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No, BT's range of competing ISPs will get a lot more popular. Virtually everyone who can get BT can get one of those and be switched over to them in two weeks (just switched to O2 from BT, best move I ever made - BT are retards).

I'm no particular fan of TPB, I think they're a bunch of dicks, but for christ's sake blocking access is not the answer for the British record industry. Legal downloads, although markedly less profitable, are still something of a money-spinner for them, and given some of the shite that has reached No.1 recently they must be selling something...

I have 8Mbit/s down and 450kbit/s up, for £14.99 a month, including the phone line rental. But as you can see from that page, "Stop paying BT! Save £283 [a year]" there is actual competition between the providers here, although the technology is a bit behind some other countries (not many areas with FTTH etc).

Apiologists use buzzwords like this to describe the vascular layout of certain insects.

Chuck Hobson's Tesla coil website (here) is an excellent source of technical theory on tesla coils. Chuck also has a page on the Marconi Centennial Spark Gap Transmitter.

Re Tesla himself I highly reading up on the great man that was Nikola Tesla - it is just a real shame that Tesla was basically ripped off by a well known business partner and ended up dying destitute.

Chuck Hobson's Tesla coil website (here) is an excellent source of technical theory on tesla coils. Chuck also has a page on the Marconi Centennial Spark Gap Transmitter.

Re Tesla himself I highly reading up on the great man that was Nikola Tesla - it is just a real shame that Tesla was basically ripped off by a well known business partner and ended up dying destitute.

Chuck Hobson's Tesla coil website (here) is an excellent source of technical theory on tesla coils. Chuck also has a page on the Marconi Centennial Spark Gap Transmitter.

Re Tesla himself I highly reading up on the great man that was Nikola Tesla - it is just a real shame that Tesla was basically ripped off by a well known business partner and ended up dying destitute.

Kinkos has has public telepresence rooms in some Kinkos outlets for years. They're not used much.

But the coolest telepresence system is the Telectroscope. This was very impressive. Especially because it was installed in public locations in New York and London, turned on, and left running 24 hours a day with no explanation.

Steve's logic behind the design is that if you've got enough money to waste on a Macbook Air in the first place, then you've probably got enough money to hire your own punkah wallah to carry it for you and open/close the lid when you need him to do so.

Mind you, if you've not got the musculature to be able to even open the lid of a laptop, then you probably shouldn't be putting your body through the trauma of adjusting to differing air pressures on an aircraft - which then makes the Macbook Air redundant anyway.

Maybe Steve should think about a Macbook "Bubble" - for use in sterile, airtight environments away from sunlight where brittle Apple user bones cannot break.

I think you're ignoring factors like improvements in health care, in particular vaccinations and antibiotics, that have caused a huge drop in infant mortality, as well as lowered maternal deaths from delivery. Better fed babies do have stronger immune systems as well, which also would improve infant mortality rates, but I'm pretty sure that worldwide availability of medical improvements had a more significant role in increasing that rate of population increase than greater food availability did.

In many third world nations, people still have kids at close to the same rate as they did when infant mortality rates were around 50%. Now the mortality rates are a small fraction of that, but couples still attempt to have close to the same number of births without the same level of attrition.

Simon Gunter, from ISP Tiscali, said the BBC should contribute to the cost.

He said the BBC did not understand the issues involved.

Superfast access
Tiscali's packages are superfast and reliable, giving you the highest possible rate your line can support up to 8Mb. Ideal for high bandwidth tasks such as music, video streaming and downloading large files.

http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/dictionaries/english/data/d0082635.html grump, grump it's one of the pleasures of being old, no if only I could remember where I left my computer...

You're both right. However, Information Technology Year was also 1995, 1996, 1999 and 2006.

Information Technology
Collective term for the various technologies involved in processing and transmitting information. They include computing, telecommunications, and microelectronics. The term became popular in the UK after the Government's Information Technology Year in 1972.

Not sure if this is the case in the UK, but in the US there always seems to be the same statement--"up to X mbits". I don't know of any large ISPs that do not use that phrase.

Yup, they all use that phrase - I wasn't arguing that that was misleading (although now you come to mention it, if your network is overloaded to the point that there's no way anyone's going to get 8Mbps you probably shouldn't be allowed to advertise "up to 8Mbps").

I do not know any company that explicitly states their residential service is "unlimited".

Orange: "unlimited monthly downloads (fair use policy applies)"
Be: "Unlimited usage"
Tiscali: "a fast, affordable service with unlimited usage every month."
Toucan: "all packages are unlimited"
Pipex: "Our Pipex Max + Anytime package gives you both unlimited broadband AND unlimited local and national calls all day every day"

Thats just from a quick Google for "unlimited broadband". I hear radio ads quite frequently for "unlimited broadband" too, and infact it wasnt that long ago that Tiscali's radio ads said "Up to 8 megabyte unlimited broadband" (which was clearly a mistake and whoever let that through needs a kicking).

Right now in the US, no company has ventured out into metered billing like PlusNet has.

It's pretty common place in the UK amoungst the smaller ISPs. The bigger ones are still misleading everyone with their "unlimited" claims though.

Ultimately, many who complain a lot about residential service not being unlimited have no clue what such a service actually costs.

The customer shouldn't need to care how much the service costs the ISP. If the ISP sold them an "unlimited" then the customer has every right to expect it to be unlimited - if the ISP misadvertised it then it's the ISP's responsibility to swallow any costs required to meet their commitment.

"Hamas use rockets to target civilians, which is active terrorism."

Israel regularly fire hellfire missles into the most densley populated area on earth, Israeli snipers have shot many reporters and even school children sitting at their desk, Israeli armoured bulldozers are used for collective punishment or simply clear and steal the land for new settlements, sewerage, water and electrical infrastructure is deliberately destroyed with explosives, shit they even used tanks to rob a palestinian bank and demolish a local zoo while the animals were still in their cages - state sponsored terrorisim or war crimes, take your pick.

Hamas use antisemitic propaganda.

And....? Everybody in international politics uses anti-"the other guy" propoganda, what's the moral difference between Iran denying the holocaust and Israel denying a different 20th century genocide? - Don't answer, it's a trick question - they are both playing politics. Yes the holocaust was beyond doubt the most highly organised example of hatred seen in the 20th centrury but what has that got to do with Israel creating an open air jail for several million people just because they want to keep the demographics of their "jewish state"..well..jewish? (Before you answer by accusing me of also being an anti-semitic: I have both jewish and muslim friends.)

"When some Austrian nuts was in the government, Austria were isolated."

And....? If you read my post I said the same strategy has been used over and over again, also which particular "Austrian nuts" were you thinking of?

"Let us see..."

Leave me out of it, the comment that follows that quote reads like a cryptic crossword - if you have something to say then say it in plain english instead of beating around the bush so much that it devolves into gibberish.

"You have realized that all countries have double standards in their foreign policy...."

At least you understood the last line of my post.

"....and lie about it?"

Lie about what? - I agree with that statement...oh look, is that your strawman I see going up in flames? OTOH: If you think I am factually incorrect please point out where and state your sources without calling me a liar.

"(-: You are a bit slow or quite young, aren't you? :-)"

I forgive your crude attempts at insulting me because english is obviously not your strong point, and at 48 I'm probably old enough to be your farther.

"Sure, it was even worse during the Cold War."

Like I said I am 48 and lived thru vietnam, the bay city rollers, and most of the cold war including the duck-and-cover exercises in a 1960's primary school. The basic "modus operandi" hasn't changed a bit - all these bullshit wars and tin-pot dictators are simply proxies so that the veto-weilding members of the UNSC don't have to fight each other directly. Think about it and read up on why the UNSC was created in the first place, if I'm wrong then why would the CIA train OBL in the art of "creative chaos", why would the west supply Saddam with fighter jets?

The only reason Hamas has been sent to coventry, despite being elected by a "landslide" that was judged "fair and open" by the UN and other observers, is that Hamas doesn't have a veto-weiling sponser in the UNSC. The isolation certainly can't be because they are "terrorists" since the west has far more objectionable "friends". It seems to me that Hamas was supposed to dissapear into obscurity after the popular vote but since they inconvienently won in a democratic landslide the UNSC have cut them off from the outside world and ignored the consequences for a couple of million civilians. I'm betting they will continue to do so until the palestinians do as they are

consist, comprise, constitute, or compose To consist of something is to be made up of it: The programme consisted of two short plays. To comprise something has the same meaning, often implying that the whole is regarded from the point of view of its individual parts: The programme comprises two short plays (they were chosen to make it up). To constitute something is to form a whole, especially of dissimilar components: Wealth and health do not necessarily constitute happiness. To compose means the same, but implies that the components have something in common: Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. A common mistake is to confuse consist and comprise, saying, for example: The programme is comprised of two short plays. http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/dictionaries/en glish/data/d0081813.html

Separated at birth?

Tuttle City Manager Jerry A. Taylor

Dwarf Dopey

Try reading a little bit of fact to reduce your ignorance.

Here's another less leading quote from Wikipedia :

Pakistan has a very rich cultural and traditional background going back to Indus Valley Civilization, 2800 BC-1800 BC. The region of Pakistan has been invaded in the past, occupied and settled by many different people, including Dravidians, Aryans, Greeks, White Huns, Persians, Arabs, Turks, Mongols and various Eurasian groups. And indeed the region has formed a distinct cultural unit within the main cultural complex of South Asia from prehistoric times. There are differences in culture among the different ethnic groups in matters such as dress, food, and religion, especially where pre-Islamic customs differ from Islamic practices. The cultural origins come from the civilizations of North India and eastern Afghanistan, with significant influences from Persia, Turkestan and Hellenistic Greece. However, it was the first part of the subcontinent to receive the full impact of Islam. Hence it has developed an identity of its own.

We have about 50,000-60,000 tons of nuclear waste in america right now.
...
So what about 100 tons? How large is that? http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/celynog/Brittany/kerloa s.htm 100 ton rock. lets assume that nuclear waste is 2x more dense then the rock so slice it in 2 and that is the size of our waste after 1 year.

100 != 100,000. It's not half the size of that rock, it's 500 of those rocks.

We have about 50,000-60,000 tons of nuclear waste in america right now. Sounds like an extreamly LARGE number that should produce large associated problems with it. The problem is how the hell do I picture 50,000 tons of nuclear waste. Then I remebered the Japaneses Super-Kamiokande http://www-sk.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/sk/index-e.html a tank that holds 50,000 tons of ultra pure water. Sadly it is not anywhere near as large as what I thought 50,000 tons would look like. But this is just water. Nuclear waste is a minimum of 10x more dense then water. So it would take just 1/10th of this modestly sized tank to hold all the nuclear waste of america? So what about 100 tons? How large is that? http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/celynog/Brittany/kerloa s.htm 100 ton rock. lets assume that nuclear waste is 2x more dense then the rock so slice it in 2 and that is the size of our waste after 1 year. it would saddly fit in my appartment room. The problem is not that we have alot of nuclear waste seeing as how it fits into a releativly small space. It is the fact that it wont go away while our goverment is still running and will harm humans/nature 10,000 years down the road.

...and the car will be called a Voltswagen ! Likewise it won't be an American built Telsa either !

...
2.2 We can end the service immediately if:
2.2.1 you fail to meet any of these terms and conditions (including but not limited to clause 5);
...
2.2.4 you use abusive or threatening behaviour while using the service.
...

Does tiscali go to court to prove that you have or have not been using threatening behaviour? They won't. You might, if you want to stand in your right, but do you really want to? Won't you get into more troubles if you actually go this procedure than just switch your provider? And what's so special about clause 5? Take a closer look:

5 Responsibility
5.1 You agree to use the service in line with our most recent instructions and also in line with all relevant laws, regulations and licences.
5.2 You agree not to use the service to transmit any material that may be considered illegal, defamatory, offensive, indecent or connected with any criminal offence.
5.3 Any advice or information, whether spoken or in writing, that you get from us will not create any guarantee that is not specifically referred to in these terms and conditions.
5.4 The service is only meant for residential purposes. You must not use it for business or commercial purposes, or to resell the services to anyone else. We can monitor your calls to check whether or not your call patterns are what we would expect for a residential customer.

So, the BPI goes to tiscali, gives them server logs of whatever, that connect your ip to some 'indecent' (how the hell is that defined) activity. Will tiscali bring that to court? They might have some internal commission to judge on this, but at first hand they'll decide themselves if they turn your connection off or not. Probably if you are spreading lots of copyrighted content, you are a heavy dsl user and they might just activate the Fair Use Policy on you. Why not? In the end, it's damaging all their other costumers. And what's this 5.4? Seems pretty nasty and vague. If you just sum this all up, the ISP is more likely to try and find causes to put away with 'problematic' users than to keep them. You can always bring this to court, but do you really want to spend money and time on that?

I encountered the term in Tolkien. It's part of the name of one of the chapters in LOTR, "Flotsam and Jetsam", where Gandalf finds Pippin and Merry amongst the wreckage of Orthanc.

Technically, flotsam is cargo or wreckage floating on the surface of the sea, while jetsam is cargo that has been thrown overboard (jettisoned) or washed up on the beach. However, the two words are linked to refer to homeless people: The government seemed to do little to help the flotsam and jetsam of society. -- the Hutchinson Encyclopaedia.

On a related note (and a story I just submitted to /.) Tiscali have just shutdown their JukeBox online music streaming service. Their reasons are given here Tiscali Jukebox switch off Q & A. From the article:
"Why have you decided to shut down the service today? Because after going online in total accordance with the music industry and having it launched officially, thus letting our users access it with the characteristics we tested and fine-tuned, today the music industry forwards unexpected demands."
and
"Clearly, major labels do not understand the business potential that is behind a service like Tiscali Juke Box which, by acknowledging and paying the rights for all songs being listened to in streaming mode, allows the safeguard of the rights of the industry and the artists."

> They had a full operating system, GUI, modem drivers, and web browser, that all fit nicely on a floppy. You can't do that without very well written code.

Not quite sure that follows. After all, you can do that* with DOS and I don't believe anyone would claim that it's well written code.

* Well, more or less. You can fit that wacky Caldera browser, Arachne, (beware the 'orrible MIDI music) and some rudimentary network tools (SSH, VNC and ping) on a floppy. Arguably that's not a "full operating system", but I do think my point size != quality still stands.

Sexium, complete with English seaside post card humour in the adverts.

No discussion of water flowing uphill can go without mention of M.C. Escher's Waterfall and Dyson's fantastic real world recreation (and there's a good explanation of Dyson did it at the BBC.

It's a hormone.

Here is a recent picture of our hero, Jerry, and here is a picture of him during his earlier years.

In the UK a director has released a film which has been offered straight for download at the same time as it was released on TV: "The Road to Guantanamo. It was shown at the Berlin Film Festival but I guess Channel 4 (the UK arts channel) decide to buy the rights to show it here. It's an 'reconstruction/ documentary' kind of film so not mainstream pulp but it's interesting to see this method of release. I was a bit disappointed to find you actually have to *pay* to download the film from Tiscali but nevertheless it's an interesting approach, I'll wonder if we'll see more of this kind of 'parallel release' in future?

You are making the mistake of equating validity with an adherence to highly structured rationalization. If all that is real to you is what can be quantified using simple rule sets, nothing I say next will be meaningful to you. Too bad.

As many people pointed out, the issue of God deals with the why, while science deals with the what. The realm of philosophy is to ask the purpose, while science identifies the cause. The two are linked, however, and one must use both to understand life or the universe fully.

As for God's omnipotence being a logical contradiction, this applies only if you are attempting to define God incorrectly. The problem is a "category error," common among atheistic thinking that limits understanding to only what can be structurally defined. The questions you ask don't make sense in light of what God is.

Quotations from this paper:

"God just isn't the kind of thing that can be caused to exist. So asking 'Who caused God?' is like asking 'what does yellow smell like?'. The colour yellow just isn't (and indeed no colour is) the kind of thing that can have a characteristic smell. Neither is God the sort of thing that can have a cause."

...

"Numerous people have suggested that God can't be omnipotent because the very concept of omnipotence is incoherent. This is supposed to be revealed by questions such as "Can God create a stone so heavy that even He couldn't lift it?"

If He can't do it, then there is something that He can't do. But there also seems to be something He can't do if He can create the stone, namely lift it. So, either way there is something that God can't do. Therefore, the thought goes, God cannot be omnipotent.

But answering this is not difficult. The answer relies upon realising that that God's omnipotence doesn't extend to making contradictions true. It is not a limitation on God's power to say that He can't make contradictions true. Contradictory 'things' are not really things at all. Saint Thomas Aquinas pointed out that it is no limitation on God's power that He can't create an uncreated being. Obviously God can't do that, if He created a being it would not be uncreated. These seem like mere trifles. It isn't obvious at first that asking God to create an immovable stone involves a contradiction - but it does. To see why consider the following case. Could there exist both an immovable object and an irresistible force? It seems that the answer must be no. It must be no because if these two things could be created, an obvious problem arises: what would happen if they were to come together? It would seem that if they did, then contradictory things would happen. If the immovable object really is immovable then it will have to resist the 'irresistible force'. Similarly, if the irresistible force really is irresistible then the 'immovable object' will have to move. But this is clearly impossible! It is logically impossible that these two things co-exist. Thus it involves a contradiction to suppose that they could co-exist. But the case with God and the stone is similar. The only difference being that one of the two already exists - namely God. But then it would follow that since God exists an immovable stone logically cannot exist. But it is not then a limitation on God's omnipotence that He cannot create what logically cannot exist. C.S. Lewis puts the general point well when he says that meaningless combinations of words don't become meaningful just by prefixing them with the words 'God can'."

Just thought I'd point out that the word 'effect' can also be used as a verb. http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/dictionaries/en glish/data/d0081523.html

...is the link to Art Bell's predictions. The man never found a conspiracy theory/alien abduction/perpetual motion scheme he didn't like. But for laughs, here it is - it does illustrate the principle that if you guess wildly about enough crap, by sheer luck you'll get something right.

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/aspie/trueorfalse/newye ar.html

Thank you! :-) And for the other replyer; I'll have you know that pedanticism is a perfectly cromulant word: http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/dictionaries/di fficultwords/data/d0009747.html

According to this interview, "Everything will be alright." In their defence, the timing in that song is this slow, shuffling gait that would be hard for anyone to reproduce.

There are other sites which say up to half of the songs on the album are demo versions, but I'm hard-pressed to find anything authoritative backing up those claims.

Please understand that I'm not trying to pick on The Killers here; they're all really accomplished musicians, and they're constantly improving with all the touring they've done. I only brought them up because I remembered this article.

I think I would slap a disney sticker of Dopey on the top and program it to do "Whistle While You Work".

Mmmm nitpick time. You mean obsolete, rather than obsolescent.

In Europe, Billion is typically used to mean the same number as Million in the US.

So to recap... Europe Billion = US Million = 1,000,000

ooh: look! we're all sort of wrong: http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/dictionaries/en glish/data/d0081600.html

A Reuters report from yesterday suggested a valuation for Partygaming (after the slide) of "about the size of Scottish and Newcastle":

http://www.tiscali.co.uk/news/newswire.php/news/re uters/2005/09/07/business/bruisedpartygamingsettoe nterftse100.html&template=/money/feeds/story_templ ate.html

S&N's a big company, active not just in the UK - anywhere there you go you can see their brands and products. I can't imagine that anything like that amount of money is going into online casinos in the long, or even the short, term.

Am I missing something here - do people really spend as much on poker as on beer?

E = I^2 * R

advice from a pacifist

http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/encyclopaedia/h utchinson/m0004884.html

I distinctly remember reading interviews with Bungie that said that the next game would not be in the Halo franchise . . .

Here's one link. I think that there was also one about it on Gamespot.

363000000 km^2 x (12000 ft - 3000 ft) x (90 F - 32 F) x (4.186 J/gC)

363000000 km^2 x (12000 ft - 3000 ft) x (90 F - 32 F) x (4.186 J/gC)

There's still a bit of a Viewdata BBs revival going on - CCl4 still has the ability to log in via a java client (their bit on the revival is here).

Sadly, Heaven isn't running at the moment but maybe it'll be back soon.

Internet users (per 10,000 people) 106.8 (2002 est) Personal computer users (per 100 people) 3.2 (2002 est)Cuba

Internet users (per 10,000 people) 106.8 (2002 est) Personal computer users (per 100 people) 3.2 (2002 est)Cuba

The fact that we are using chemical rockets is irrelevant to the time it took the Cassini space probe to get to Saturn. It did not take a direct route. It used a gravity-assisted flight path where it hardly used its rockets. They where mainly used just to get off the earth. These flight paths are minimum energy paths that use the gravity of the Sun to guide it and the gravity of the planets to push it.

I used to be with http://www.tiscali.co.uk/, who are one of the worst ISP's in the UK. I decided to move to another ISP and rang Tiscali to get a MAC code. With a MAC code the old ISP talks to the new ISP and they arrange a changeover, usually takes 2 weeks and you are down for a day at most. Turns out Tiscali don't do MAC codes, probably because they are one of the worst ISP's in the UK and every bugger would leave if it was that easy ;)

So, I had to leave Tiscali and they wanted one months notice, which they got and after a month, my broadband stopped working. It then took many calls to Tiscali chasing them up to get BT to cease the line, what should have taken a week took three weeks. Then it took a another 2 weeks for BT to cease the line after Tiscali finally got off their butts and told BT to cease the line, that again should have taken 3 or 4 days. In that time Tiscali and BT constantly blamed each other for the delay.

I'm now with http://www.demon.net/ who I'm very happy with, but if they ever go downhill at least they support MAC codes so I never have to go through anything like that again.

Jonathan