I'd have thought because of noise and attenuation? Having said that I did used to run an audio cable from one side of my home to the other, never noticed any problems - but then I'm no audiophile.

Perhaps look at a bifferboard? http://bifferos.bizhat.com/

£29 for a tiny low-voltage machine that can play a wav that's being streamed over the network. Someone wrote a howto here: http://sites.google.com/site/bifferboard/Home/howto/use-bifferboard-as-network-audio-player

You'd still need to sort out speakers, and figure out a way to control it, but I'd have thought it would be fairly straight-forward to set up an IR controller or start/stop/next buttons to play a pre-defined playlist.

Probably because they work for Murdoch, and are merely writing what he tells them to.

FWIW my post wasn't flamebait. I don't agree with what you've said in your post, but don't want to get into a big theological argument - we obviously disagree strongly, but in so doing risk straying away from the point, which was that creationism is a belief, whereas evolution is a fact.

My point was that due to the history of how the bible was created and has been passed down through the generations, it seems illogical to assume that it is the literal word of god. You are free to believe that it is the literal word of god, that's fine, but you can't prove it to someone who doesn't share your belief. There is no evidence to support it.

To believe in creationism is to believe that there is an omnipotent being who created our reality, led us to adopt scientific methods to try to understand it, and littered our universe with things for us to discover that would imply that he did not create humans in one day, and that we're the result of the process of evolution.

Frankly I can't see why evolution and creationism can't live side by side - why can't God-worshippers say "Well, there's all this compelling irrefutable scientific evidence that life on earth came about through evolution, so I guess that's how God created us". Isn't it possible that God just dictated the bible in terms that would have made sense to Abraham thousands of years ago, so He skipped out all the stuff about dinosaurs and DNA?

But given we are having this argument, it seems not. Nonetheless, evolution is a fact, a scientifically proven fact, and it is futile to try to pretend otherwise. It happens all around us - bacteria evolve to resist certain antibiotics, butterflies evolve to survive in a rapidly changing environment - it happens all the time. The difference between evolution and creation is that evolution can be proven to someone who doesn't initially believe it to be true, provided they are prepared to consider the evidence.

I do find the whole subject of religion fascinating; as you may have gathered, I'm not a believer in any deity, but I am open to listen to those who do believe, and I respect that everyone is entitled to believe whatever they want to. Having said that, I feel strongly that evolution should be taught and discussed as the facts dictate, and that religious beliefs should be kept separate.

The church has managed to adapt to irrefutable challenges from the scientific community many times in the past, and I am sure it will again - but eventually the facts will win.

Evolution is not a theory, it's a fact. There is scientific evidence all around that proves it, not least fossil records and DNA analysis.

Another fact is that creationist crackpots are basing their beliefs on a book that was put together by committee hundreds of years ago. It cannot be taken literally as the word of God, because that is not what it is. It is a collection of stories written by humans over the past couple of thousand years, stories which reflect the morals, superstitions and prejudices of the societies of their times. It's a fascinating insight into the hopes and fears of our ancestors who lacked the scientific knowledge to explain the world around them, but you cannot take it as anything more than that.

The irony is that Bible-based societies have already thrown out large parts because they don't like them - for example, they rejected the parts of the bible which advocate stoning adulterous wives or disobedient children, with the notable exception of a few extreme Islamic groups. But then people hold up sentences right next to it as irrefutable proof that homosexuality is the work of Satan? And that in 4004 BC God created the heavens and earth and a near-infinite number of stars and galaxies in just 7 days, and then went to all the trouble of coming up with all this fake evidence proving evolution, which he weaved into every living cell just to fuck with us 6000 years later? Christ.

Exactly.

Besides, it's not like the contractors downloaded "Bob's IT Dashboard" and changed the logo - by the sounds of things, they just used open source libraries to reduce the development time.

Better than the BBC, for example, who insist on rolling their own libraries for everything, while on the taxpayer's time.

No, but it has always been the case that everyone who owned a work (or at least a license to use it) was legally obliged to pay for it. This reduces widespread adoption, and in particular blocks mainstream hardware implementations for fear of legal action.

Make content sharing legal like the pirate party want, and sooner or later you'll get netgear/linksys/belkin/apple/ms et al releasing affordable set-top boxes which browse torrent-esque sites, pull down music and videos, and play them straight into your tv for free. A bit like apple/ms already do, only with P2P.

The kind of thing that a minority of tech-savvy people are doing today without regard for the consequences will be available to the masses, and nobody sane would ever pay for content again.

With convenience of watching the latest releases at home while the costs are reduced to near zero, cinema attendance would suffer, and most films wouldn't stand a chance of making all their money back.

The only people who would stand a chance making money out of content in the short term would be those who can create a compelling way to package and deliver the content with a subscription or ad-supported revenue model. But even they would struggle in the long-term as hardware manufacturers try to undercut each other. The only real cost would be ISP bandwidth.

Making content free to share would ultimately kill all modern sources of professional-quality content. We would be reduced to theatres, concerts and youtube shorts of students prancing around in abandoned campus car parks wielding make-pretend light sabers.

So instead of bleating that content wants to be free and that we should all live in some hippy copyrightless utopia, I'd prefer to be a bit more realistic and wait for the content industry to figure out they can make more money by embracing the internet than trying to fight it. It'll happen eventually.

I buy books I own; if I did go to the library, I'd pay library fees and they'd buy the books in. If I borrow my girlfriend's books and read those, she paid for them - and I give them back. This is legal, and in no way the same as it being legal for millions of people to go onto a P2P network and permanently download an exact copy of the book without giving the author any money.

Pay-per-joke is comparing apples to oranges - but I'd certainly expect to pay for a joke book, and don't think it would be fair to expect a recording of a comedian's performance which I didn't pay for.

I do pay for every song I own. I pay for songs I hear on the radio by listening to their adverts. If I sing to myself in the shower then I'm not performing it to anyone; if anything I'm practicing. If I sang it to 500 people in a field, and charged them access the performance, then yes, I should pay performance royalties.

If we were talking about making it legal for me to upload a video to YouTube of me singing in the shower, then yes, you may have a case for arguing that copyright law is unfair.

However, we're not talking about that. We're talking about the Pirate Party wanting to make it legal to copy a track or film off a CD or DVD, put it on a P2P network, and let millions of people get an identical copy of the original without any money going to the people involved in creating the content. I can't see how anyone thinks that is fair.

You and I may not like Britney Spears, but then we don't have to buy her music. A lot of people must like her though, because she keeps doing very well in the charts and on tour.

I don't like a lot of new music, but equally, there's a lot that I do. Some of it reached me via last.fm, but most of it reached me through the mainstream radio. If the people making the music weren't getting money for their efforts, that music wouldn't have reached me. Not to mention the books and films I've enjoyed reading and watching lately.

The current system is far from perfect, but the system that the pirate party are proposing would not only harm the content industries, but the content creators themselves - not just the manufactured pop mega-stars that you and I dislike, but the skilled and talented musicians, actors, authors, designers, and programmers who are merely making a fair living creating things.

I get the impression that they are bleeding the customer dry whenever I see people getting fines running into the tens of thousands for sharing a handful of tracks. A $2 million dollar fine for sharing 24 tracks.

When I see the industry saying that paying for a track on a CD doesn't entitle you to copy that onto your PC or portable MP3 player, and that you have to buy another copy.

When I hear about how the people want to extend copyright past any reasonable length to reasonably ensure income for the author.

When you look at a CD on an online shop and see it's half the price of electronic delivery from the same place.

When a CD of an album that came out in 1984 is 3 times the price of a 2008 straight-to-DVD film.

When "Gone with the Wind" - which came out in 1939, has made hundreds of millions of dollars since then, still holds the record for domestic box office, and whose main actors have been dead for at least 30-40 years - is still more expensive on DVD than films that came out in 2008.

The customer may may be paying a relatively fair price when compared to 1939, but that doesn't make it fair.

Yes, you can be an amateur musician playing music for the fun of it while you keep a day job. But to create anything of quality while you're doing a full-time job and would be incredibly difficult, especially if you had a family and wanted to play music with others.

I know a musician who had to leave his band because it got to the point where he didn't have enough time to practice with the others, get his work done and spend any time with his wife. Of course he didn't give it up altogether, but he had to give up any chance of doing it really well. Equally, his bandmates had to give up their full-time jobs to put the time into their practice. There just aren't enough hours in the day to do everything properly.

Just look at orchestras; the good ones are made up of full-time professionals. The ones made up of amateurs meeting once a week may get most of the notes in the right order, but they will lack the polish and precision of people who have the hours to practice to pull a performance up from amateur to professional.

And that's just the performance. You then have to find a composer with the skill, experience and time to create something worth listening to. A conductor or producer to make sure everything goes in the right place. You have to find someone with the time, expertise and equipment to record it.

I'm sorry, but I don't think that all of the effort that goes into creating an excellent recording should have to be done for free. If you spend all of that time building skills and creating something beautiful, you should be able to protect it legally for a reasonable amount of time.

If you remove money from creating music, books and films, you can only be left with amateurs who create amateur content with amateur production values. I'd prefer to continue to pay for quality.

Indeed you didn't; other people in this thread have said as much though, so it was partly in answer to those, and partly pre-empting a similar response.

If it's legal to share content with friends or strangers for free, on P2P networks or whatever, it will get mainstream hardware support, and everyone from grandchild to grandparent will have something hooked up to their TV that can download everything for free. They'll never pay a penny more, and they'd be stupid to do otherwise.

When there's no money coming in, people who make films and music will get no money to pay their bills, so they'll go do something that will.

There would never be another big-budget film with quality actors, soundtrack, story and effects. We'd be left watching old movies before the law was passed, and no-budget university students prancing around in abandoned campus car parks wielding make-pretend light sabers.

So no thanks, I'll continue to wait and hope the **AA figure out they can make more money out of working with their customers rather than against them. And until then, I'm sure a lot of other people will be happy with illegal P2P.