I take it that the police's interest in the call logs should stop the moment the SIM is blocked (on networks with SIMs), and a replacement SIM issued to the correct user of that phone number.

So, both my brothers have Doctorates, and I'm just a BSc. If I had need for a Doctorate by now, I'd have got one by now. (Astrophysics and Veterinary Medicine both kind of need Doctorates, IT support doesn't.)

A portion of the output of an airliner's jet engines goes to the generators (or when the main engines are not running, the APU), to provide cabin power, avionics power etc. No reason why the wings couldn't be covered in solar cells, so that the generators need to provide less output, hence the jet engines are more efficient at propelling the aircraft along, in the same sort of way as a Solar PV array on a house is grid-tied. Of course, all those solar cells, and three-phase inverters do have mass, and that hauling that around with the aircraft needs to be taken into account in potential savings. During cruise, airliners tend to fly above the clouds, and mostly at daytime. Solar PV could be quite useful.

I look forward to the first compliant 2D inkjet and laser printers, even more so if they are affordable.

I wonder if they took that into account, and the fact that vehicle production does use quite a bit of power, and a lot of vehicle manufacturers are now going out of their way to have renewable sources of power. There's also new lightweight manufacturing processes for cars, like the Graham Murray Design factory designs for the T.25 and T.27 cars. My own power mix is about 50% renewables and increasing that percentage. No, I don't have solar panels on my roof, and I don't personally own a wind turbine, hydro turbine, wave or tidal power; I just chose an ethical energy supplier that invests in renewable generation. I'm not driving an electric car, but I'm not intending to buy another new internal combustion engined car.

I used to interview for Windows sysadmins. Ask them what their favourite way of doing a particular task is, and how this differs from Microsoft's preferred exam answer. A good sysadmin will know that Microsoft's preferred exam answer (the only one that would be the 'correct' answer in their multiple choice) probably isn't the only way of doing something. A really good one will know several ways of doing it, and will pick holes in Microsoft's exam questions. Then ask them how to achieve the same when Microsoft's preferred exam answer fails Then ask them how to achieve the same when their favourite way fails. Example: Terminal Services service on a physical server in a remote location has stopped working. How do you restart it remotely? That will stop the point-clicky desktop jockeys. How would you restart it remotely from the command line or a scripted fashion? How would you monitor the remote server to alert you if something isn't running, using nothing but the base tools installed with the OS?

Sure, there's ways of addressing IPv6 with link-local style addresses, these tend to start fe80::, but if you want your packets to be routed out onto the big wide Internet and back, they'd better have proper addresses. IPv6 doesn't do NAT, but if you really need to renumber your network (say, if you've changed ISPs, and have got far too much statically configured kit, and don't know how to do a simple search and replace on some configs), you can do a network prefix translation thing, which is a bit of a bodge, in the same way that NAT is a bodge.

The government insists that motor vehicles have at least one licence plate that is easily readable, and that you have that on display whenever you're on the public roads. Anyone could sit beside the roads, and write down licence plate numbers. It's boring as hell. Trainspotters do this with locomotive numbers at railway stations. Plane spotters do this with aircraft registrations at airports. In most countries, this requires no special permission or legislation. Co-incidentally, those countries that do require prior permission to do this sort of thing are themselves heading towards being a police state. All the DEA are doing is automating this mundane task. This is already done for other purposes all over the place. Fuel filling stations use ANPR to deny fuel to known fuel thieves, car parks use ANPR instead of passes for private car parks. Of course, once the criminals work out what capturing and analysing images of licence plates is done to analyse criminal behaviour and catch criminals, they will work around it by having fake plates. The added complexity here is whether a licence plate identifies an individual. There's parallels to IP addresses here. You can often infer that an IP address is one usually used by an individual, but you cannot prove that it was only that individual using that IP address. In most places, the licence plate identifies the vehicle, not the driver - though there's often a near 1:1 correlation. In countries with strong personal data privacy laws, there may be requirements to purge records of almost-personally-identifying records after a short period.

Last time I tried, 3G did not connect to the public Internet; it didn't give my device a unique IP address that would allow other devices to send it data directly. Until the 3G networks provide proper, non-NAT, non-proxied IPv6 (or IPv4 if you're feeling really lucky), it's not full network access. It's access to something that looks a little bit like the Internet (sufficient for most dumb one-way HTTP traffic), and is connected to the Internet.

Ditto for most public wifi access points though. Most of them aren't full internet access. I wonder how long before someone gets hauled up in front of a court somewhere for offering IPv6 only open access?

There are ways of roaming across wifi access points, one of which is UMC, where a mobile device with a SIM tries to connect to wifi, and route the 3G (or 2G) traffic over wifi instead in preference to 3G/2G, and it will fall back to 3G/2G when out of range. Sadly, not widely implemented on handsets and mobile operator networks - even though they get to charge for something the user would get for free otherwise.

If your insurance covers third party cover as authorised driver on another person's vehicle, you will find that that's just as a DRIVER. It doesn't cover the need for that vehicle to be separately insured.. If the insurance is good for the vehicle, the vehicle registration will not show up on the hotlist of uninsured VEHICLES. If you are in the motor trade, you'll have trade plates, won't you?

It's not called 'road fund license' or 'road tax'. It's Vehicle Excise Duty. It goes into the same bucket with general taxation, along with VAT, income tax etc. it's not collected solely to fund, or tax, the use of road.

Excess grid output, typically at night time, goes into places like Dinorwic (North Wales) and Ben Cruachan (Scotland), which are massive pumped-storage systems, which do a remarkable job of smoothing out the supply vs demand on the National Grid, by pumping millions of litres of water uphill at 'quiet' times, and can turn up the output on demand at ridiculously short notice (far faster than any thermal power station - oil,gas,coal, nuclear) when the population decide to turn on their kettles in sync during advert breaks on telly etc.

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.