Fair point, kudos for Microsoft for poor naming convention. You can usually save a bit of cash getting an OEM copy. The Home and Student copy (just they key) in the UK costs £75 inc VAT which isn't outrageous. 99% of people don't need Access or Publisher at home and can get by with Exchange for their emails, or even Windows Live Mail. Of course people use Thunderbird, etc as well. Office Pro 2010 is around £160, key only, which is still a good deal. Assuming you don't need to upgrade office at all, unless they bring out a new file format, I'm happy to pay £150 for it. Prices from www.scan.co.uk

http://www.microsoft.com/student/office/en-us/default.aspx Erm... you do get Outlook with the student version...

No, you ALL miss the point. How are you going to explain having a HDD or partition full of "garbage"? Nobody with half a brain will believe you there's nothing encrypted in the noise.

Both Mac and I presume Linux both have options within the operating system to overwrite free space with random data. I have my Empty Trash settings in OS X set to secure erase things when I delete them. One would presume this is filling up the empty space on my drive with random data. Windows as far as I'm aware does not have this facility (at least it's not as well publicised) although there are plenty of free applications that will clean up your free space with Gutmann passes, etc.

Were I to be questioned about it, I could provide a believable and - for now - truthful alibi. I don't do it because I have anything to hide, but every now and again I blam the free space on my disk just to make sure there's no personal information (I've needed to make scans of my passport and other ID documents which I no longer require, for instance) that can be recovered in the event that I sell the laptop or it gets stolen.

To sum up, it's plausible to have random data on your hard drive and it's perfectly deniable. What would be suspicious is a file on its own that appears to contain only random data.

I was under the impression that plausible deniability involved encrypting something twice, providing the password to unlock the first layer and having a hidden layer underneath that you could keep secret, assuming that your interrogators would not think that you'd hidden more. Naturally the problem with this is that you'd need to have something pretty damn good in the first layer to provide the illusion that there was nothing else.

As for steganography, the key is storing the data in plain sight, is it not? So you would need to store the data in such a way that even if your attacker can open your JPEG and analyse its binary "code" form, it is not possible to determine that there is hidden data there.

The trouble with storing random data is that it needs to be statistically random. Consider the most basic, a substitution cipher. It is easy to attack since the frequency of letters such as E or S occur often within the English language and you can perform a frequency attack on it to try to break it. More advanced encryption methods try to mask this and also to attempt to mask any patterns that may occur during the encryption process. The last thing you want is for someone to be able to run your file through some code that has been trained (say using a neural net or another machine learning method) to identify patterns present in data encrypted using your encryption algorithm. Programs like TrueCrypt have been designed specifically to address this problem and attempt to minimise traces of the encryption algorithm itself (like not leaving behind headers, for instance).

If I had to hide anything, I would just encrypt it and stash it inside some program's DLL directory (install the program at the same time you encrypt the data to avoid obvious time differences). If it's an obscure application like an old game, who's to argue that that file shouldn't be there? Hell, use your steganography technique and hide your data inside a game save file - at worst you'll try to open it and it'll appear corrupt in the game - at best you could be sneaky and store your secret data within the game's world somehow.

That's not the whole story. The actual size of the HST sensor is something like 45mm square (or maybe diagonally). Hubble takes amazing pictures for a few reasons. 1. It's got an 8 foot (2.4m) collecting mirror, so its light gathering prowess is amazing compared to normal cameras - like most telescopes. This means that the sensor is only effective because Hubble can direct so much light onto it. 2. It tracks the sky - like motorised ground based telescopes it is incredibly good at pointing in the same place for extended periods of time. So it can take longer exposures to get more light in. The Deep Field was taken with exposure times of roughly 1200 seconds, for instance. I assume it could expose for longer if it was at a Lagrange point and didn't have to contend with orbiting the Earth. 3. It's in space.. so there is very little in the way of light pollution (besides the sun!) and no atmospheric diffraction limit. Presumably they also make "panoramas" of the images to make them appear larger in print. The famous "Pillars of Heaven" shot is certainly not one image.

It's not only Adobe, it's the website developers themselves. The benefit that Android has is that it can view websites that are flash enabled, optimised or not. If the websites are optimised then there's the potential for some really great rich content. As it stands, the problem is not necessarily that Flash is bad (even if it's bloated as hell), it's that people are trying to view websites that aren't designed for mobile screens. The difference is, when a company brings out a flash page optimised for mobile devices, Android will be able to read it and IPhone OS won't.

People don't complain about viewing websites that aren't designed for phones because nowadays the designers have implemented a handheld version of the stylesheet. With Flash there simply hasn't been any demand for it, and as more people use Flash 10.1 on their phones, I predict that this problem should go away (mostly).

I am well aware of the difference, thankyou.

My point was that ionising radiation can and does cause cancer, simply by particle interaction. In effect you've clarified this further - you can't directly cause cancer from EM radiation, it is simply energy. You might very well get tissue damage from exposing yourself to high energy non-ionising rads - as you say, from the energy being dumped as heat - but that's all you'll get (in the same way you don't get cancer if you burn yourself). No doubt if you have your mobile glued to your head it's not going to end well for you, but I suspect the social ramifications would be worse than a bit of head heating

Oh and apologies, i think i got it the wrong way round about bursts. There was a study done after the Chernobyl incident with the resettlement and it was concluded that short bursts of high energy radiation were far worse than prolonged exposure to small amounts of radiation.

Why would they cause cancer (any more than wifi/general EM radiation)? It's not ionising radiation as far as i know and short bursts of exposure to any sort of radiation is fine - people live in Chernobyl without any side effects and the background radiation level there is substantially above the norm.

Certainly this is an interesting study, but they chose a relatively small sample size and a pretty obscure cancer. Interestingly it IS NOT brain cancer, they state a 50% increased chance of salivary gland cancer (50%). Now, correct me if i'm wrong, but this is a case of overblown statistics and media hype. Parotid cancer is relatively rare, in 2002/2003 in England there were around 650 cases. A 50% increase is.. oh, right.. only 900 odd cases. What am I getting at? Double a small number and you get a small number. Ok, so you increase your risk of cancer which is bad, but it's a pretty rare form of cancer and your chance doesn't really go up that much. Say i had a 5% chance of mouth cancer and using my phone bumps it up to 7.5%, should I be worried? Well perhaps i'd cut back a bit, but i wouldn't lose any sleep over it.

Now compare this to Lung cancer due to smoking. 90% of all lung cancer cases are attributable to smoke inhalation and a 23-fold increase. That is a fundamentally different statistic, 23-fold is 2300% and is definitely something to worry about. It's not a totally accurate conversion, but suffice to say 23 times more likely is much worse than an increase of 3 odd percent.

If TFA you linked had said that there is 10 times the risk i'd be listening, but as it stands it's just over enthusiastic reporting.

Death by Snoo Snoo? "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is spongy and bruised."

Arguably it's called entrepreneurship.

Welcome to Britain... The 40% income tax here is a joke!

We've had that for a few years now, they're called mobile phones.

When you think about it, the telephone is just about the rudest technological device that exists. As Stephen Fry once said, "it's like someone standing behind you yelling 'speak to me, speak to me' over and over again until you pick up".

I call to the defence: "Early nineties sci-fi films!" If they've taught us anything, it's that the terminal is clearly an evil mechanism for hacking government computers.

Or, like most top secret installations these days, you dig and avoid the problem entirely. Facilities like NORAD, for instance (and you think if anything has ever existed at Area 51 it's above ground?).

The UK (and no doubt the US and similar) government employs researchers with the sole task of poring over satellite pictures to determine the capacity of power plants, populations of regions and in general "what things are and what they can do". They also have far more high resolution satellite images than Google is allowed to produce.

We've been doing this kind of thing for years and still are. The only difference now is that the public can give it a go.

Reminds me of the famous incident concerning one of the first Nuclear tests when a university professor used dimensional analysis to calculate what the detonation payload was (a classified figure at the time) based on a photo that was published in the papers (that was the last time the US Military put scales on their photos :P).

Just to stay on the topic of the Kindle, whilst the paper saving is certainly significant, the portability is what would swing me. It would be rather nice to be able to carry around all my physics and maths textbooks (at university level this equates to a lot of kilograms of book)in something that i can read with one hand. Whilst i do have pdf copies of some of my textbooks, and some books are even good enough to provide a CD with an e copy, it would be nice not to have to get out the laptop when i'm on a train and want to get some work done.

The IP of the authors?

Urm, well not necessarily. The IP of most authors is restating things that other people have discovered. Take a physics textbook, Gauss' law is not owned by Pearson Publishing, neither are Newton's laws or Einstein's "Postulates of Special Relativity".

A major factor when considering the cost is the limited runs and copies of each book. Not to mention the way some publishers continually update their texts to incorporate new developments/syllabi. My 1st year physics textbook is probably less than 15 years old and it's already onto it's 12th edition. The reason most "best sellers" can be sold at under $8-10 is because once they go viral, the publishers do print runs of hundreds of thousands and they can guarantee profit.

Compare that to a science or computing textbook, say on Gravitation or some other very specific topic that perhaps only 25,000 are sold a year globally. Thus, they tend to cost more.

It's the same with newspapers. The Times can sell for under £1 where a copy of New Scientist retails for over £3. Do NS go to more trouble to make their magazine? Arguably not, they just cover the major topics in science and have a few thoughtful articles about how we're all doomed. Compare that to a major newspaper who are pushed to make 100 pages (including supplements) of news and articles daily - surely that effort should cost more? The fact is that New Scientist sell a lot less than the Times or any major newspaper (ie. their circulation is a hell of a lot lower) and for the publishers and editors to get paid, they have to mark up to account for it.