I had the privilege of camping a few years back near Dulverton, quite a bit out of town on the moors, and the sky was unbelievable then. I could see stars in areas of sky I would usually in Bristol have seen as dark. Breathtaking.
On the down side, a town near me recently started turning of the street lamps at night, and there was a fatal road accident which was proven to be caused by the lack of lights. Leading up to this incident were a string of near misses.
I dont know what the people complaining about bandwidth are moaning about, so limit the downloads if you feel you have to make a fuss about it. You cant stream the content to the iPlayer anyway, it's a straight download and then watch. As far as I can see its another way for the UK ISP's to grab more money from the UK consumers. We get a really bad deal here compared to the US market, and the ISP's use any excuse to wring even more money from us. They just want to excuse another price hitch.
Others have already said this bit the e-toys in Squeak are brilliant for teaching kids programming. My 8 year old was designing and running simple programs to drive a little car around the screen within about half an hour. And most of that was self-taught, I just showed him the basics and he was off and running.
And just remembered, this old guy who used to go to Amateur radio rallies here in the UK used to turn up and sell old used bus 50MHz Pye Westminster PMR radios. They had spent their entire previous life starpped in the wheelarches of these old buses and were covered in YEARS of old road dirt, grime and diesel. He used to STEAM CLEAN them to get rid of the gunk and then dry them in the airing cupboard and then sell them to punters who adapted them for Ham use. They all worked fine.
My brother's CB radio once caught fire whilst we were driving along chatting to someone. When we got the fire out (smelly and scary) the CB was just a fused black smoking mass of plastic and stuff, but the connectors at the back and for the mike etc. were all ok. For a laugh we plugged it all in again and keyed the mike AND IT WORKED! We got a contact from someone 20 miles away who said we sounded just fine. Hate to think of the safety implications!
Its bad enough managing several thousand PC's with users who want and try to download everything and anything they can lay their hands on without having the extra administrative burden of so-called good worms screwing things up too! Honestly though, if you tie the machines down and implement regular automatic updating of OS and anti-virus you should be OK, if you dont do the above, well, you only have yourself to blame.
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I had the privilege of camping a few years back near Dulverton, quite a bit out of town on the moors, and the sky was unbelievable then. I could see stars in areas of sky I would usually in Bristol have seen as dark. Breathtaking. On the down side, a town near me recently started turning of the street lamps at night, and there was a fatal road accident which was proven to be caused by the lack of lights. Leading up to this incident were a string of near misses.
I dont know what the people complaining about bandwidth are moaning about, so limit the downloads if you feel you have to make a fuss about it. You cant stream the content to the iPlayer anyway, it's a straight download and then watch. As far as I can see its another way for the UK ISP's to grab more money from the UK consumers. We get a really bad deal here compared to the US market, and the ISP's use any excuse to wring even more money from us. They just want to excuse another price hitch.
Others have already said this bit the e-toys in Squeak are brilliant for teaching kids programming. My 8 year old was designing and running simple programs to drive a little car around the screen within about half an hour. And most of that was self-taught, I just showed him the basics and he was off and running.
And just remembered, this old guy who used to go to Amateur radio rallies here in the UK used to turn up and sell old used bus 50MHz Pye Westminster PMR radios. They had spent their entire previous life starpped in the wheelarches of these old buses and were covered in YEARS of old road dirt, grime and diesel. He used to STEAM CLEAN them to get rid of the gunk and then dry them in the airing cupboard and then sell them to punters who adapted them for Ham use. They all worked fine.
My brother's CB radio once caught fire whilst we were driving along chatting to someone. When we got the fire out (smelly and scary) the CB was just a fused black smoking mass of plastic and stuff, but the connectors at the back and for the mike etc. were all ok. For a laugh we plugged it all in again and keyed the mike AND IT WORKED! We got a contact from someone 20 miles away who said we sounded just fine. Hate to think of the safety implications!
Its bad enough managing several thousand PC's with users who want and try to download everything and anything they can lay their hands on without having the extra administrative burden of so-called good worms screwing things up too! Honestly though, if you tie the machines down and implement regular automatic updating of OS and anti-virus you should be OK, if you dont do the above, well, you only have yourself to blame.