I like the idea of offsetting charitable donations against tax. It seems a very good thing. We don't have that in the UK. However, I only give to one charity regularly. It is the poppy appeal, http://www.poppy.org.uk/ they raise money to look after soldiers wounded in conflict. In my experience, a lot of charities are just self sporting institutions with far too many directors and accountants.

one interesting fact I heard on a documentary recently is that around 1/4 of the cars should not be on london's roads anyway. Either no insurance, not tax, no driving licence, or the car has been stolen. So I think mobile phones are the least of the polices worries.

I saw this windows CE netbook on sale in the UK: http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=257308 Maplin is an electronics/gizmo store, but I have seen one or two others on sale in medium sized chains. I has been on sale for a year or so so I guess it can not be doing too badly.

To be hoist, one of the main reasons I turn my office computer off when I go home is so it is not hacked by script kiddies at night - I don't think I need a non updating embedded linux system running all the time on my network.

You must remember that our national life boar service (RNLI) is a CHARITY and receives NO government sponsorship whatsoever. They get all there cash by collecting in the streets, collecting tins in shops and charity events... They are a truly amazing charity and save hundreds of lives . All there members are highly motivated volunteers who have ordinary jobs but when called upon drop everything and go and save lives what ever the weather. So my point is that it is not so amazing that they dug there own fiber link, they do after all maintain all there own kit and are out to save as much cash as possible because they don't have that much of it in the first place. http://www.rnli.org.uk/rnli_near_you

may be the radar is cooking the bats and that is why he is finding less of them!

I have the same problem, I use fedora 10, on an samsung NC10 with an atom processor. I just ticked the encrypt file system box on the install. I do not notice any noticeable slow down due to the disk encryption overhead.

Thought I would just put this in perspective for non UK readers:

This is quite ironic because the politician Jacqui Smith who was backing this crazy plan. Justified the plan with logic such as if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. Well.... last month she found out that this was true. Somebody leaked her expenses claims to the nation press it turned out that she had claimed for two porn films along with a load of other essentials for her house such as flat screen TVs which were of course essential for here to carry out her job. Oops.

Secondly, the last few months and in especially the last week has been very bad for the government. It is generally agreed in both the left and right wing press that the government has totally lost the plot and is also losing control of its MPs. (there is talk of the ruling party splitting in two and senior ministers defecting) Add to this that the UK is in massive debt, and I mean massive. This means that after the next election (in 12 months time) the ruling party will most probably be out. The incoming party will HAVE to cut expenditure and things such as this mad project will be cut and all the employees fired. I can not wait!

To be fair the Russians do not have a spotless record in nuclear health and safety. Or for that matter health and safety in any form.

Sorry to disappoint you but as Tom Tom found out earlier this year computers in cars are already patented:
Vehicle computer system with open platform architecture http://www.google.com/patents?id=_wIGAAAAEBAJ&dq=6,175,789
Vehicle computer system with wireless internet connectivity http://www.google.com/patents?id=crt7AAAAEBAJ&dq=6,202,008

Along the same lines as the above post.... What a waste of my taxes. I am getting fed up of hearing about cash going to dubious research projects. There are some big problems to be solved out there for example reducing mans dependence on fossil fuels and reducing the damage they cause our planet. Why are we wasting cash on this dubious project?????

Why not just ask yahoo for an image of the site. They are going to shut it down anyway. So what value is a load of crappy web pages to them. They may be glad to send it rather than have a load of random web trawlers going over there entire web site.

Thank you Finish copyright police TTVK or who every you are. I had never heard of this service before. It sounds great and now I might just use it!

I see what you are saying. As a scientist it iterates me a lot when a journal paper with a very important contribution to human knowledge is behind a subscription service I do not have access to. And why should I have to cough up 30$ for research which was probably funded by my government anyway?

However, on a slightly different idea... Have you ever wondered what would happen to windows market share if cracked copies of windows and key gens could not be download from the internet. (i.e. a world where windows piracy was impossible or at least very hard) I doubt that all those people with hookie copies of windows would rush out and buy vista at the bargain price of 200$ or what ever it is these days. I expect it would give a huge competitive advantage to Linux and the other free OSes. So is piracy band for Linux? I think so.

How is this moded as funny. How many viruses do you know for Linux. I mean real viruses, not ones that somebody got going on one distro by disabling SElinux and typing in the root password twice. Real viruses like oh I don't know conficker for example. I can never see this happening on Linux because:

1. If the software you download has been altered with some odd code, yum will pick it up because the check sum will be wrong.

2. see above.