And without the laws and regulations I have no choice but to accept sod all holiday time because employers won't budge on the issue. The average person's negotiating power is minuscule compared to a big company.

Before health and safety laws workers got killed on the job all the time, and the attitude was largely "there's lots of desperate workers, they can be easily replaced". If a safe working environment was beyond the power of the little people to negotiate, what chance a less serious matter like holidays?

The fact that someone bothered to make uPnP suggests that there's a need for this capability for average users. Things such as voip, gaming, exchanging files - if you can't have peer-to-peer connections, you're reliant on big centralised services for all of these things. Granted, we seem to have gone down that path already (perhaps driven in no small part by the prevalence of NAT), and these services may have a place, but do we want it to be *all* there is to the internet?

As for your second point - well, Microsoft seem to have managed it, and if they can surely anyone can. I accidentally left my Windows box connected to the internet without an external firewall for a few months with no ill effects. That would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

Do you really expect the average user to know about IPs, ports, TCP/UDP etc.? That's not very realistic. I don't agree that a safe alternative is impossible - there's no magic power that packets have to hack a computer. Any failings are due to poorly written software.

If an application doesn't need to listen for connections, it shouldn't open a port. A firewall won't make any difference here.
If an application does need to listen for connections the firewall will need to let them through. Again, the firewall doesn't help - at least not at the level of sophistication you'd see in a home router's firewall.

The problem with that is how many home users know how to configure the firewall? There are legitimate reasons to have incoming connections. Unless you want to reinvent uPnP for v6, but that would be needlessly complex and probably have security flaws of its own.

Frankly there's no excuse for any modern software to be vulnerable even if connected directly to the internet with no firewall. This isn't 2003 any more, and in any case it's commonplace for computers to be connected to all sorts of untrusted networks such as public wifi. So anything that assumes "a firewall will take care of it" is utterly irresponsible.

"Sonic cannon"? Nice bit of hyperbole. Everyone else just calls them airguns.

That ~ 250 dB @ 1m is a bit misleading. It won't be that loud at 1m because airgun arrays are not point sources. Additionally, there shouldn't be anything that close as it's standard practice to start at a lower amplitude and ramp up slowly. The amplitude falls off with distance quite quickly.

This technology has been in widespread use for decades.

I have no objection to paying for ad-free stuff. Of course, to be fair, I'd then like a refund on the part of the price of the stuff I buy that goes to advertising it.

That's the worst thing about advertising - it's surely more expensive than just paying directly, as you have to pay people to make the ad, plus various extra middlemen. And in return for that extra money you get to be assaulted by obnoxious audiovisual pollution.

At least for DSL technologies, the antiquated bit can support full bandwidth 24/7 as it's unshared.

That doesn't stop quite a few companies from putting caps on it regardless.

Ah, so you're the other Fortran programmer on here. I've often thought I should learn a proper IDE because I'm working with code that needs serious reworking and something to automate the process would help. Emacs is fine for most things though.

Perhaps I should be thankful I'm not using a card punch...

So what all this is saying is that at the times when the solar panels are producing the most power they can only sell it for peanuts? If it wasn't for feed in tariffs that guaranteed a big payment no matter what the selling price they'd be stuffed.

That's not exactly a ringing endorsement for solar power.

A 5 minute charge would require a charger that could supply about a megawatt (for about 250 miles). Even if you could design a battery pack that could handle that kind of power input, supplying the energy isn't trivial.

In Germany? Here in the UK peak demand is in the winter months, where solar panel output is negligible. I admit I haven't checked, but I suspect Germany's demand profile is closer to Britain than to California.

Ford (and maybe others) have suggested that an E30 blend would allow them to make significantly more efficient engines due to the strong anti-knock effect of ethanol, particularly when used with direct injection.

Maybe on the NEDC test cycle, but not in reality. We really need a new, more realistic testing scheme.

Makes sense, but then surely the same gateway could be used to let an LTE mobile phone talk to a non-LTE mobile phone, without the need to kick the handset itself onto 3G. I can understand the lack of urgency though - VoLTE is hardly a selling point and they'll have to maintain the older network for the forseeable future anyway.

It seems strange to me that VoLTE needs *both* ends to support it in order to work. What about when you want to call a traditional non-mobile number? Surely they can't intend to keep 2G/3G around forever for this purpose, or is this feature planned for a later version of LTE?