What do you want your audience to think, feel and do? Decide this at the start, and then you'll be able to judge whether you've succeeded in the end. Unfortunately, "Sharing information" is the lowest form of presentation (the highest is a call to action - "Attack!") so if that's all you're doing, it a tough row to hoe.
Start with a grabber - something funny, or a question.
Then tell them what you're going to tell them. This doesn't have to be an agenda slide, you can do it verbally. This sets the context and tells your team that there will be an end!
Give them the content. This can be in the form of slides, or visual aids. Remember, you are the presenter, not the slides. Look at TED talks and you'll see it is the person everyone is looking at and not the slide. Practice standing still and talking to people in the audience. If you have to read off your slides, do it silently for a few seconds, then turn and face the audience and speak. Stand to the left of the screen if you can from the audience's perspective so they'll naturally move their eyes to you (In English we read from the left).
For content, I *really* recommend pictures and no text, or very sparse text. Just get rid of all the text and you'll be free to talk about the picture how you like. If you put up text, people will read it instead of looking and listening to you. The Ignite style, or PechaKucha (http://www.pecha-kucha.org/) styles are very awesome and exciting if you want to give them a go. I use www.gettyimages.com as a source - it's a great search engine for emotive pictures. For internal use, screw copyright, just take anything and blow it up BIG (full bleed, no titles).
Finish with a call to action slide that drives home what you want the team to think feel and do after they walk out the door. Don't be afraid to ask for something too, or for something they should consider. After all, if there is no point to what you've just said, then why bother?
One last point - being told to do a presentation for 30 minutes is an artificial constraint. Will your boss really be upset if you take 10 minutes and get the message across? I've had to do presentations to extremely busy people and had 5 minutes or less and done that with terrific success. The time should not be what you consider - if there's time left over, call it discussion time or Q&A. If there's no discussion or Q&A, maybe you need to be a bit more provocative or thought-provoking in what you are saying.

Good luck!

> does the adjective virgin have the same connotation in the UK as it does here? [USA]

Yes, it does have the same meaning. It was really racy until FCUK started in '97.

> Nobody got hurt.

Hmm. I cheated once at school and it almost wrecked my future. I wasn't caught, and it sent me on a path that I wouldn't have gone down if I hadn't have cheated. I was taking a Chemistry exam aged 14 and due to overcrowding, the exam was in a regular classroom rather than the gym. The assistant music teacher was running the show and as he had really bad eyesight it was just too easy to look through books in my bag for answers. A month later, the results came out and I hit 90% - almost top of the class and a strong indication that I should pick Chemistry as one of my subjects the next year. That was a terrible decision. After slogging through 2 months of Chemistry, I realized I was actually really crap at it and hated the subject, but by then it was too late to switch. I ended up wasting 2 years studying something I hated.

So, you can cheat, but the only person you're fooling is yourself if you think that result means anything at all. Know your own worth.

A friend's Dad bought a ZX80 when they came out and then first thing I did was program a home-made "breakout" game into it. The screen flashed every time the ball went up and down, and then the game ran out of memory.

There's a good tutorial on Amazon's Kindle site here on how to build Kindle books with Word - https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A2RYO17TIRUIVI

Although us Americans may think that $4 a gallon gas is expensive, it's not. What would the change in activity be if it was $7.86 a gallon like in London today? (Source: http://www.theaa.com/motoring_advice/fuel/) In the UK, these kind of prices over the years have meant a wholesale conversion to diesel engines because they have higher mpg, even though diesel costs $8.22/US gallon. The average fuel economy of all UK cars is: City - 17.78, Highway - 37.861, Combined 30.27. Eight out of the top 10 most fuel efficient cars are diesels and have a Combined MPG of >52.56! (converted to US Gallons), with the best The other two are hybrids. (Source: http://fuel-economy.co.uk/stats.shtml). The best diesel is 34% more efficient than the best gas (petrol) car. In the US, the best non-hybrid is the Hyundai Elanta (29/40/33) followed by the Mini Cooper (29/37/32). (Source: http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/pdfs/guides/FEG2011.pdf).

Raising prices to UK levels would mean for a typical family car with a 15 gallon tank, paying in the order of $123 to fill 'er up. Yah, I think that'll make a difference to the decision whether you'll be driving, how far you're willing to commute and how big a car you'll want to buy. Doing it instantaneously would be a huge hit to the US economy, not least because of all the hugely inefficient cars in use today, that people typically live miles from where they work and drive, they haven't ridden a bike since elementary school and there's no public transport. That doesn't mean it couldn't be done, or shouldn't be done or that it wouldn't have an effect.

We in the industry have been using the term "superphone" for a while now to indicate the tier that sits above the iPhone in terms of spec. It is jam-packed with very-high-spec Android devices, like the Galaxy Nexus, Motorola Droids, HTC Bionic, etc. This segment differentiates itself from the iPhone with HD resolution displays, NFC, sub 10mm thickness cabinets, dual-core processors and other techie specs. It is the only space that's really left open now that Apple has claimed the $99 to $199 space and is very crowded as a result. The only other viable space is low-end prepaid, where Pantech, ZTE, LG, Huawei and others fight it out. I have a very neat diagram of this, but I think you get the idea. So this comment on the roadmap is I'm sure nothing more than a tip of the hat to that super-high-end market spot and not a "superphone" that'll rescue Microsoft like Superman.

Our IT team is really the best. They are hugely popular with the staff and I can't imagine a better team. It's a 100+person R&D facility with 3 IT people. Here's how they do it:

1. Invisible firewall - there is one, but you can FTP, ssh, etc. to your heart's content without noticing it. It's even possible to run P2P apps. Of course, if it's non-work related then you're signing your own pink slip. Also, they do audit all PC applications on the network remotely, but I've never been queried and I run some really odd apps sometimes.
2. Simple to use Help ticket system - and they're fast in responding.
3. Adequately staffed - that helps.
4. No restriction on smartphones hooking up to the Exchange server - company doesn't pay for any phones or service though.
5. Multiple VPN services available, so if one doesn't work, try another. Worse case, SSL VPN is available or webmail over SSL. Helpful when traveling abroad or visiting companies that block VPN ports.
6. Support for Windows & Linux, but if you want to run a Mac you can. They'll support you as much as they know.
7. Software purchased under $2000 doesn't need to be vetted, reviewed, quoted or anything else. Just buy it on the dept credit card - with your manager's approval of course.
8. Printers everywhere - we are a printer company, so that helps, but we have competitor's products too, so if one fails and you're waiting for it to be repaired, you have at least two others to print to easily.
9. Copious amounts of network storage for shared files. All RAID. All backed up.
10. Large email quotas, which are instantly upgraded for power-users.
11. Overall a can-do, but pragmatic response to requests - want a load of email or docs archived? They won't waste their time or yours burning DVD's, but they will copy it to an HD and vacuum pack it for you.
12. Finally, no, and I really mean no, draconian controls or policies. Just don't set up a rouge WiFi AP or download porn. Basically, the cardinal rule is - get your work done and be a star.

One clarification - the heart may need those pulses, but the rest of the body does not seem to need them. From NPR June 13th 2011, "Heart With No Beat Offers Hope Of New Lease On Life": "The pulsatility of the flow is essential for the heart, because it can only get nourishment in between heartbeats," Cohn says. "If you remove that from the system, none of the other organs seem to care much."
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/13/137029208/heart-with-no-beat-offers-hope-of-new-lease-on-life

I just watched a number of the course previews for a variety of the online professional development courses from Stanford as I was seriously thinking about doing one of their certificates. I also checked out ClassX, which has some classes on it. I'm having second thoughts because I fear I'll be bored to death by the experience. I've been out of university almost 20 years, but it's clear that they haven't changed much and the flow of information from instructor to student is agonizingly slow. Maybe I'm spoiled, but these lectures are essentially academic death-by-powerpoint experiences or even worse, death-by-writing ... very .... slowly ... on ... the board experiences. Just taking a Standford (or any other) lecture, slapping it on the web and putting even a fancy control UI like ClassX has is just not good enough. I think the courses have to be completely redone with online learning in mind. And if they were really well done, then I'd bet lectures would end up being the *last* place you'd want to go to for the course.

Here's some tips for improving on the online UI experience (for Stanford people if they read this):

1. Add a Skip Forward 30s/Back 10s control, because the instructor often dithers around on non-educational topics.(Copy Tivo/Dish/etc.)
2. Enable the video to be viewed faster than real time. I can easily process 2x speech or higher and the instructors often speak slowly. There's no need to force onliners to listen at 1:1. (Like Livescribe Pen desktop playback or software DVD players)
3. Have the instructor repeat the comment/question from the audience for the microphone - it's a classic problem, but they need to do it.
4. Add in chapters for each topic - this will enable us to skip to the next point/slide should the instructor belabor the point - okay I get it! (Livescribe pen / available on some ClassX content)
5. A number of times, the instructors mentioned how questions couldn't be asked by the online participants, but this isn't true. If the video is surrounded with a forum UI then viewers will easily be able to ask questions and a TA or the Professor can answer later - or other students could. (Like Hulu/YouTube/etc) Partially implemented.
6. Allow bookmarking/resume on the videos because it'd be really useful (like BBC iPlayer/Hulu)

Maybe Stanford's real online system has these functions, but if not, they should. Based on the cost of the courses, you'd think they could have a decent system banged out pronto.

Cliff

Well, 50% of humans *are* below average intelligence, so it only had to be lucky with the other 9%...

Did you chose those names as a homage to the BBC Micro Model A and Model B?

I can just see how an enemy will hack the pixel array to marquee "ALL YOUR BASE BELONG TO US!" or some animated target and the poor tankies won't know it because they can't see their own thermo picture!

Prevent, maybe not, but monitor yes. The signals have to come back down at some point so governments could try to intercept satellite connections at a ground station. Iridium routes from satellite to satellite and then down to the US (Tempe, Arizona and Wahiawa, Hawaii for the military) so is fairly impregnable from that perspective. Globalstar's satellite are "bent pipes" and beam down immediately to a ground station in Argentina, Australia, Botswana, France, Korea or the United States. Inmarsat is perhaps the most interceptable (in theory) as the ground stations are not owned by Inmarsat and are in a number of countries: China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, India, Singapore, US, various EU countries, etc.
But there is also signal monitoring equipment like that from Shoghi Communications that can snoop on all the signals. One would use a VPN at that point, but you'd be breaking the law...