I think you do if it is live, but not if you watch previous programmes - the difference between downloading and broadcast.

The only law I can see conflicting with the Freedom of Information Act, is the Data Protection Act. Data Protection deals with what you can do (or not) with information about individuals. Data Protection in general will override Freedom of Information (you can't make a FoI request to find out the home addresses of the institution's employees, for example.) However, in this case tree ring data is not about individuals, so Data Protection doesn't apply.

The only reason for not complying with a FoI request in this case is that it would be too costly to comply. It appears that the Commissioner disagreed with the University about this, so they must release the data.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but I am interested to know why this is. Can you enlighten?

As the replies to your post show (and I can confirm through my own experience), most people I know who are on Virgin cable DO get very close to the advertised speeds. It is ADSL providers who have problems. That is not to say there aren't problems:

• They cap heavily at peak times if you start downloading/uploading lots of stuff
• The fibre comes no where near the home. Virgin don't appear to be making any effort to fix this, even with some old decaying coax in certain parts installed by one of the providers they took over
• They don't appear to be extending their network at all - and I'm not just referring to rural areas. There can be parts of major urban areas that weren't cabled by the original companies that Virgin acquired, and nothing has been done since

You can't run the software on the phones, though, with just the SDK. There is an iPhone simulator, but there are quite a few things it can't do.

How do you know they never consider it? I've not heard anything specific from NASA, but they do seem to have plenty of people who do dream up long terms plans and ideas. Don't forget that most of the people there read/watched science fiction just like we did and many of them were inspired to take up their careers at NASA because of it (see various bios on the NASA sire if you don't believe me).

The problem comes in turning those blue-sky ideas into reality. There is no 'just' when it comes to space. Whenever you find yourself asking, "Why can't they just..." it is almost always for a good reason. A mothership's a great idea, but how do you build one. You've got to get the parts into space. Are you going to test the nuclear propulsion? How long will this project last and will Congress give you the funds? These are the sort of real questions that need to be answered and have scuppered programmes before now (and look likely to scupper NASA's current plans - which are less ambitious than the mothership idea).

The way I look at things, I ask are they likely to cost a lot more than what is happening now. To do this, you need to assume there will be no miracle leap in technology in the short-medium term. For example, if raising parts to space cheaply relies on a space elevator, then rule out the short-medium term. Obviously, we have ideas that one could be built, but technological breakthroughs need to happen to make it a reality. While this is possible (and even likely, I hope), don't assume that we will have a functioning elevator within 20 years.

So, using only slight advances in current tech, could we build a mothership for approximately the same as what the ISS cost? I don't believe so - it would clearly need to be bigger and would involve research and testing in propulsion systems. Given that the US, Russia, ESA, Canada and Japan are struggling to find the cash to keep the ISS up beyond 2015 (when most of it is already built) who is going to fund and build the mothership?

Sorry to sound so negative, but I get fed up with all the unrealistic ideas and whining about NASA on Slashdot. Being a Brit with a government that does no funding of a manned space programme at all, I think they do a fantastic job given the resources they have to work with.

As something of an outsider (being British - we have no manned space programme at all which seems to suit the majority of the population here), it appears to me that there are lots of ideas - the problem is which one. NASA itself clearly has a very definite idea - Constellation, Orion, the flexible path leading to Mars. That is quite a definite vision for space exploration. However, lots of other people have other ideas and some of these people are very powerful.

Personally, I can't really comment which is better or not, but while America itself remains divided NASA will struggle. It needs serious funds for its programme.

Unfortunately, as far as I can see, the only part of America which doesn't seem to have a definite opinion yet is the White House - and that's the most crucial opinion of all. Of course, that is probably not true. I'm sure Obama does have an opinion. The worry for someone like me as a lover of manned space flight is that he would rather spend the money elsewhere but is afraid to go down in history as the President who killed the US manned space programme. Of course, it's not my taxes which will pay for it.

True, but the comment I was making was in relation to Google Scholar where it is surely reasonable to assume most publications are scholarly (as I said, the main Google index is a different thing). If you're not part of an institution when using Google Scholar it doesn't matter - you just decide whether or not to pay when you get to the site.

The other side of the whole debate is whether the scholarly papers (at least those paid for by taxpayers in democracies like the US or UK) should be paywalled. I didn't mention it cos it wasn't relevant to the reply I was making, but in case you decide to raise it I think we need to press ahead with the open repositories for papers (and find a mechanism of peer-review linked to it). As someone who works in a UK university library, I think it is something that libraries need to push up the political agenda rather than meekly following the publishers lead (i'm not advocating libraries break copyright, but we should be at the forefront of the copyright debate and not leave it to the Pirate Bay et al.)

I can see why it annoys you when the main Google index does this, but I thought that was the point of Google Scholar. In hte Scholar preferences you can set your organization and Google Scholar will then route you through your institution's authentication and link resolver systems which will provide access to the content your institution has paid for.

and why is that a problem?

Wikipedia's St George article has information. At least as interesting is how Germany came to have an English (!) patron saint: St Boniface

They don't make a profit. But of course if they didn't have other revenue streams then the UK taxpayers (of whom i am one) would have to provide more money to allow the galleries to provide the same level of services.

There are alternatives of course: they could provide reduced services (eg smaller digitisation programmes, reduced opening hours) or we in the UK could make it explicit that the taxpayer funded museums had provide stuff like this for free and up our tax contributions. Personally, I'm in favour of this latter option, but I suspect I'm in the minority.

On this topic, Americans need to learn that there's more than one way to do it. Just cos your state funded services provide all their stuff in the public domain doesn't mean that it is the only way. In the UK we usually go for a mixture of taxes and cost-recovery to fund these institutions. It does at least have the benefits of allowing high-quality services for less tax.

Have you got any evidence for your statement that the corrective optics only recover a fraction of the light gathering capacity. I've never heard this and looking at various websites hasn't shown this. I assume the COSTAR corrective optics must have caused some light loss for the instruments that required it, but Hubble hasn't exactly been a disappointment in terms of results. And of course, some of the most successful instruments (WFPC2, ACS, STIS) haven't required the corrective optics and so haven't had suffered any light gathering capacity at all. There's loads of information on the NASA website at the moment about Hubble, including a video with the designers of WFPC2. This was always designed with an internal mirror, and when they discovered the spherical aberration they simply ground this mirror to an alternative shape. Therefore, no loss of light.

And what is this about getting a 'visible light replacement space telescope'? Since when has anyone planned a replacement visible light space telescope? NASA are certainly not doing it, so who is? The James Webb Space Telescope which is always reported as the 'Hubble Replacement' is an infra-red telescope, which makes sense as visible light ground-based telescopes have improved so much it is probably not worth the cost of sending another space telescope up to look at visible light. Of course, ground-based telescopes can't use fancy tricks to see radiation that gets blocked by the atmosphere, which is why we need the JWST.

A quote from motorcyclist Barry Sheen seems an appropriate reply.

After a serious crash he was asked what went through his mind at the time. He replied, "My arse."