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Must... resist... Cartman hippy jokes....

It's fun to see them try, but the physics say that the energy just isn't there. Perhaps if the copter weighed almost nothing, and it was constructed of super-strong materials.

go to www.epistaxsis.ukgateway.net for a picture of a RISC OS desktop.

WARNING! this is a 2048x1536 24bit JPEG so if you're bandwidth restricted it'll take a while.

Doesn't it look nice?

This is one of the reasons I use RISC OS - can you imagine windows/linux/BeOS/MacOS being as clear in such a resolution (I have tried all except MacOS in 1600x1200 and they were unreadable!)?
Note also the lack of text based File/Edit/View stuff in the windows (or top of screen for mac users...) - this is all done on the middle mouse button. This is one of the best features of the WIMP as it lets you perform an action on an object without shifting the mouse - which is brill for graphics.
BTW you get a text editor, a bitmap prog & a vector prog built into the ROM - how cool is that?

Marklar!

Don't know whether including Berwick seperately is just a nicety or whether it has any legal force, but some guy from Russia came over in the late 50s (IIRC) and signed a peace treaty for the end of the Crimean War with the mayor of Berwick, allowing him to assure citizens of Russia that they could now sleep safely in their beds.

Would have been fun being the mayor, you can't deny it.

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Tom Harris
http://www.harris.ukgateway.net

That's the principle that the Leeds University archiver works on. As the tapes are continuously getting bigger, if the system is set up semi-automatically, data can be continually transferred to current media without significant time expenditure. The ISS reckon this can continue pretty much indefinitely.

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Tom Harris
http://www.harris.ukgateway.net

Mary Poppins is the only film ever to score 100% on the CAPalert system. Enough said, really.

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Tom Harris
http://www.harris.ukgateway.net

You will also notice that some of these categories get their own domain classes. (.mil .gov .com .edu)
It would greatly serve the internet, IMHO, to have domain classes for each of these "continents". (.sex .tec .alt)
This is what DNS was designed for, and it's sad to see this feature go unused.

Bravo, there. If there's one thing that saddens me about the current internet, it's the abuse of the DNS. Lets face it, .com is far too broad and says nothing about the organisation in question. If there was a .sex (or .xxx or something) TLD, and sex sites were removed from .com (and .net and .org) then it would also be much easier to operate filtering.

Oh, and people using .org domains for commercial purposes should have them permanently removed - it completely defeats the point of differentiated TLDs.

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Tom Harris
http://www.harris.ukgateway.net

Because the people aren't always right? One of the reasons you have entrenched rights in something like the US consitution is to prevent your popular, elected government from doing things that are wrong.

I don't claim to be right all the time, "the people" shouldn't make the same claim. Allowing that to be true, it's our duty to stand up and be heard when we think society as a whole is making a shortsighted and misguided decision.

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Tom Harris
http://www.harris.ukgateway.net

A couple of quick rebuttals before I get onto my main point. Firstly, the furore about GM foods was very little to do with our governments and very little to do with trade protection (we don't grow much soya, to start with). It was ordinary people (possibly ignorant and wrong ordinary people, led by their newspapers, but that's a different issue) complaining about GM that brought UK government action in the first place. Until they realised how unpopular it was, the UK govt was actually pro GM. Secondly I take some offence at your portrayal of "Euros" as a homogeneous group. We're not. I, for one, don't get excited about GM or trade protection, in general.

Alright, on to the main point. This is not about trade protection. "Europe" doesn't have a competing commercial OS, so there's nothing to protect. Xenophobic bigotry aside, don't you think that the EU could be as concerned about MS strongarm tactics as the US DoJ is? Afterall, EU consumers are getting screwed over to the exact same degree that US ones are. And finally, the EU does have a record for taking unpopular action against its own firms and industries. Indeed, that's one of the reasons it is somewhat reviled in the UK - people object to the introduction of compulsory decimalised labelling of goods, for example. Especially the firms that have to implement it.

The EU has many problems, but this is not one of them.

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Tom Harris
http://www.harris.ukgateway.net

I don't know about Britney Spears and Pokemon (I know a lot of "mainstream" people who are equally as scathing about them ;-) but I'm uneasy with the claim that geeks reject the worthless trappings of rampant consumerism.

Looking from the perspective of a geek at University it seems that the worthless trappings of a consumer society are exactly what many geeks are looking for. I suppose it follows: rejected at school, with a resentment against the people that did the rejecting, what better way to get one back at myopic and shallow mainstream culture than by beating its proponents on their own terms?

It's the "Geeks being essential to the workings of modern computerised life" bit. How many people have revelled at the possibility of making shedloads of money from a net-bubble IPO and becoming instantly rich? Granted that many people wouldn't consider that an aim, I reckon there are many people who do want all the trappings of consumerism. After all, what is one of the central tenets of the libertarian philosophy that many geeks (myself not included, I must add) hold up as the ideal? The right to become wealthy through the operation of the free market - and damn the consequences for anyone else. Not the "self contained subculture" that geekdom is sometimes made out to be, but inherently consumeristic.

Many geeks don't want to eschew the liberal good life, with the attendent nice house, financial independence and ton of shiny computer kit, they just want it on their terms. Or at least that's how it looks from here.

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Tom Harris
http://www.harris.ukgateway.net

Has anyone read "A Canticle for Leibowitz" by Walter M Miller Jr? A post-apocalypse book, it is based on the premise that it is not just random environmental degredation that destroys our data and hence our science after the nuclear holocaust, but that people were so disgusted at how our knowledge had been used that there was a mass orgy of book burnings.

Even given that you can't book-burn an optical disc (though it could easily be destroyed) surely an equal worry to the slow deterioration of our media is that people may not want to preserve data that future generations may consider valuable?

My university has an archiver with a "preserve everything" policy because when they migrated their systems at the end of the 70s they only saved the "important" stuff like source code. They had a request a few years ago for binary code from an obsolete system that someone was trying to emulate - and they couldn't give it, even though it would have been exceedingly useful, because it had been deemed "worthless" and lost.

Perhaps we should be equally concerned about what we're preserving, as well as how we're doing it. Tom Harris

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Tom Harris
http://www.harris.ukgateway.net