always make the wisest decisions for the rest of the planet."

I think that's harsh on Canada.

Land of the Free

I find it odd that the land of the free feels it is ok to restrict the choice of their citizens on where they are allowed to gamble. It's ok to gamble (in Vegas etc.), as long as foreign companies aren't making money out of it.

Fast forward a few years and the US will yield to the pressure and once again allow internet gambling. Except this time it will be monopolised by US gambling companies. The US missed the boat when internet gambling took off and this is a good way to relaunch it on their own terms.

You don't need to chip PS2 to play Manhunt 2.

Assuming that not all European countries ban this game you would be able to get a PAL copy from one of the other European nations and play it without the need to chip your console.

Modchips are only needed for US and Japanese region games.

Look after your email address

If people looked after their email addresses better and were more careful about who they gave it out to there would be much less of a problem. It is all very well blaming Hotmail for the problem but if you don't want spam look after your email.

I'm had the same Hotmail email account for years and years. In the last 12 months I've had less than 10 bits of spam in my inbox. It's not even as if I have an obscure un-guessable address as it is in the firstnamelastname@hotmail.com format.

Why don't I get a ton of spam? Because I don't use it on untrustworthy websites. If I do want to give an email to an untrusted website I use my generic throw away account that I only look when I'm expecting an immediate response from the website I signed up for.

Even better I use an email account that lets me put anything I like before the @. So when I signed up for this site I used theregister@mydomain.co.uk. So if any of the sites I signed up for do pass my details on someone else I know which one did it.

My point? Don't blame Hotmail for failing to catch spam if you've done nothing to avoid it yourself.

I'm surprised this activity is illegal

Why is this illegal? Surely the winning bidder is prepared to pay the price that they bid and no-one is forcing them to pay more than they are prepared to just by bidding on their own auction.

Betting on sport is not a skill.

I think Jim is a little confused here. Playing a sport is a game of skill, and therefore prizes are awarded for winning a game or league legally. Betting on it however is based more on chance than skill for the bettor, and therefotre illegal (in some places).

Just out of interest..

"Just out of intrest, what is the benefit of being able to track everyone via DNA to the 'Evil' government?"

The benefit of course is cold hard cash. Data like this would be worth a lot of money to the wrong people. And we all know how much some Govt. officials / coppers like to make a bit of cash on the sly.