Posts by Tony Pottrell

ESA unveils billion pixel camera that will map the Milky Way

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

I imagine that you would take two pictures, 6 months apart. Then your "eyes" are at opposite sides of the Earth's orbit (2 AU).

DfT 'unwittingly' bigged-up speed camera benefits

Swindon

A recent BBC article on this topic referred to Swindon council's decision to remove all of their speed cameras, save those at known blackspots. Although it's still a bit too early to say for sure, they did give this quote:

"A spokesman for Swindon council says that in the first six months after the cameras were switched off accident numbers across their sites "remained the same"."

Suggesting that Speed Cameras have a neglible impact on accidents, at best :)

ISPs told to keep filesharer naughty list

Sharing?

The law refers to "illegal fileSHARING"... If you were to disable the uploading of your favoured client, whether this would still be classed as sharing? Surely in this instance you're simply downloading a file?

5,000 NHS records vanish with latest lost laptop

Better than Gov't security??

OK, so all they need to do to get into the data is take the drive out of the laptop, connect it to another machine, copy the database off then run a brute force password attack on it (or some other method).

Real secure...

Virgin downloaders hit by AllofMP3.com fault

Hmm

Using Virgin BB at home:

ping www.allofmp3.com

Pinging allofmp3.com [87.242.93.250] with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.

Request timed out.

Request timed out.

Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 87.242.93.250:

Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

---------

And when I dial into work's network (ironically using the Telwest network):

ping www.allofmp3.com

Pinging allofmp3.com [87.242.93.250] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 87.242.93.250: bytes=32 time=142ms TTL=52

Reply from 87.242.93.250: bytes=32 time=159ms TTL=52

Reply from 87.242.93.250: bytes=32 time=148ms TTL=52

Reply from 87.242.93.250: bytes=32 time=143ms TTL=52

Ping statistics for 87.242.93.250:

Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),

Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:

Minimum = 142ms, Maximum = 159ms, Average = 148ms

Virgin lays down case against Sky

Shot themselves in their own foot

I was a United Artists/Cableinet/Telewest/NTL/Virgin (whatever they want to be called now-a-days) customer for a good 10 years with the TV/Phone/Net package.

I've now moved the TV package over to Sky and I'm actually £10 a month better off. Go figure.

Frustrating thing is, Virgin claimed (in their gushy drivel recorded phone message) that they were acting on their customers behalf. Who gave them the right to assume that customers did not want to pay a bit more to keep Sky?

The poll they ran on their site suggested almost 3/4 were willing to pay more for it, either by switching to Sky (like I did) or by paying for it as a premium channel.

Sky 1 was by far the only reason I actually had Cable TV - the other reason was for the digital switchover.

Shot themselves in the foot there me thinks!