As repeatedly stated concerning the famous "Four Minute Warning" that the UK would get by playing host to US long-distance launch detection equipment back in the Cold War... what use is that?

Most developed countries do not recognise a polygraph in court, or in science.

And haven't.

For centuries.

I wonder why the US still does.

Just saying.

I'm sorry, is it just me? What kind of information are you going to put out over FM to cell-phones, in an emergency, that will be life-saving? How many cell-phones are still going to be running on day two of whatever disaster either because people have turned them off because they "don't work" because the local cell is down or because the batteries are flat? How many of those that aren't would be captured by an initial text message anyway? How many people are going to crowd around the only working phone in the area and turn on the radio to tune in and then hear something that might save their lives?

And what are you going to tell people that they don't know already (but should) and which will directly contribute to saving their lives better than, say, common sense?

Maybe it's just because I live in a country where emergencies don't really happen on this scale (no seismic activity, little flooding, no drought, no tornados or extremes of weather, no civil unrest, etc.) , but I'm one of those people who reads up on anything risky before I do it, and I'm still struggling to fathom what could be sent that would make that much difference?

Shelter locations, possibly? Surely the best is word-of-mouth and going and finding those people in need of shouting at with a big shouty-device? Like the first thing we do in any such disaster, send the police round and the helicopters over to give out such information? And anyone in a dangerous area, in need of shelter, will move away from the danger and can then be corralled and treated once they are in a safe area, any safe area? And, again, a simple text message serves the same purpose and probably uses the same power given the "always on" nature of cell connections on modern phones.

What's a real scenario where one-way FM radio on a cell-phone would be a real life-line for anyone but the completely ignorant and inexperienced?

Andrews & Arnold.

So when everyone goes IPv6, when ISP's literally say "That single IPv4 address you used to have? This is the replacement IPv6 starting with XXXX:XXXX:XXXX:0001?

Do you think they are going to pull up all their existing systems renumber every internal machine, make them all publicly accessible, give each a unique IP from the range allocated, etc.

Or do you think they'll buy an IPv6 compatible router, slap it into the network as the same gateway on IPv4, and have it pick up the first IPv6 address offered from the ISP?

If anything, all you will see is more NAT - ISP's will NAT your connection for you in the interim rather than IPv6 all their systems (I can name precisely one ISP in the UK that I know offers IPv6 connectivity).

Sorry, mate, NAT is not "solved" by IPv6. It's here to stay for way more than the foreseeable future. And your problem is not necessarily even NAT. It's stateful firewalls. And guess what anyone with half a brain will put in front of their hundreds of clients that you want to individually route to the Internet? A stateful firewall.

UDP works JUST FINE with NAT, if you haven't noticed. Has done for decades. Anything initiated inside the local network will go out just fine, and Internet servers have to have open-ports anyway in order to work. As soon as you send a reply, the stateful part of the firewall knows that it can bypass NAT, NAT itself does little in this regard. And, as the summary says, Google Chrome works JUST FINE with UDP at the moment..

People have this thing about NAT being evil but it's not. And it's not "fixed" by the existence of IPv6 (or we'd all jump ship just to avoid NAT, if the problem was that bad). And it's not even going to go away on IPv6.

Not sure what you're hoping for but I'll worry about my ISP providing me any kind of IPv6 functionality before I even think of removing NAT from my local networks and - chances are - I won't for years until EVERYTHING, every server, every website, every service, is IPv6 anyway. And I'll still have a stateful firewall so your unsolicited packets to my network still won't succeed anyway (unless port-forwarded or open-port) and still all the servers on the planet will need to have open ports.

First point - granted. But if no private company has picked it up in the meantime, it's probably because it's just not profitable.

Last train driver strike, the signallers went out on strike too in sympathy. It's not as simple, once things are unionised.

My sorting office is my local branch. Which is 2 miles away (20 was hyperbole for effect), has no parking, has a local glut of traffic wardens even on weekends (precisely because there's no parking) and is only open between 11am and 4pm Mon-Fri and 9-11am Saturday. Guess when the world and their brother decide to collect their parcels, needing to have their ID checked, etc. forming more than a 2-hour queue?

Your options (according to the little note they pop through) are delivery to another address (same restrictions), redelivery to the same address at the same times (and a maximum of twice before they give up), or collection at the times above. That's it.

And that's if they are post-office parcels and not ParcelForce - who have similar but different restrictions and locations - or some random third-party courier (who are generally even worse and one of them is 8 miles from me and charge for redelivery!).

And I guarantee that you've heard of the town I live in, inside the M25, serviced by several underground stations (also between 1-2 miles from me) and lines.

Amazon lockers? Last time I used one, it was in a petrol station late at night with no security and nobody around. Sod that for anything of value.

AmazonCollect? The last time I went to a newsagent that was supposed to be part of that, they knew nothing about it and didn't have my parcel and the other time I used it, that newsagent refused to accept my parcel for Amazon Return that Amazon themselves (on the phone) had said I could do from that newsagent.

By comparison, I'd rather pay just about anything to get someone to come to my house of an evening with the parcel or - better - ring first.

In the last year or so, though, I've been at a workplace that is manned 24/7 and allows staff to have personal parcels delivered there. Solves no end of problems, but no thanks to Amazon, the Post Office or any delivery company. And we still get hassle because some things companies will refuse to deliver to business premises!

No, but you can say "This isn't a priority any more, we don't think GNU Hurd got where it needs to be, we think your time is better spent elsewhere".

It won't be long before it's either forked (and thus no longer a burden) or abandoned.

There was for a while. The post office had their own lines.

But it's so prohibitively expensive and you still have to do vehicle/hand delivery to/from both ends anyway, that it was abandoned.

London gave up this idea nearly a decade ago and for the last two decades, it was expensive and unviable and they knew it (unions stuck their noses in).

Trains just aren't practical when you have to get the parcels to the track, load them on, pay for the track and train, move the train against other train schedules, arrive at another station, unload the parcels, load them onto vehicles or delivery guys, who then have to go and take them to their destination.

London is only 30 miles in radius and that's Greater London (not all of which is serviced by underground). The central city? It's also viable to walk across it delivering parcels as you go, but mopeds seem to be the most popular method of delivery. Outside the core, vans can carry more, only need to be loaded once, can make the same journey in a handful of minutes, and deliver parcels as they go.

Some great ideas worked back when we didn't have ubiquitous transport. They're not such great ideas now.

How much does a DVD cost to post using the Royal Mail?

Not that much more and they'll send it from London to Scotland on your behalf too. These guys pick up from local warehouses and deliver in their home street and surrounding roads.

I don't argue that it's probably not much more than a minimum-wage job but all the drivers I spoke to were more than happy with it - flexible hours, paid by how many you can take and successfully (and reliably) deliver, can do it after work, with the kids on the school run, throughout the day, etc.

How much does my local paper-delivery boy get per house her delivers to? Probably a damn pittance. But he can do a road on foot in ten minutes and make a wage worth him getting up at 4am for.

Gimme an IBM / Lenovo Thinkpad "nipple" mouse, that's Bluetooth. You could literally just stick it in your pocket or push it back on the machine when you're done with it and it would miniscule. Bluetooth chips are tiny now. Stick a sticky pad or other anchor of some kind on the bottom (or even a soft ring to go on your finger that tucks away).

If you could stick it on the side of your first finger, you could thumb it to control it like a mini-joystick with a click-down action for mouse-clicks.

If the problem is solved, then move the development focus elsewhere. And I thought that FSF didn't actually like the idea of GPL2-only things?

However, the FSF development focuses are odd and abandoned.

For years a Skype-replacement was asked for. Apart from game-server-oriented once like Mumble, I can't see a viable OS alternative that works cross-platform, with video, etc. We could say that Jabber's use by Google Chat was the replacement but - again - why are we then continuing on the others?

For years, a Flash replacement was asked for. Last I checked, Gnash could do some things but nowhere near all.

Coreboot was asked for, but it's a REALLY niche project and whether that supports UEFI etc. I don't know.

Google Earth replacements, Matlab replacements, OpenDWG library (odd choice, I think), Oracle Forms replacements, all suffer the same problems.

And "automatic transcribing" is just silly and shouldn't be a priority at all.

The FSF's priorities are basically ignored and people work on what they enjoy working on. That's great and all, but HURD has been a long-time coming and can just barely run something approaching a Linux distribution. Given that it's replacing a kernel only - and userspace can be things like Debian software etc. - that seems an awful long time. Don't even get me started on filesystem or hardware support for Hurd.

Sometimes you just have to say "Oh well", and cut off the project. The people working on it would be much more useful on other projects that may well end up on machines worldwide rather than niche toy projects that have taken decades to get close to fruition. Not all of them would move, of course, but at least some of that talent could re-focus to other projects that are of greater utility.

On this note, I have always wondered why new-towns aren't like this.

Every time you run a road, stick a tunnel underneath, or beside it. Or one tunnel each side.

You have to run, presumably, at least sewers, electricity, gas, water, street lighting, traffic control, telephone, Internet etc. already so why not build it all in and put a tunnel through it too.

Done properly, you'd never have to dig up a road to get to the services you require and all maintenance can take place underneath the road.

Sure, it adds to the cost initially but it MUST save on cost within just a year or two.

And you instantly know that if you are on or near that road, it's trivial to hook in to any known service.

If we ever "started over", and I were in charge, I would enforce it. You build a road, path or other highway designated as public? Then you have to put in a large service tunnel, all the utilities (or capacity for them without disturbing the road) for the entire length of anything classed as "public highway" (i.e. a serviced street of any size).

Then your Internet connections are as redundant and routeable as your transport links, telecoms network, power distribution, etc. And just as you could "go around the block" if there was one particular road out, you could re-route all the other utilities (maybe not every time, because of capacity etc. but the majority of time surely?). And you'd not have to dig up a road except to MAINTAIN that road. Not every utility, service, pipe, duct or cable that might happen to be under it. And if you built the service tunnel properly and laid rail in it, there's nothing stopping you running a piggy-back service on your service routes to take the occasional train of parcels or whatever with you.

The Romans knew the road system was their best weapon - everywhere they went, they built roads, every time the road was too small to cope with traffic, they expanded it. No more different to how ants lay down scent and route to places. Why should we be having multiple, different, overlapping service networks at all? Stick them all together and then you know you can always put a box by the side of the road, don't have to dig up the countryside just to run a bit of power (if you do HAVE to, you certainly also need all the other services and a road that way too anyway!). And in the same way that roads join industrial, commercial, and residential, you can site your ugly equipment away from people's houses but still service those same houses.

I never got why we ever had one cable crossing over a street or not following the existing road network.

And I have to say, the most relevant line on Wikipedia is this:

"Royal Mail had earlier stated that using the railway was five times more expensive than using road transport for the same task. The Communication Workers Union claimed the actual figure was closer to three times more expensive but argued that this was the result of a deliberate policy of running the railway down and using it at only one-third of its capacity"

If even the unions are saying it's three times more expensive, there's a problem.

And, to be honest, I really don't want my post subject to both postal AND train-driver strikes, thanks very much. They already have had several months off for the past few years just by striking over pay while they earn more than I can ever hope to earn.

The beauty of Amazon was that they hired random people to deliver Amazon parcels in their cars late at night and thus avoided the whole Post Office "We tried to deliver your parcel at 9am but, strangely, you weren't home.... you can collect it from the post office 20 miles from you or your workplace at any time between 9-5 Mon-Fri".

Was going to say the same thing.

This isn't new. London, espcially Central London (as opposed to Greater London which is about 30 miles in radius), is crawling with tunnels dug for underground lines that were then abandoned, or repurposed - and some of them were operated by the Post Office for exactly this purpose.

Strange how the old gets reinvented as "new".

The problem you have is that London is only a tiny, tiny, tiny portion of what you have to deal with in the UK. And it's already well-catered for in transport, post offices, courier firms, etc. precisely because it's so dense.

Come even a couple of miles outside of central London though and you still need a hundred guys in vans driving around and dropping parcels over fences. There's no escaping it.

If the Post Office tunnels were so useful, they wouldn't have been abandoned - it's not like delivery of post to/from London has ever stopped since we introduced the first ever postage stamp.

You know that little screen they put in the back of the seats? Do you think they're stupid enough to cable that into the engine management?

The air-phones? Do you think they're stupid enough to just tie that into the cockpit comms?

When you're talking life-dependent systems (which pretty much no-one here will ever have to deal with and certify, which is why all your electronics ALL say that it's not to be used in life-support devices etc.) like airbag deployment and plane avionics, it's heavily regulated, heavily specified, heavily tested and heavily scrutinised. Rarely does a aircraft system specified on the "jumbo jet" level do anything more than exactly what it's designed to do. Plane crashes are caused by outside influences, human input overriding the computer and by DESIGN decisions, not software failure because someone forgot to renew the licence of two DHCP servers fought over who assigned IP's to the engines.

It's an entirely different class of system that you want to hope that you never have to deal with. That's WHY large planes cost HUNDREDS of millions of dollars and you have to train for decades to be allowed near the switches - even if you're servicing them.

And, no, VLAN's would never operate in a system like that and if they did they'd be proven-safe mathematically and, hell, even my cheap commodity switches only respond to management requests on the management VLAN and no other.

They is why the guy responding is so clear on this. It's just not done. Ever. If you change a cable, or a panel, or redesign a bit of hatchway, or push out a software upgrade for a commercial airliner, it takes hundreds of people checking it, re-certification of the end-result, testing and all sorts.