Member of the European Parliament. You'd have found that at MEP if you'd bothered to use Google.

What this shows is that the British Phonographic Institute (that well know protector of all things copyrighted and the authors of that stuff) has bought the outgoing Labour Gov't in just the same way that the RIAA & MPAA have bought the American Gov't.

They're so scared that their old badly formed business model has broken with the digital age that they've had to enlist the help of a UK Gov't quango to do their dirty work.

The folks abusing copyright will just find an alternative way to do it that falls outside the meaning of any of this nanny state inspired Labour law.

There's two types of volcanoes. Ones that go bang and ones that go fizz.

Mt St. Helens was one that went bang, shot lots of lava into the sky and then started to cool at which point the lava/ash being spewed from it started to solidify into particles that were too large and too cold to be held in the atmosphere.

Eyjafjallajokull had a glacier in the caldera, as the lava arrived that became steam and forced the tiny pumice grains into the atmosphere and continued fizzing for a few days adding the the mass of debris around 30,000 ft. (Since then it has been falling onto my car which was washed the day before the volcano started fizzing.)

Most of the aircraft science is based on the June 1982 event when British Airways 747 flt BA009 flew through a cloud of ash and flamed out all four engines. They then dropped rapidly to 12,000, the ash that had turned to glass on the turbine blades cooled and broke off and they were able to restart three engines and land safely at Jakarta.

There's two problems, 1. not enough research of what happens to jets in clouds and 2. they don't have radar or any other sensors that can see the cloud in the sky (so they can vector away from it before it does any damage).

The UK/EU Gov't response was to take the very cautious approach (they don't like telling relatives that their family members have died in an air accident) and close EU airspace. With the science and data available to them at the time it was the right decision.

I'm 1.72m tall and 518.84Km (518840m or 322miles) from the town where I was born. That comes out at over 300,000 times my height. So it's a very silly poll.

It's a real puzzle that 20% of folks have chosen 1-3000.

Er, what?

• Ireland is predominately Catholic.
• The Irish Republic isn't part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands.
• Northern Ireland (Ulster) had thirty years of terrorist fighting to remain Protestant and part of the UK

There's no Islamic takeover happening in the UK or Ireland anytime soon.

But that's the whole point of it. All atheists know there's no god, no flying spagetti monster or whatever deity religious folks choose to worship (or whatever they do in their temple, citadel, chapel or whatever).

Some daft Catholic in the Irish Gov't proposes a law that it's blasphemy to say that.

Another bunch of daft Catholics and the daft Irish President pass that law onto their statutes (remember that before their cessession from Great Britain were the same as the UK laws of the time and the UK used to have a blasphemy law).

So now the Irish Atheists (and presumably anyone else who isn't a God fearing Catholic) can be fined up to €25,000 because they disagree with this daft Catholic legislation.

I can see a case being taken to the European Court of Human Rights as soon as the first person gets charged with this "crime".

The whole nature of the comments in code is to explain why the result that the code creates or the function returns isn't as simple as you'd expect when you first look at the code. If there's nothing strange in the code, don't bother with the comment. If the code uses some funky technique explain in a concise way why you've written it that way and not used a possibly more obvious method.

Too many folks create "write only" code that isn't worth debugging when it goes wrong and the better way to cure the bug is a rewrite. In those cases the comments are essential to avoid the need for the next guy maintaining the code to have to re-analyse the problem and rewrite.

It gets worse when you add complexity. One thing guaranteed to make code unreadable is when folks create SQL statements with hundreds of predicates and tens of joined tables.

1st simple rule is trust the code not the comments.

2nd simple rule is don't comment the obvious.

For x86 machines, Go to the folder HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Mozilla > Firefox > Extensions

For x64 machines, Go to the folder HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Wow6432Node > Mozilla > Firefox > Extensions

Delete key name '{20a82645-c095-46ed-80e3-08825760534b}'

It doesn't matter. .SE is only Sweden. If .SEX fell off; then the whole Internet would melt down into a small singularity.

Here's an idea.

Install Grub as the bootloader. Make the default boot partition (labeled as WinXP or something,like that) into a small linux that runs Duke's Boot & Nuke. Have a selectable option to boot the windows partition with a password.

The thief gets a boot menu, ignores it and it will take the default after 10 seconds so DB&N boots and trashes the HD

The normal user chooses his protected entry and can boot the machine into Windows normally. The only risk is if he misses the GRUB menu and heads into DB&N by accident.

There's also things like BIOS passwords that can be used to defeat the casual thief

That's not going to happen.

About 45% of IMS is still supplied as assembler source to licenced customers. It was first generally available before the IBM dictat that said "all source is confidential" and we'll only supply OCO (object code only) materials to customers.

DB2, IBM's hierarchical database was developed by the same people originally as a complete replacement for DL/I. But, DL/I databases are sill alive and well and supporting them is paying my mortgage.

It was used as the parts database for the Apollo program, Neil Armstrong wouldn't have made it to "One small step ..." without IMS

IMS is still faster than DB2, but DB2 is easier to use from an application design and application programming point of view. That's why there's a Java/SQL interface to IMS databases.

There's no RIAA in Aberdeenshire. But what the heck you'd have had to read the article to find that.

He may get a bill from The Performing Rights Society if more than ten folk can hear his Walkman.

I'm old enough that when I was at school in the UK (started at age 5 in 1968) we were taught imperial AND metric. We were taught base 12 and base 16 arithmetic. Then in 1971 they changed our money from pounds, shillings and pence (with twelve pence to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound) to metric pounds and pence (100 new pence to the pound).

Since then we've switched from measuring petrol (gasoline) in imperial gallons (4.54litres) to litres. We've switched food and drink weights and measures from pounds and pints (20oz) to kilogrammes and litres (except for beer which is still served in a 20oz pint). We've switched from inches, feet and yards (3ft), furlongs, miles to centimetres, metres and kilometres (except for distances and speed limits). We've switched from acres to ares. We've switched from imperial tons (2240lb) to metric tonnes (1000Kg).

My children don't get taught the imperial stuff. They don't have to learn base 12 (inches to the foot) and base 16 (ounces to the pound) maths.

One day we'll ditch the old crap and stick with Napoleon's nice French, decimal units.

We do drive on the right (correct) side. The right side of the car on the left side of the street.

The switch was done by Sweden, one Thursday night at 18:00 they all moved to driving on the wrong (right) side of the street. I think they had the trucks switch over on the same day. Or they'd have been borked like the Swedish Chef.

... so who needs a weblog (or "diary" as we used to call them when they were written on pulped dead trees).