The ability of a DVD to be compressed using a different format seems largely to be a function of the quality of the "original". A decent original can compress quite nicely. A crap original will be crap transcoded.

It won't be as impressive as a BluRay but the original isn't either.

Again. MPEG2 is a really outdated format. It doesn't take much to do better (or much better).

Er... is there a UK tax on blank CD's and media?

I'm not sure there is.

1) You've confused American "schools" with British schools, where the pupils are children. I specifically mention primary and secondary - primary is up to age 10/11.

2) We still have tracing of what was accessed, it's still against school rules to allow someone access to your account. Their actions aren't your responsibility but may have been your fault.

3) Any "school" that expels a kid for losing their key and another kid doing stuff on their account, won't be a school over here for long.

4) No school will charge for a crime in such circumstances, unless a crime was committed, and then you have the "reasonable doubt" defence and legal requirements of proof.

If you think for a second that a teenager losing their access card is any different to them leaving the machine logged on for the microsecond it takes one of their "mates" to reach over and do something on their account, you're an idiot.

P.S. Been running IT in UK schools - state and private - for fifteen years, no complaints yet, and massive shortage of time to work for all the school who want me.

I'd like something like this for a mixed Windows/Mac/Linux network but the costs are just prohibitive.

Yubikeys are $25 each for the hardware, and $45 PER USER. That's just ridiculous when you scale up, and there's an awful lot of manually faffing about to get to the point that it works.

To be honest, in my scenario (primary/secondary schools), I'm not looking for 2-factor as much as "I don't have to remember my password" login. If someone has the key, they have access (but only to another pupils account, which is nothing), and leave 2-factor as only a consideration for the staff (so then you could buy Yubi just for the staff, etc.). But anything software-licensed per-user is just ludicrously expensive when you start adding it up, on top of the "per-user" device costs to start with.

To be honest, I'd pay £10 each for a set of USB tokens that - when you press the button - just types in a username/password for you. Yubikey doesn't solve that problem on Windows, it just makes existing logins much more complicated (and, as pointed out in their manuals, when you get into mobile access they are useless anyway).

If someone could come up with a £10 USB keyboard-emulating device that types in a given string (I can code it so it presses tab / Return in all the right places, etc.), I'd probably buy it.

But on Windows, Yubikey is just too expensive for the software. I can't believe, given how little it does and how "third-party" it still feels after you've installed, that it costs that much to develop the Windows side of the software.

Well, unless someone sits and writes specific modules for each possible underlying instruction set, probably not.

Remember, Android is Java - sure, you CAN execute ARM (or in some hardware Intel) instructions - but those are always of the processor-specific modules. Go download the MoboPlayer app, which has specific modules to accelerate video for each type of device.

Can't see that happening for an emulator, especially when 99% of the time, the performance in Java would be fine anyway. Thus, you're really asking if someone is going to bother to write, say, an emulator for a cutting-edge device that a PC would struggle to emulate, plus specific ARM modules to make it run at feasible speeds. And the answer is probably no, especially when the market moves this fast.

One whole seat?

Do you think Blacks would be dancing in the street if they were entitled to one whole "reserved" seat in Congress? Latinos? Asians?

Talk about tokenism.

> Not that I approve of Israel's bombing of their own citizens

Israel is not bombing it's own citizens. Although Hamas is.

Israel is bombing an enemy belligerent. Collateral damage and casualties within your own forces are just a part of that.

Going into business with friends or relatives is not a problem.

Just treat it like a business. When your cousin comes to work for you, you're under no different obligations as an employer than you would be if they weren't you cousin.

Similarly, business is something which people do for "profit". Whether than be salary, experience, shares, or literal profit - each person is there because they have something they want out of the business. As such, pretending that because they are family makes things different is idiotic.

The friend who says to his friends that he hired "Sorry, mate, it's not working out" is still a friend, but he's protecting his interest in the business. A friend that doesn't understand that is not a friend. And though there might be "favours" and shortcuts and digging people out of holes, those favours are as shortlived in the business world as they are in the personal world - and abuse of them by a friend means that they aren't a friend.

Speaking as someone who has in the past hired my own brother (and will do so again soon), and who my father found me work for occasionally with good friends of theirs, it's still "just business". They're not giving charity - if they were, they'd give charity as a friend.

If you go into business with a friend or relative, treat them like anyone else. Get a contract, get them to sign it, talk to them about what's happening, don't just assume they will always do what you want even when it's not in their interest. Don't rely on even a friend's goodwill to get you through.

You wouldn't take money from a friend just because they offered it. Equally you wouldn't run up a debt for your friend just because they "normally pay" or whatever. Talk to people. And get anything business-critical in writing.

Some guy you know coming to work for you for a few days can go wrong enough - don't think when you're talking multi-million dollar businesses and official share certificates that you don't need to make things official too.

In this day and age, I don't really care.

I prefer Steam because, generally, programs don't put more DRM on than the default Steam stuff (which is non-intrusive, as far as I'm concerned).

Origin, I can't stand the poorly-designed program that once downloaded something like 40Gb and took nearly a day to install one game, because every update was applied sequentially and every update updated every file, sometimes 9Gb per update.

But the end-point DRM on the game? You either care what that is and Google it, or you don't. That it's on a "free" game or not, who cares? And Securom is a damn sight better than shite like Games for Windows Live.

I can't say I've ever seen a machine "messed up" by Securom, certainly not one that can't be fixed by removing it (tricky though that may be).

As far as I'm concerned, the average bit of freeware comes with crap worse than Securom bundled nowadays. Hell, have you tried stopping Google Update services being created every time you install Chrome or Google Earth? It's a nightmare that DOES affect things.

Take a look at some Palm code.

If the hideous restrictions and limits there don't put you off, then find out what they recommend to compile.

Flashy IDE's probably aren't going to be easy to find, there weren't many around in the first place and the majority of stuff I know is just command-line compilers which can plug into any IDE (if you're brave enough).

All I remember of Palm coding was having to break C files into tiny parts, jam them together and hope the individual object files never went over a certain size because the linker had to play all kinds of tricks to load them.

Take a look at something like this:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org...

The base code of which is generally easy to port (Simon Tatham's PORTABLE Puzzle Collection). That Palm version is quite a pain to compile even with the right tools.

I assumed "Authentic, But Chaotic and Unethical" was the description of the Internet resulting from the census.

This is a minor nit, but sh*t without the asterisk is really sht, not shit. ;)

Some people get a lifestyle choice with ACA coverage that's impossible without the ACA: they can breathe.

Others might remove that choice. There's a civics lesson there. If you're talking about covering people with HIV, or who were smokers, then please charge admission for the times when you walk on water. I genuflect.

Ireland didn't do anything remotely like what Hamas is doing to Israel. If it did, you would have seen the relevant bits of Ireland flattened like what England helped do to Nazi Germany.

We have ISIS running amok engaging in mass murder, mass mutiliations, and the destruction of religious sites. The problems in the middle east have sqaut to do with oil. This kind of ethnic strife would be going on regardless.

It's like the Balkans or any other place on the planet where people can't get along with each other to the point of engaging in genuine ethnic cleansing.