Supposedly Chromecast support will be in VLC 3.0.

(I'm not a Slashdot manager just another site user) Since the redesign things like comment boxes and posts have no white space at their left edge. Additionally something strange seems to be up with tags - they only display when you hover over them?

My guess is:

If you recover the clock from the stream, you just need to roughly control the motor (CD) RPM and stream what you read. If you run your own clock you need a buffer and you then either need to dynamically tweak the motor speed based on how fast the buffer is filling/draining, or you need to read the CD a bit too fast and stop/resume every so often. Clock recovery sounds much simpler to me.

These sats are going into LEO, not GEO, so their position in the sky won't be fixed. I imagine you'll used a phased array antenna to track them. The good points being: lower latency, no requirement to see the southern horizon specifically. The bad point being that you'll need a view of a bigger chunk of the sky to avoid signal dropouts as the satellites move - how big a chunk depends on how many satellites they have up there (and therefore how many are above the horizon at the same time). If they have enough satellites, it may work out better for you.

Although crazies keep voting for UKIP, who have said they want to legalise firearms...

Great! $malware got read access to your bank details.

So now instead of having a single copy of the file, you have a separate copy saved by each application that has been used to process it - creating a mountain of almost-identical files that the user has to keep track of is not a user friendly way of doing things.

Better is to have a versioned filesystem - each time a file is changed (by any application!) the delta is saved and the filesystem keeps the old data hidden away. Most of the time everything behaves as normal - you have one copy of a file, no matter how many times it is edited. If you need to roll back some changes then you just ask to see previous versions of that file, much like a source control system. And indeed, there are a number of file systems that do exactly this - if you care about such things there's nothing stopping you doing it.

It doesn't stop malware reading your files or modifying them, but it does mean you can recover the unmodified versions... but then doing backups (which everyone should be doing anyway) gives you similar protection.

Because anything else would require popping up numerous "would you like to allow this application to do $foo" boxes, and then you end up training the user to just hit "yes" on everything because it's too damned annoying to make a decision every time when the vast vast majority of access requests really are legitimate.

Sandboxing based on applications making their own decisions and being relatively trustworthy might not be a bad plan though - i.e. if your web browser has an immutable list of files it needs access to, and you trust your web browser, that provides some level of protection when some malware compromises the browser, so long as the immutable list really is immutable and the malware can't modify it.

Well no, if you can roll back everything that happened between the "all clear" scan and the "you've been cracked" scan then that's certainly much better than nothing.

You don't know what most software ACTUALLY does, even if you did install it - most software people use is closed source, but even the open source is a black box unless you actually audit it.

I suspect a manned Mars mission will always be "a bit silly" at any point until people start actually doing it. And whilst I can't really point to much tangible return on the investment, "blue skies" project do have a habit of producing some quite unexpected returns.

To my mind, governments seem to be mostly concerned with themselves at the moment, with nothing to unify those in power towards some common (non-selfish) goal. With the few top-richest people being as rich as they are now I wouldn't be surprised if a few of them banded together to put together a manned Mars mission long before any government (so long as they do so before a revolution comes and redistributes the wealth a bit more fairly).

And what about research that takes longer than 5-10 years to come to fruition (which actually isn't very long)?

Lets take fusion research as an example - that has spent decades sucking money out of governments and has produced very little return on that investment. It may never produce much return. But if we ever do crack fusion for commercial power generation, that would be a serious game changer - probably a big enough return to justify a couple of hundred years of otherwise fruitless investment.

Umm, I don't agree with my taxes being spent on "National Defence" (when I can sum up the current "defence" ideas as "go into foreign countries and blow up some brown people").

Guess what - you don't get to choose what your tax gets spent on. In theory, it should be apportioned democratically, but even that doesn't happen - a significant number of people objected to the Iraq war and were ignored.