@b166er
... and you propose this as a viable technical setup for the man on the Clapham omnibus? Do you work at the BBC, by any chance?
424 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2007
It's only now that I've succumbed and bought a Wii (yes, you <i>can</i> make fat, bald, middle-aged, spectacle-wearing 'mii' avatars) that I'm starting to understand what the Reg and others have been saying about the BBC losing the plot on this one.
I don't want to watch telly on my computer, nor full-length programmes on my mobile device (short news bulletins and sports clips maybe). I DO want to watch telly on my telly. How many Wiis, PS3s, and XBoxes are there around the country plugged into tellies? The Wii has the Opera browser, but if you go to the iPlayer site, there isn't a suitable plugin. Instead of concentrating on Microsoft PCs and the half-dozen or so iPhones that have been sold, maybe they should be working with the console manufacturers...?
Assumption: that viable electric guns are developed that can put stuff into space at escape velocity (ie no need for chemical/fossil-fuel) rockets.
Question: with current/predicted technology, does a fission power station produce enough power to heat up my shower, and have enough left over to get rid of its waste at the aforementioned escape velocity?
If not, we're stuffed.
While it was "just a film", putting 'Jedi' on one's census was a good way to register a protest at the government's plans to turn us into a religious state. When people really <i>do</i> take it seriously, though, we secularists have a problem. Any suggestions as to how we can register a protest at the next census?
I disagree. I can see it going into production in France, where they have a terrific tradition of small, light, 'sans permis' microcars. But I find the predicted price a little hard to believe: the lack of mass production over the years has ensured that French microcars are anything but cheap for what you get. If they *did* manage to produce one for around the £3000 mark, I'd be over there like a shot with my cheque book at the ready.
Umm... what mssrs Hewitt and Confused and the others said. Squabbling over a couple of MB of file size is bloody stupid when the cost of mass storage is going down so dramatically. As for the people who think they can tell the difference between a lossy format with a good bitrate and a lossless format: they're just so full of crap it's pathetic. Probably the same people who drive around in a two litre car when a 1.3 would adequately suit their needs.
"...any Wi-Fi enabled player..."? So that would include Nokias, Sony-Ericssons, HTC, and Wi-Fi enabled dogs and cats and duck-billed platypuses, presumably? So why are iBling products worthy of special mention? In every, single, sodding, tech article?
I really don't understand it. Just imagine if we started getting a stream of articles like,
"This petrol can be used in any car, including the Renault BlahDiBlah."
"Blauplunkt have developed a new car stereo. It fits any car, including the Renault BlahDiBlah."
"And now the traffic information, which applies to everybody, including drivers of the Renault BlahDiBlah."
</rant>
I kinda "got it" when they were flogging Baylis crank products as being a good idea for times and places where there was no mains electricity or batteries for sale. But pushing them as being "green"? This thing seems to have a NiCad battery: you can even see the "do not discard in bin" symbol on the back in your published photo. Please explain in what way that is "green".
What makes a "cult" different from a "religion" different from a "superstition"? If somebody gives all his money to the catholic church and spends his life in their service then he's a monk; if he does the same thing for, say, the moonies, then he's the victim of a cult. If somebody prays constantly he's pious, but if he flicks lightswitches on and off all the time then he's got OCD.
Bizarre.
UK vehicle definitions are unfortunately way out of sych with Europe and are not at all conducive to developing light, safe, efficient vehicles. They are, in short, a complete and utter shambles. I think the problem started when they abandoned the use of the words "motor bicycle" and "motor tricycle" in favour of "motorcycle" and "tricycle", with no definition for a quadricycle. "Motorcycle" now appears to imply two wheels, because I never succeeded in getting my French 350kg (yes really) Ligier quadricycle registered as anything other than "private/light goods", so I pay the same tax as somebody with a Chelsea Tractor.
Broadly speaking, the Americans define a smartphone as anything with a keyboard while the rest of the world see it as something that can run programmes in something other than Java.
Even using the rest-of-the-world definition, we'll probably still be having these arguments after the SDK comes out, because the SDK is unlikely to give the programmer access to low-level functionality until they figure out how they're going to handle security. So it will still be equivalent to a rest-of-the-world feature phone that can run Java games.
In other words, still not a smartphone.
"The question here is what doe Bill Ray have against Nokia."
I think there *is* an element of tabloid mischief here. This is a non-issue that has already been laughed off symbian forums. Having said that, we're all grown-ups and we all know what journalists do; part of their job is to stimulate debate, and he's achieved that in this instance.
Also, to occasionally get a viewpoint that we disagree with, puts into perspective those that have us thinking, "Yeah, dead right".
"...But it could well reduce fuel bills and make money for shippers - and thus for the technology's creators..."
But in a capitalist society, isn't that the whole point? Everything in the end boils down to pounds, shillings, and pence. And nobody does anything out of the goodness of their hearts unless it also makes them money. Trying to drive these pathetic "initiatives" using good intentions alone (or at best, the marketing departments) is doomed to failure. Only when the bean counters become involved will something happen. I find it incredible that so many people are naive enough to think otherwise.
Sorry to be a party pooper, but as a wannabe geek who actually managed to pull off the feat of having some knowledge of persons of the female gender... nay... actually *married* one... this is easily explained. During "the wash", ladies' undergarments frequently end up getting inside trouser legs, and are not always immediately apparent until later in the day, when they either fall loose, or are surreptitiously shaken loose, whilst looking straight ahead hoping nobody notices.
"It's in their financial interest after all - they have to refund customers who lose cash when the account's been compromised."
So why don't they set SPF records, which would enable mail admins to block the vast majority of the phishing attempts with a simple lookup? It's very easy: even I can do it. I'm not normally a conspiracy theorist, but there's a hidden agenda here somewhere. Nobody can be that incompetent accidentally.
I only watched half way, but if I saw somebody acting like that I'd assume he was a diabetic going hypo. My instinct would be to try to help him rather than attack him. This is a sad reflection of modern city society: we'll ignore people when they need help but attack them if they become an inconvenience.
<yawn> Here we go again. So what if it is a "private, closed relay"? They still have a provider, don't they? They're still paying somebody, unless the Internet has suddenly become free. What if (hypothetically), their provider is spammer-friendly? If I'm a taxi driver and you're a perfectly respectable citizen but you happen to live in a crime-infested slum neighbourhood and your landlord is a crack dealer... am I obliged to take you home? (disclaimer: this is entirely hypothetical as I have no idea of the reputation of their actual provider)
I favour the GPS theory, too. These, together with the bright orange paint, have led to people slowing down in the proximity of the cameras but reverting to speeding elsewhere. As somebody who keeps to speed limits all the time, I've certainly noticed an increase in aggressive tailgating during the same period. Of course, the $64,000 question is what have the accident figures done in that period...
I think a couple of people have missed the point about voting. The Republic of Ireland is a foreign country, like France or Germany. However, have a look at your electoral registration form next time you complete it and you'll see that you get to vote in UK elections if you're a citizen of the Republic of Ireland. If you're French or German you don't. Why not?
As for me and hordes of UK citizens going over to Ireland and voting in *their* elections: yeah, right...
I'm actually starting to think that this bluray/HD battle is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Comparisons with the VHS/Betamax thing are really not valid because now we have many other methods of recording, storing, and delivering. OK, no chance of fibre-to-the-door anytime soon, so I suppose we'll be buying hi-def pre-recorded films on them for a while. But other applications? Writeable disks? Absolutely no way, with flash memory getting so cheap and reliable. RW disks were always a complete shambles, and not compatible between different readers. CDR and DVDR are just as bad: they take ages to write with a low success rate. Quite a few people have DVD-RAM recorders for their TV now, but the hard-disk recorders are now cheaper and far more clever.
I have to take a 300MB database file home this evening, and I've just given up after five attempts to burn it to a CDR and have bluetoothed it to the flash card in my phone.