Posts by Number6

Games and Reading

Yes, reading to children and being seen reading books for enjoyment is a good way to pass on the love of reading. My son has been discovered awake and reading books in bed several hours after his bedtime recently.

A good match

I was thinking along the same lines - given how many politicians appear to treat the electorate.

Change the Theme

Somewhere in there is the facility to put the buttons back where they belong. Change the theme to something more friendly.

Share Price != Profit

From the perspective of an operating company in profit, the share price is irrelevant to day-to-day operation. If you're making money then you don't need more share capital[*]. Of course, the investors like the share price to go up rather than down, and might vote out the board of directors that made the company profitable, but if it is turning a profit the share value is more likely to go up longer-term, regardless of what News Corp has to do with its shares.

[*] Unless you want capital to fund expansion, but that's a different issue

Manual Control

Ultimately there will be manual intervention to deal with deliberate attempts to break the internet, so it would recover after some downtime. In this respect the dodgy guys are doing us all a favour by forcing upgrades to DNS, teaching ISPs how to deal with DOS attacks, etc. If a government tried it for real, the net would be in far better condition to cope than ten years ago.

It's all in the interface

I use an SPA3102 which understands UK CLI and happily passes it on with no effort on my part, which unfortunately doesn't help your situation.

The other way...

Until O2 announced their decent data plan degradation, I was considering moving there from T-Mobile in the hope that I'd get better 3G coverage when my current plan finishes. However, now I need to look at all the offerings again because they're all changing. Whatever happens, I won't be using an iPhone.

Scotland...

The SNP need to be very careful. I can quite see Westminster happily giving them extra powers but poisoning them by telling them that if Scotland wants more services than Westminster gives England, then Scotland is going to have to pay for that extra via an extra local income tax.

Re: @Subban

This is primarily America we're talking about here. I wasn't aware you needed grounds to file a lawsuit, just a money-grabbing lawyer.

Re: Stinky cyclists?

Have the best of both worlds, get a folding bike to keep in the back of the car and then you can emit loads of CO *and* BO by swapping transport mode part-way.

I leave my cycle helmet at home, that keeps it nice and safe.

Not at all

Back to the good old days where helping each other out did wonders for national productivity without having to record it all for the benefit of beancounter.

Wrong Way Round

You may find that you've got it the wrong way round - the USB standard allows a device to request up to 500mA, but not all hosts can cope with that, especially if they're supporting multiple devices. A four-port hub with a total power capacity of 1.5A is technically within spec, but can't support four 500mA devices, whereas it can support two of those and two 250mA devices.

Laptop USB ports tend to be built down to a price/power budget and may struggle to give 500mA. It's also the case that many desktop PCs were capable of providing much more than 500mA, so they would be less likely to be fussy about things.

What you do find is that custom USB power chips exist that allow the device to draw a given maximum power from the host, and that if the current drain of the backlight and processor is high enough, all the USB current goes to supply that and none is available for battery charging. Similarly, if the device has asked for 500mA and has been turned down, it may opt to only draw the 100mA it's allowed without asking and power the electronics but not attempt to charge the battery.

The final point is that Apple may not claim that the device conforms to the USB spec. I believe that they make no such claim for the iPod. Electrically and from a software protocol perspective it may be perfectly compliant, but the spec also requires use of standard USB connectors and the iPod has a custom one. I don't think there's a USB logo on a standard iPod lead for this reason - it's not compliant with the mechanical aspect of the standard.

Long-term roll-out

Some of us still have an old non-photo licence. Until I move house or it expires I see no reason to change.

Fish Dance

If we're going Python, surely the fish slapping dance is more appropriate here. No convenient canal, but if you hit them hard enough they should stay down and quiet.

On the other hand...

Murdoch's TV channels compete against the BBC TV channels, so why should the BBC News website be taken down if he can't compete.

I'm another of those who doesn't willingly give Murdoch any of my money, but I gave up paying for newspapers a long time ago due to the quality of the journalism. Too much focus on celebrities and opinion (complete with bias) and no enough objective real news.

Film?

Wasn't that "Virgin Soldiers" or some similar title? I vaguely remember someone getting his finger(s) shot off.

No Difference

Look at how many paedophiles are gaining access to children now even though CRB checks are in place. No system is going to be 100% and the existing one appears to be well over the top for the results it has delivered.

I don't give a damn about a bit of government paper, that just allows people to abdicate their responsibility to think and leave it up to the state. Far better to be aware of danger than assume there isn't any merely because the state said it's OK.

Freedom has a price, which is often paid in blood. Consider road casualties - the level of restriction on drivers is comparatively low compared to the carnage caused, and yet that's the price that society has deemed acceptable in order to maintain freedom to drive. We don't like to talk about it in those terms, and shock and outrage is generated when something hits the news, but on average we maintain the status quo.

Departing where?

I always assumed that the quoted departure time was pushback from the gate. It's the getting from gate to take-off clearance in five minutes that's impressive for Heathrow. Normally it takes longer than that to taxi to the end of the queue.

Software Patents

Surely the answer to silly software patents is to make sure the rest of the world is benefiting from the technology via open source codecs and have a paragraph in the terms and conditions that requires US users to either not use the software or to contact the patent holders for a licence, which may require payment of a fee.

That way the rest of the world can get on with life and ignore the very broken US patent system. It's a great shame that the rest of the world can't do this with anything that's only patented in the US, given the number of very obvious, non-novel things that the USPTO grants.

Change

Even if they screw up the economy (assuming we're not already on the endstop for that one), repealing all the police/nanny state laws will vastly improve the country.

No guess

It's just one of those numbers I happen to remember. 33ft underwater the pressure is doubled, and I remember the old barometer stuff from when physics lessons had real physics in them.