Why would you have to drop your internet connection to connect to another WiFi device? WiFi is a LAN, it's not a point-to-point network which can only connect one device to one other device.

A tv can be detected from a van outside your house, the TV's local oscillator can be detected (you can determine what the TV is tuned to from it).

These days though, they just have a list of households with no TV license and send a man around to knock on the door.

Really? Britain's economy is in worse shape than any other European country?

Britain has the lowest unemployment rate in the EU, and a GDP per capita higher than the majority of EU countries.
Britain still has a AAA rating on its sovereign debt, France is about to be downgraded, and let's not talk about Italy or even Greece.
Manufacturing output of Britain increased last year despite a recession in the rest of the economy.
Britain is having to bale out other EU countries like Ireland. Nobody is having to bale out Britain.

Thanks for the insight. I guess we can all be grateful that *all* of the ISO-OSI stuff fell by the wayside and we got the internet instead.

I'm almost 40, TVs with tubes are still easy to hear. At least in one ear (I tried out my ears kind of non-scientifically the other week with my signal generator set to sine wave and the 10kHz scale and a decent set of headphones, my left ear almost gets to 18kHz, my right ear struggles to get above 15 or so. I know some years ago both could get to almost 18)

Raspberry Pi news is *very much* news for nerds, it is very much the very core of what Slashdot is about. If you don't like it, then perhaps Slashdot isn't the site for you.

You can always just not read the stories.

It's a fsck of a lot of energy to have in a *single subatomic particle*. The Planck energy, for example, you could say on the same token "is only the amount of chemical energy in a tank of gas in a typical car". But all that energy carried by a single subatomic particle... it's rather more concentrated.

There are plenty of wireless modems that are wireless (I have a 3 Mifi, basically some rebadged Huwei thing, which is a 3G wireless access point). There are probably bluetooth equivalents, too.

What is wrong with X.400? I presume like all other X.something standards, it's an unwieldy, unextensible "designed by committee" thing where you have to pay thousands to get access to the actual standards documentation. Am I right?

Spain did NOT bankrupt itself on the "green energy = jobs" wild goose chase. Spain was actaully one of the few countries actually complying with the sovering debt rules of the euro (France and Germany, the framers of these very rules was not).

Spain's problems stem mainly frmo the following:

- Eurozone interest rates during the boom were set to suit the French and German economies, and were far too low for the periphery. This resulted in an enormous construction bubble as well as enormous wage inflation.
- When the bubble popped, construction almost instantly halted, meaning a lot of people ended up out of work. Exacerbating this was now that Spanish labour was uncompetitive because of the high wage inflation, leading to very high unemployment rates.
- Spanish banks were pretty exposed to not only the thieving scum on Wall Street selling subprime mortgates as AAA-rated debt, but also exposed now to their own mortgage default problems as a result of the bubble popping, causing a credit crunch, driving more businesses out of business.
- France and Germany still haven't learned: Eurozone interest rates are still set as to what the French and German economies need and are too high for the periphery. (Therefore I don't have any sympathy with the French and Germans when they whine about having to bail out other eurozone countries: they were a big part of the problem).

None of this had anything to do with "green energy".