can anyone confirm whether downloading cleanly encoded tracks from an album i possess (on vinyl, for instance) is legal or not?

and another thing, i hear that the prison population is ballooning ! - howcome common criminals are offered expensive leisure activities when most honest hardworking taxpayers have trouble affording a basic holiday.

" french robot gropes bottom"

Interestingly, diamond is two separate, interpenetrating tetrahedral lattices

am i the only one to notice the great strapline?

Oh, and for the record, regression to the mean is exactly as El Reg describes, It does not apply if a change is made to the road environment, this would create a new mean.

we are in the last few days now, treasure what you once believed, it will not occur.

Its top-drawer techno-journalism for which you are not charged, and you are even given the opportunity to besmirch it with your very own vapid remarks.

But you want it to stop.

Why???

(like i care..)

looking a "W"'s commens on SCC, i get by with a 12" screen, proper keyboard, 1.6kg weight, 3-4 hours battery life, 1024x768 screen, wifi, USB2, 60Gb drive. and all for £200 - £250. i went and bought another two for the kids. they're called IBM X31.

Hmm, i would be interested to find out which patents were said to have been infringed, and in what way. AFAIK exhibiting products is not infringement, unless you're selling them off the stand then it doesn't matter what's in them. therefore the (nice-looking) goons should not seize anything other than boxed product.

another matter is the territory of the patent, the "noddy" american system routinely issues patents for devices that would be ruled "obvious" or "prior art" in the EU, and products based on these obvious ideas may not be legal for sale in the US, but should be exhibitable in the EU.

How do you get rid of 12 Megawatts of heat, given that you are in a vacuum?

New Scientist published a study that compared the Met office's output with a simple "much the same as yesterday's" blanket forecast, and found the latter to be more accurate. Je reste mon valise.

Oh, and Aimee, you poor confused person, post first - think later. Any ful know that with a shiny new computer the Met office can start offering some better weather forecasts, and by christ we could do with it.

F#ck me, a light switch that needs to go through the internet, through some Acme routers, back to the house and to the plug/socket.

this can't be right, i thought Zigbee was a stand-alone self organising network, like peer to peer. The stack is a bit heavy for a light switch - though with silicon cost it will reduce.

you can be sure that jokers will have great fun turning your house into a disco display once they've cracked the inevitably poor encryption/implementation.

Didn't the Russians already do the worlds deepest dive a couple of years ago? Barents sea or something if i remember correctly...?

Is it just that they're hoping to resurface with this one..?

This is clearly not a party political situation, there are no other mainstream parties contesting the seat, so "bias" is not a concern. It is a single-issue election, for the very good reasons outlined. the fact the the reg chooses to offer him the interview and publicity is one of the reasons i visit the site, like many other readers i lament the relentless and now galloping encroachment of fundamental hard-won rights.

The main thrust behind GM is big profits for agrobusiness. GM cotton puts in a gene for Bt toxin (botulism) to kill the boll weevil. This is rightly regarded as dangerous as genes can leak into other species, and if this were to turn-up in a food staple, or even a common weed, it would be disaster.

The other plan is to put in a gene that guarantees sterile seeds, so farmers have to buy new seed every year. This would also be disaster if it got into the wild (it would survive as a gene that offers 50% viability) - its DRM for plants, nuff said.

Some worthy scientist types are working to improve yield, or more commonly, to increase vitamin content, undoing some of the earlier non-GM work on high-yielding varieties. This is laudable, and if the genes for vitamin B12 did escape into the wild, well so what.

If agribusiness is happy to indemnify the world against the possible consequences of their desire to make money, then great, but insurers won't touch it, and nor should we.

We (i.e. governments on our behalf) could take on the risks of release of less dangerous genes, if there is a great public benefit to be had.

I suspect that irrigation, mechanisation and above all, peace, will have the greatest effect (on world food supply), and are cheaper and less risky.

does anyone know if it will enable flash to be turned on and off, by means other than visiting the adobe website, or de-installation?

maybe there are already ways to do this that I don't know of.

the bugger is sometimes i want it, and other times it just lets adverts crawl all over the page.

three switches, for Javascript, java and flash would be perfect. - and on the button bar not through 2 sub-menus.

should i re-post this somewhere more appropriate? - i was kind of hoping the useful crowd of commenters at the reg would agree/disagree/advise on this one.

thanks

halogens offer 15 lumens per watt, fluorescents 55

they are a part of the solution. sure, people must recycle them, but we are all getting better at this all the time.

the manufacturers have signed up to reducing the mercury load to 5mg per bulb, and 2.5mg later. these are tiny amounts.

from what i saw of the directive, it was things >5% mercury by weight, so not CFLs then. the RoHS already prohibit mercury switches and the like.

yes Ash, its not really a secret ballot - i wouldn't want to be voting in Zimbabwe under this system.

Apparently it is there as a means to investigate tampered voting, if a large box full of replica slips turns-up, all voting nu-lab say, then they can prove the votes were invalid. -- doesn't help the postal vote scam popularised by the workers representative party though.

its a really difficult call as to whether this feature should be in or out. maybe one should have the option of receiving an unmarked voting slip.

i don't see any problem with ticking the fact that you've turned up and voted.

I suspect that Broon's hints are from a genuinely held Calvinist distaste for pleasure, especially cheaply obtained and in others. However, mercifully one man does not a government make, and once middle England has voted (today) it will all quietly be forgotten.

More lethal, indeed... does the man "do" grammar? or truth for that matter.

PS Gordy - what's all that UK Gold you sold worth now?

you're mistaken.

US billion is 10^^9 UK billion was 10^^12 - but the US billion has prevailed, we need a common name for 10^9. the Trillion is therefore 10^12, beyond that there are quadrillions and quintillions, but they're only for wide-eyed americans, anything not to do with money should use standard form after it gets into the billions.

why don't you just shoot everyone?

driving above the speed limit is perfectly acceptable under the right conditions, with anticipation and observance and responsibility - FFS the police are allowed to do it. -and even acrosss all conditions, is not a hugely significant factor (5-7%) in road accidents. Why it should be treated as criminal behavious beats me, it is a civil misdemeanour. Criminals intentionally hurt people.

my concern is that you and others reduce the road safety argument to the one dimension you can control, speed. I can't beleive the recent adverts that say a child hit at 30mph has an 80% chance of survival - FFS the whole point is to not hit them at all, by observation, experience, reactions and a load of other stuff not in your 1-dimensioned world. - this gives the idea that you can drive at 30, eyes on the speedo, and whatever happens next is not your fault !!!

Fantastic line BigYin:

Enjoy your freedom people, to your children it will just be a word in the dictionary.

my grandfather worked for the gasworks during WW2, and tells of an incident where some men from the ministry were assessing the risk of gasometer explosion due to bomb shrapnel ( - not much one can do about a direct hit...). a certain "chalky" White duly punched a hole in the side of the gasometer with a big screwdriver, and as the gas was pissing out, set about trying to light it with a box of matches - to demonstrate that it just blows the flame out - town gas will not burn until mixed at least 30:70 with air.

Unfortunately said brave souls from the ministry did not hang around to witness the demonstration, preferring to observe whilst running hell for leather in the opposite direction.

couldn't help but collapse into a giggling wreck, so all and sundry wanted to know why... fantastic

nice one dodge, although i have to say that Lewis normally casts a highly critical eye on the deathware industry, and its there in this article, but then it does invite comments like the first. I say we need someone to keep an eye on the despicable fruits of these people's life effort, they are after all engineers like us at some level, just took a wrong turn somewhere and are now useless for any other work.

- coz although you can block images from adserverbolx.wever, there's no way to kill the wretched flash things that roll into view. - short of never installing flash.

or is there?

interestingly, although entanglement allows "signals" to travel faster than the speed of light, and it does, these signals can not carry any information, the first-measured thing will be a random 0 or 1, and the second will be its inverse.

No-one has yet managed to work out how this can be used to transmit information, if indeed it can at all.

Odd that "meaningful information" and "correlated garbage" are physically different things, one can go faster that light, the other not.

Thank goodness for the UK's sensible strategy on Patents, the old ideas (lacking novelty) and the obvious ones (lacking the inventive step) are not allowed to clog-up the system, no matter how much you shout about them.

A 'Proper' school is here assumed to be the same as the other boys and girls go to, to mix with a normal cross-section of others. Granted they're never perfect, and in some cases home-ed can improve the quality, but within the class of "normal" you can pay more and get more. Public examinations are another requirement, GCSE's in the basics, the baccalaureate etc.

what i object to on many grounds is home-indoctrination, there is no escape from the bonkers religious confines, no outside contact to determine if the child is being abused, or failing to "thrive", and basically the child, who must at some point be brought into society at large, knows only a very narrow viewpoint.

Sure there are those who say all state education is indoctrination, but fooling all of the people all of the time? - its a lower risk compared to this.

not sure about metaphysics as theories etc - look at the agreement between theory and measurement on for instance microwave background anisotropy, try the image search first, or the link:

http://www.answers.com/topic/cosmic-microwave-background-radiation?cat=technology

you tell me where on your scale towards fact this should go?

I just looked at the link - they're all bonkers christians, and i applaud the German state and police dragging the kids to a proper school

Its such a perfect illustration of the schism between the words and the deeds, mere words fail me.

£80 million is it? - don't we lose that every month due to NewLabor's incompetence in managing a new benefits computer thingy?

never even had a fucking paper round most of them

- can we have an icon for this??

There's a lot to go through, and much of the above is correct, basically DAB could be better, for a number of reasons.

Signal strength -my nearest transmitter (Sandy Heath) puts out 100kW of radio 1 (why??) and 5kW DAB - and this is for about 20 stations' worth. www.digitalradiotech.co.uk/dab/coverage_maps.htm - with this level of power you will not get as good coverage as with FM. they should pump it up a bit.

That said, the signal will sound perfect right down to whrer a similar FM signal would be all hiss, and then it will drop right out as the error-correction caves-under.

signal quality - the compromise between number of stations and bitrate is skewed because only about 10% of the allotted bandwidth for DAB is actually in use. the powers could fix this but there are some EU harmonisation issues, or something. The MP2 codec is not so good as MP3, AAC, but gives near-CD quality at 160kbps and above, and even though they're under-running it at 128kbps it sounds better than FM on all but the best tuners. the lack of hiss is great, like when CD's came out vs vinyl.

price

you can pick-up a DAB radio for £40, maybe FM radios are cheaper but at the low end they are shite.

Car radios

there are a few out there, but its still hard to design a sensitive tuner for the car environment, to the price they wat to pay, and when there's no big pull for it. To do it properly you need a dual-tuner as well, and a lot of software to keep track of what stations are available as you move through the country.

Portables

I've seen these heavily discounted, it is just too difficult to get enough signal out of a body-worn antenna (i.e. the headphone lead) The robi thing for the ipod works ok though.

content

i can't listen to commercial FM because the adverts are so shite, but there are some all-music channels on DAB that you can leave switched on 24/7.

Spectral efficiency

FM is inefficient because to get national coverage you have to do a 4-colour theorem thing, so it costs you 4 channels (minimum). one of the clever things about DAB is the single frequency network, where distant transmitters signals actually reinforce, even though they're late (this is due to the long symbol time available in an OFDM system) DAB is the most spectrally efficient thing out there, and DAB+ bumps it up by another factor of 2. - thats why 4ustralia and NZ look like they will adopt it.

the downside is that it needs ~30 MIPs to decode it, but silicon gets cheaper pretty quickly, ask Mr. Moore.

shame the Germans opted out.

i thought the original text was that it was easier for a camel to PASS through the eye of a needle, with all the eye-watering sphincter-straining that that that would entail.

I'll fetch Mr.Nazereth's coat.

Lewis you're normally an authority on most things, but i didn't get the bit about reprocessing = safe? i thought thinking these days was moving to maximum life of the reactor rods, and no subssequent reprocessing, its dirty hence dangerous, and we don't need the plutonium that it generates any more. all it was ever for was the A-bomb stockpile, it has no place in peaceful power generation. - sure you can make fast breeders, but we've tons of plutonium anyway, and no-one's quite cracked the fast breeder, all that liquid sodium and water, the superphenix has been shut down for years now.

i think if you can make reactors designed for 20-year fuel rod cycles, and the old ones you just entomb, then maybe you can make clean power.

in an already stressed situation you give someone 50kV of electro-torture, the mind/body does not have any innate response for this, unlike a beating/blow. As pack animals we know to submit, curl-up, flee or retaliate. the problem with multiple tazering is because the cops don't want the big guy to "come round" - he is disoriented, spitting mad, highly charged, and with a will to rip them all limb from limb, the cops get scared, and rightly so.

can't you just talk them down guys?

I like the idea that "anonymous coward" sits in front of a computer all day simply commenting on el reg articles, that's why he's always first to comment. He should be an institution like amanfrommars. Maybe we need a social thread for him as well, like the occasional admisson that his boss might be onto him, or that Candice in accounts is just walking past and he needs to go.

hey anonymous coward, don't try and trick me into thinking you're many people, get on with your work.

Hey anonymous coward, don't you ever do any work? - all you ever do is post comments on el reg articles, mostly contradictory ones at that.

get a life you sad f*ck

- is that the science courses are so keen to develop "broadness" they neglect "incisiveness" which is the absolute core of science. I say learn one thing well and understand the benefit of scientific clarity. you can relax the constraints later, but some people are naturally very good at the absolute stuff, and are born engineers/scientists, and yet are kept back from the thing they do best, and are dwindled off into vague problems that have no answers. Never mind trying to co-opt others into the field, what about ensuring we capture those with the aptitude first?

As a physicist i respect the body of science and engineering that has gone into making our nuclear power plants as safe as they are.

this has been hampered by the need to change rods every 6 months to maximise the plutonium yield, they should stay in there for 3 years or possibly forever.

the reprocessing is the dirty end, and where most/all of the spillages come from. There is no need for it, period.

unfortunately BNF are trying to wean the industry onto its MOX product - i.e. Pu and U oxides, no need as yellowcake is cheap, and all the documentation and financials are rigged (and the Japs found out)

and it puts plutonium into fuel rods, so ships need a full-on naval escort.

and its a factor of about 500,000 more toxic.

if the engineering effort to bring nuclear to where it is now had been spent on wind and wave we'd be there by now. Right now there are loads of options (many tidal ventures, undersea watermills, offshore windmills etc) - - and now the running costs start to look stable and known, its the banks who are putting in the money.

more solutions will come as it becomes worthwhile, engineers and financiers hate no-hope projects.

no bank will ever back nuclear, they're not so nuts as new labour.

as a Physicist, and now engineer, with a daughter who is studying Physics to "A" level, i can only confer with the above, the GCSE syllabus is too broad and fails to teach a complete understanding of any topic.

The thing with Physics is that it is compressible, if you understand it you can work it out from first principles without having to remember hardly anything. - but only really if you have some natural ability in this area. Attempting to open-up the subject to a more popular audience has weakened this appeal, it is no longer "a good skive" - i.e. an easy option if understanding comes easier than knowledge.

The truth is that Physics and Higher Mathematics are visual sciences, if you take a brain scan then it is the visual cortex all lit up, its like rewiring your graphics card MIPS to do field-solving. This skill alone is the key, and also finds application in software / hardware architecting, strategy and ultimately, creativity.

We need scientists and engineers as a society, the courses should be designed for those with innate skill, it is a specialist subject.

that said, there is some need for a social dimension, i support the calls for a hipppocratic oath for engineers, to decouple them from the arms industry - a major put-off for the more enlightened pupils of today's age.

I'm commenting on this because i think their side needs some light, and we all need to look at the retrograde advances in criminal law.

paedophilia has recently been redefined to include pictures of 16-18 year olds, it was <16 before.

we (males) have a strong selection pressure to choose a young but sexually mature mate, so in what way is 16-18 perverse? (actually not my cup of tea, - and there is also selection pressure to choose a mate who can cope with parenthood, and with the female heirarchy, and many more)

this is also a thought-crime, (ok it is sick,, but..) - there are already strong measures in place for conspiracy and intent, -based crime, but this is new. I don't have an alternative, but i also think its a step into dangerous territory.

The other complicating factor is that internet porn is a huge business, and much like the drug-dealers of yore, it is in their interest to get you hooked on the harder stuff. - do we need to consider the term "expoited" in some cases as well as "depraved"?