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User: elvum

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Comments · 358

  1. Re:Wisdom foolows, pay attention! on Online Revenge · · Score: 1

    The personal data protection laws in the European union (of which Britain is a member state) are extremely serious. The guy used the data without authorization and by making it public, he has become a criminal. He is very lucky if he aviods spending actual time in prison. I am sure the civil penalties will make him bankrupt anyhow.

    I accept that you're an Anonymous Coward and probably trolling, but really - you should do some research into the laws you cite before making such wild assertions. The Data Protection Act in the UK applies to organisations, not individuals. And there is no civil penalty for publishing damaging information about a person, as long as it's true.

  2. Methanol-powered laptops? on BBC Tests Pre-Commercial Toshiba Fuel Cell Laptop · · Score: 1

    Great. Now you can contribute directly to global warming from the comfort of your own lap... ;-)

  3. Re:Check those gender assumptions on Can You Survive Long Commutes? · · Score: 1

    Well, you're less likely to get it wrong if you jump for "male". At what point does it become acceptable to risk offending someone by jumping one way or the other, though?

  4. Re:Not enough bandwidth on Free Nationwide Wireless Internet Access? · · Score: 1

    Have you come across Digital Radio Mondiale?

  5. Re:You've missed the point on Judge Creates Own Da Vinci Code · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is the UK. We can tell the difference between bias and humour over here.

  6. Re:Seriously though... on Nokia's New All-In-One Phone · · Score: 1

    FWIW, a USB Bluetooth adaptor costs about as much as I would expect a USB cradle to.

  7. Re:The new thing is the hype(r)transport on Start-up Could Kick Opteron into Overdrive · · Score: 1

    I'd like to see an Open Source solution that greatly facilitates the creation of FPGA firmware. Perhaps something that could compile/synthesise one of the many excellent modern functional languages. Anyone out there up to the challenge? :-)

  8. Re:Might we ever have socketed Hypertransport GPU' on Start-up Could Kick Opteron into Overdrive · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I think the parent was suggesting that CPU-socket devices could be produced that were marketed as GPUs but could be used to assist other CPU-bound processes. Whether or not said devices are designed as graphics chips or general-purpose logic devices is another question.

    WRT your vehicular analogy, there are people who buy cars and want to use them as trucks occasionally, and people who buy trucks but sometimes just use them as cars. It's no big deal.

  9. Re:Performance rating on Windows Vista 5342 Screenshots · · Score: 1

    So that you know what you need to upgrade.

  10. Re:VBR? on Cringely on P2P vs Streaming Data Centers · · Score: 1

    The 4-16Mb/s figure is a variable bit-rate... ;-)

  11. Re:English to American translation on The Simpsons Come to Life · · Score: 1

    Most would, but not all. :-)

  12. Re:what idiot would stream mpeg2? on Cringely on P2P vs Streaming Data Centers · · Score: 1

    Many people would expect a "high-definition" video service to be higher quality as well as higher resolution. A BBC White Paper on the subject suggests 4-16Mb/s for H.264 (or VC1) encoded HD video, depending on the nature of the content.

  13. Re:HDTV adopters screwed by HD-disc rules on HD DVD to Screw Early HDTV Adopters · · Score: 1

    1080p25 or 1080p50? And how would you like your analogue component signal to be carried?

  14. Re:Permanent Magnets and Zero Point Energy on Self Contained Power Source? · · Score: 1

    For example, two electrons, through electrostatic repulsion, will accelerate away from one another. It is impossible to dismiss that energy was required to cause this acceleration. Yet, the electrons do not diminish in energy, they do not loose any electrostatic potential and are in fact capable of continually doing this same magical feat indefinitely.

    Where do you get your free electrons from in the first place, and once they've pushed each other apart, how do you put them back together again? I'm afraid that the expenditure of energy is required in both cases.

    The same arguments apply to magnets, but the equivalent of free electrons (permanent magnets) do exist. Problem is that the energy you can extract from them is less than the energy required to magnetise them. If they were a viable energy source, they'd be as non-renewable as coal or uranium.

  15. Re:There are NO patent free video codecs on Newest Patent Threat to MPEG-4 · · Score: 1

    There's Dirac, of course.

  16. Re:Question: on BBC Presents An Open News Archive · · Score: 1

    Yes.

  17. Re:Most used news site on the Internet? on Microsoft Leaving MSNBC TV Partnership · · Score: 1

    No wait, there's more than one MSNBC URL, isn't there? Panic over - everyone back to their own beds... ;-)

  18. Most used news site on the Internet? on Microsoft Leaving MSNBC TV Partnership · · Score: 5, Informative

    The MSNBC Web site... is the most-used news site on the Internet.

    Sez who? Alexa.com puts it orders of magnitude below the BBC News website, for example.

  19. More Agreement on Supernova 1987A Decoded · · Score: 1

    cf the Correspondence Principle: a new theory has to account for all the measurements made in support of the accepted theory. It's not enough just to cover the areas in which the accepted theory is inelegant. A theory that doesn't meet this basic criterion can be ignored without requiring debunking.

    In the case of the Electric Universe theory I would ask its proponents to explain why decades of Space Physics experiments have failed to find and measure the kind of charged-particle flows to and from the sun that would be required to convey enough energy to power it. Until they've adequately explained where they are, I don't feel the need to take them seriously.

  20. Re:Oh my God on Practical Method for Getting Oil from Oil Shale? · · Score: 1

    On the contrary, people moan. (That example is from back in 2000, so it's not like we're suddenly waking up to the realisation of high fuel prices.) European governments "get away with it" because the people selfishly insisting on their right to burn as much fuel as they like are countered by those who believe in alternative sources of energy and means of transport to a much greater extent than in the USA.

  21. Re:Timing on Thousands and Thousands of Hours of PVR TV · · Score: 1

    You could, but the BBC at least has ambitions to enormously increase the importance of interactive programme content. And you're talking about a 10% reduction, anyway.

  22. Re:Timing on Thousands and Thousands of Hours of PVR TV · · Score: 1

    Probably 1, 2 and B, since the project was done under contract for the BBC, but I don't know for sure. I don't know why they chose three, although I can think of some possibilities. Yes you can recompress MPEG2, but you yourself said it was unfeasible for a promise.tv PVR! My point is that it's already compressed sufficiently.

  23. Re:5 channels on Thousands and Thousands of Hours of PVR TV · · Score: 1

    Analogue and Freeview users can only get S4C in or near Wales right now, although that might change now that Ofcom has announced the adoption of 8k in the UK, which permits Single Frequency Networks, which only work if everyone in the Network receives exactly the same multiplex. I don't have any info on the likelihood of this, however... I'm not Alan Cox, and perhaps suggesting S4C was a little mischievous ;-)

  24. Re:Timing on Thousands and Thousands of Hours of PVR TV · · Score: 1

    Record three muxes. Only store a week's content. That gets you down to 3.2TB. And you don't have to compress anything - MPEG2 video is already compressed.

  25. Re:Timing on Thousands and Thousands of Hours of PVR TV · · Score: 1

    The box they demonstrated at Open Tech 2005 did indeed have 3.2TB of disks in it.