Stating the units used: This doesn't stop the brain-dead UK Department of Transport stating that road signs denoting distance to road works should be measured in metres, and placed at 100 metre intervals, but stating the distance is yards, when it is in fact, metres. Still, I guess it's safer - metres are longer than yards, so if you stretch the definition of a yard to be 1 metre, the drivers get a few seconds more to react. This seems to have gone off-topic and road works signage is of little relevance to space projects.

It's district heating. Very wise use of waste heat, rather than just wasting energy throwing air conditioning at it and throwing the waste heat away from a data centre, you duct the surplus hot air through insulated pipes at a local neighbourhood. (or you pass it through a heat exchanger to warm a liquid which is then piped to local housing / swimming pools / public buildings etc).

ActiveSync is available for all Google Accounts, and is their preferred sync method: From http://www.google.com/mobile/sync/ On most devices, Google Sync uses the Microsoft® Exchange ActiveSync® protocol. When setting up a new Exchange ActiveSync account on your device, existing data may be removed from your phone. Please make sure to back up before you set up Google Sync. Please note that administrative security controls are only available for Google Apps Premier and Education customers. Also, at this time not all N60 devices are supported with this feature. See the Google Sync Help Center for more information.

cacert.org works for me. Indeed, their root certificate isn't included by default with IE or Firefox, but it's a one-off client change, and you can't argue with the price. If the clients happen to be in a Windows Domain, they can easily be forced to do whatever the group policy tells them to.

Ban the receivers, so that ATC couldn't buy them? What about ATC at a small airfield? How large an airfield would you have to be to be allowed to purchase such receivers? If you ban the sale of receivers, are you going to ban someone from reading the specification to cobble one together? Last time I was in the tower at my nearby small airfield, they had such a receiver, despite the fact that the airfield didn't have radar, and most aircraft that used the airfield didn't have Mode S transponders. Using the receiver was better than nothing. Once something has been invented, it cannot be un-invented. Once something has been widely deployed, it cannot easily be widely un-deployed. The only thing that you could sensibly ban is being a terrorist.. Oh, that's already banned. You naughty terrorists out there.. go and sit on the naughty step.

Only last week, a merchant's fancy EPOS system was completely down, and they were having to revert to doing all stock control by pen and paper, and use the old fashioned card imprinter - somethng that I haven't seen done in many years. It will be interesting to see if the paper trail does eventually finish, and someone manages to read the very poorly recorded card number. I guess if the NCR slip is unreadable, the liability lies with the merchant.

and don't get be started on the correct formatting of telephone numbers, and how Excel (and Excel-compatible) spreadsheets tend to wreck telephone numbers by attempting to parse them as floating point numbers.

So, in what way is a 6510 emulator not interpreting machine code opcodes, and executing, er.. program code, and why is that different to that same interpreter interpreting a program that allows you to interpret BASIC program code?

They went downhill after Office '97, when Microsoft realised that most of the functions in the Office menus were not used by most of the users, so they did the silly "collapsible" menu thing and hid stuff until you found it was there. Actually, I'd go as far as saying that the user interface for Word for Windows went downhill after Word for Windows 6.0, since the one that became part of Office '97 had clippy.

You will find that the carriers don't really get a choice. It's got a SIM card slot. You buy the device, from Nokia, or a reseller, then you go to your preferred 3G network provider, and get a SIM-only contract or pay-as-you-go SIM from them. Job done. SIM only contracts give far better value for money, and tend to only by month-on-month rolling contracts, not silly tie-you-in-for-years contracts. Yes, it may cost quite a bit of money up front that way, but that's the real cost of the device. I'm sure you might be able to get some sensible credit deals on it, or even a bank loan. Once you buy it, it's yours. You can do with it what you like. Swap the SIM for another network - sure. Sell it on after twenty seconds - sure.

You forgot about the pay-and-display machines that only take certain coins (no 1p, 2p and 5p) and don't give change, and with charges set such that it's impossible to pay for the amount of time you actually want. It's £1.05 per hour, you want to pay for 20 minutes, you have to pay a minimum of £1.10, £1.20, £1.50 or £2, depending on what coinage you have. Even if you do find a pay and display car park that allows short stay, you'd better synchronise your watches to the clock on the machine (rather than the actual time), since if you buy 30 minutes of parking, and turn up to reclaim your car 30 minutes later, and if the machine's clock is running fast, it will have printed an expiry time a few minutes before you thought, and by the time you get back, your car will have been visited by the parking control vultures, and you will have gained a ticket.

The issue here is using mobile broadband (3G data or Wimax etc) as fill-in coverage for where other fixed line services aren't going to work, or even be worthwhile deploying upgrades for. As an example, my parents currently live on a farm out in the sticks. They live too far from the exchange for ADSL to work, fibre is out of the question, PSTN modems barely work, but they have got a reasonably good 3G data connection (though I question the ability for a mass-market mobile phone operator to be able to provide an ISP service - they don't appear to do DNS properly, and their outgoing SMTP smarthost regularly dies). There's also small outfit that is offering Wimax that covers the area.

In the UK, anyone arrested for any alleged offence is fingerprinted (and palmprinted), photographed and DNA samples taken. If they aren't then charged with the crime, or it goes to court and they are released as not guilty, the police still get to hold onto all the biometrics. This process has gone to the European Court of Human Rights, and found to be wrong, but the UK Government haven't worked out what to do about that ruling.

Wind kills birds? I've done quite a bit of walking around windfarms, and have never seen a dead bird and blood on the turbine blades. Admittedly, wind turbines will create turbulent airflows, which any aviating species (including humans) would prefer not to be near, so it wouldn't surprise me if statistically there are fewer birds in an area after a wind farm has been erected. Wind turbines should be at sea, where there's lots of wind, and no pesky hills and buildings to create turbulent airflow. Actually, if they could combine wind turbines on the same pylon as tidal turbines, that would be quite an excellent use of resources.

Indeed, and ZFS makes it utterly trivial to add new disks to the pool, so if you're getting short on space, go down to your local computer retailer, and add a few of those cheap half a terabyte external disks to your system. If you are running a laptop, then get yourself a bigger disk.