Have they thought of

getting Ali G to be their Press Officer?

The Copyright Laws arent the problem

Copyright is all about preventing other people making money from your work. So you can read books and listen to music from the library, but the copyright law does not permit you to sell that item as if it were yours to sell. That is what Copyright Law is for.

The "music industry" mafia has hijacked this perfectly good law. If they had their way, you would have to rent books from the library, you would have to pay to listen to every track the radio plays and you'd have to pay every time you play your own CDs.

The net result is that customers are fed up AND SO ARE THE ARTISTS. Musicians are releasing their music for free (e.g. creative commons license) and making their money on performances ... which is how musicians made their money traditionally anyway. In the end, the fat cat mafia middlemen will lose out, but they obviously aren't going down without a fight. IMHO they have already lost because they've lost the confidence of the public.

Long live the Internet!

London after Beijing

The best thing that London 2012 could do after Beijing is to return to a sports-based Olympics rather than a show-off of culture. It would be hard to do (given the egos at stake) but in the long term, London would be thanked for breaking the ever-increasingly expensive cycle of oneupmanship. It's the obvious thing to do given the budget, and it would leave behind a legacy of sports rather than a hangover.

Blackberries? If you're going to watch it live, you expect to see tiny dots in the distance. If you want to watch close-up, you'll get better coverage (and value for money) watching at home.

Point gun at foot, pull trigger

Come on eBay, that's not how to treat your loyal millions.

Come on elReg readers, it's time to organise a boycott. The Internet will be eBay's demise.

640k

It just goes to show that 1GHz and 1Gb RAM is more than enough for anyone.

The really clever bit is the maths (pencil and paper stuff) to approximate a model. Once you've got that worked out, the software model is relatively easy. Did you know you can do Mandelbrot Sets in Excel, you can do garden planning in Excel. You can even write books in Excel. It's only for stuff with huge datasets (like weather, finite element analysis, or oilfield simulations) that you need a supercomputer.

Glottal Stops

Finally! The Sarfeet 'as it's way. We all know wo! a Da!a cen!er is. Looks like Cisco is doing it's bi! for promo!ing the Lympics in 2012.

Is any of their ki! available on the Mile End Road?

Goldenballs at dawn

Run for the Hills! Prepare your particle cannons! Can you luddites not see that messing with Casimir stickiness will rip the fabric of spacetime and cause us all to DISAPPEAR INTO A BLACK HOLE? The universe is doomed.

</joke class="tabloid">

We knew this decades ago

Have you ever tried to power a "Sim City" with wind power? The French must've played Sim City, cos they went straight for Nuclear, and are now selling it to their neighbours.

World according to Google

It looks like Denmark belongs to Germany too. Some of the Countries That Used To Be The USSR seem to be correct, but where are the borders within the UK? And why is the Yorkshire Bordern not marked.

Daggers at Dawn, Google. Hope you've got good defences.

The staff can READ your passwords?

Oh man, does Lloyds understand anything about security? Not sure if El Reg is being artistic in its descriptions, but if a bank staffer can see that he put a rude password in, then their security system is on a par with that of the Tax office.

I guess it really doesn't matter any more anyway. The Govt have "lost" my bank details to the Dark Side anyway.

Aliens? Nothing scarier?

What software would YOU use to run the Fringe?

There must be some freeware or Open Sauce available for doing this kind of thing. Maybe that's what Pivotal did - or maybe it's where they went wrong.

Linux is way ahead

"...I didn't consider Linux because with two young kids I didn't have time to fiddle with it."

I don't have time to faff around installing Windows. But with the Ubuntu install, I can use a browser (or play Sudoku, or most other stuff) AT THE SAME TIME as installing the OS. How cool is that?

In five years time we won't be arguing about Vista vs Leopard vs Ubuntu. It'll all be about the browser.

But do they do Peril-Sensitive?

I am still waiting for someone to market Peril Sensitive sunglasses. Douglas Adams (RIP) you were a genius.

(the alien is the closest icon you've got for Zaphod)

Does't work.

The Govt would do well to see the fiasco that happened in Germany with satellite-based HGV tolls. The system couldn't tell the difference between a lorry on the motorway and a lorry on a parallel "Bundes-strasse" (A-road). Meanwhile, the Austrians implemented a microwave (non-satellite) system that "just worked". We wait and see if .gov.uk will re-invent the wheel.

Is this the icon for peril-sensitive sunglasses?

Drought since 1960?

Flooding used to be much worse - as evidenced by high water marks in places around the UK. Take Guildford for example : St. Nicolas' Church, about 5' above road level, 1968. There are hundreds of other "high water markings" on buildings around Britain. "Beyond living memory" ? It's a good job our predecessors knew a thing or two about how to record information for long-term use (no database, no backups, not even on paper records in the vaults of the council).

what a waste!

Instead of smashing the iPod, can't they give it to someone who needs one (like me)? <sigh>

29th Feb on Thameslink

Aha! This would explain why my Thameslink ticket purchased on Feb 29th would not let me out at St Pancras less than an hour after I bought it. Fortunately there was a kind man waving everyone through the glass gate instead. Lots of people around were muttering "only had 4 years to fix it from last time!".

"Stop" cos that's what the barriers did at the top of the escalator.

AUs cancelled - world about to end

Without the AU, I am never going to be able to play "Frontier Elite" ! This is a complete disaster. I often wondered if the AU was different in each solar system... and by the way I don't have a beard!

Attracting ET's attention?

Uh-oh. The aliens have infiltrated the SETI project and are sending a message home. The message might look to us like "Yoohoo, come and buy our warez" but hidden in the signal is a coded message "come on over for a pillage-fest" (Idea based very loosely on Hamilton's "Pandora's Star").

never mind my account details...

... it doesn't take much imagination to think of ways of redirecting child-benefit payments - someone only has to write them a letter, and the money's theirs. Same for my tax credits. It's going to take YEARS to sort this catastrophe out. Smells like an insider job to me :-(