I have (packed away somewhere safe) a copy of 'Radio and Hobbies' magazine that was published in Australia early last century.

In it there was an article touting a radio receiver that you fixed to the running board of your car. The article stated that while it was not practial to use while the vehicle was in motion, it explained that it was expected that laws would be passed prohibiting 'radioing' (sic) while driving as it was a distraction and would promote unsafe driving.

If you look at the range of devices currently built into most cars and look back over time it's safe to say that many people have adapted to the increasing number of information sources available to the driver and can capably prioritise their actions.

The morons that insist on texting while driving are probably just the same ones who previously shaved or put on their makeup while behind the wheel. The real problem is not the technology, but the idiots using it.

These people will still do dumb things irrespective of the law - why punish those that are using the technology safely?

The authors for this RFC are interesting.

You have a team from Ericsson (as in SONY Ericsson). It's not like any business worth its salt would seek advice regarding security from Sony.

You also have authors from AT&T - who have probably been passing customer data on since the days of Teletypes and morse code.

Section 7 (Privacy Concerns) is blank - you have to ask why (too hard, or not a concern).

If you have it in your collection, watch WarGames again.

The opening sequence has a missile operator discussing the quality of the sensemilia his girlfriend was growing with the other. And the bonus easter egg for those of you that do is the sign in the corridor :-)

The suggesting that the numbers would be better if the drives were burnt in is laughable.

Burning in a drive is basically when you connect it up, and run a program to exercise the drive for a set period to make it fail. The idea is that it's better that a drive dies during the burn in process than when in use and theres actual data stored on it. Its a great idea when you want to keep your services availability figures up but won't make the drives themselves any more reliable.

It will however skew the numbers so that drives die much quicker, and will probably have people saying it's now not fair because the drives were pushed to fail.

The ABC have a contact page at http://www.abc.net.au/tv/abctv... where you can ask them why there is no mention of this story on their site - despite the BBC article being shown on national TV in Australia

They have a contact page available at http://www.bletchleypark.org.u... - tell them what you think yourself

I've an HP netbook that I wone as a prize - and some dumb-ass engineer at HP switched the role of the function key and the 'special' functions.

So when you press the [F5] key (good old refresh) the damn thing does a Suspend instead. And then there are all the other weird features it enables that are of no use.

I'm still trying to work out what to fscking do with it - basically it's unusable. About all I can think of is dropping it into a blender and feeding the debris to the fool who thought a non-standard keyboard is a good idea.

It would be interesting to see what patents Google will be picking up with this. It's hard to see US$3.2 billion in value given the limited range of products Nest currently sell, however if there is some latent IP that Google can leverage then there might be some cool stuff coming out of this.

Isn't it strange that there is a group within Microsoft that can turn out such great tools for for languages developed outside, but where they are touting Powershell as a strategic tool you are stuck with a toolset that lives back in the 80s ?

Why can't Microsoft put out a Visual Studio plugin for Powershell with full intellisense, breakpointing, inspections, etc. ?

Sad :-(

... sounds like something from a Dr Who plot line.

If you have ever thought about one of those nice Dell 30" monitors:

Buy two of their 27" screens (about the same price) and enjoy all the extra pixels.

They also overcharge Australian customers,

The only thing they did in response was to modify their online web shop so that Australian customers could only see the AU$ price and conceal the US$ prices out of shame.

:-(

Great documentory on the Russian initiatives for remote operated vehicles - very clever stuff !

I bought a copy of VMware Workstation last year via their online store.

On their site you could choose what currenty to pay in - the conversion to Australian $ added around 40% to the price. What stung was at the time the Australian dollar was stronger than the US$, so in theory the price should have dropped.

I actually phoned up and queried why - the lady at the other end told me that it was due to the exchange rates when they set the price and not the rate at that point in time. However that would only have been the case if they had set the price several years previously.

Now they have fixed the problem by not letting you chose the currency - they force you to pay their inflated Australian prices, even though all you are buying is a license key.

It sure makes those US hosted proxy services look attractive.

It would be really handy to be able to easily identify web sites that are registered with GoDaddy. That way we could politely request that the admins use an alternative registrar.