You'd still be receiving the live broadcast, and it's receiving it (not watching it) that needs the licence. Similarly if you use an old fashioned VCR to record the TV signal but only put it on a screen later, you need a licence. They're not quite silly enough to leave such an obvious loophole.

If he doesn't watch live TV, he's not doing anything "get away with". It's perfectly legal to watch iPlayer without a licence (except the live streams).

£3-4? Isn't that what cash is for?

Actually, my office has one of these NFC systems. It's acceptable givent there's never more than £10 in the account it's linked to, which is completely separate from my bank account. No way in hell would I trust my main bank account to a system like that.

Fibre as a replacement for the copper local loop doesn't need repeaters. The typical range of GPON is about 20 km, which is far longer than any copper loop. You can achieve blackout availability by the rather simple measure of having a battery at the user's premises to power the fibre terminating equipment.

So they'd just stick the equivalent charge for your voice service (which is really almost entirely paying for the physical infrastructure) on your DSL bill instead. Bundling is common in such situations, because it doesn't really cost them significantly more to provide line + voice service than line alone.

Mechanical circuit switching is long dead, and electronic circuit switching is no more limited in capacity than packet switching. The reason long distance was more expensive was that in the old days it really was very expensive to install a lot of long distance capacity, and this was true for data as well as voice. Fibre changed all that, so if they're still charging a fortune it's solely because they can. Some phone companies here in the UK offer unlimited international calls (to come countries) in their bundles, but there's now a (regulator enforced) competitive market. The old monopoly telco, BT, would never have done anything like that.

100Mbps is plenty for a home user. Yes, yes, 640k will be enough for anyone, etc. But really, what will need more than that? That's enough for many simultaneous high definition video streams. VDSL2 allows easily good enough performance at a far lower cost than putting new cabling in.

The coax infrastructure is also far less widely available than the twisted pair. In my country, only about 50% of the population have access to it, compared to nearly everyone for the phone lines. If you're going to deploy entirely new cabling, you might as well make it fibre and avoid the need for powered equipment in the field - the coax, like the twisted pair, is only worthwhile because it's already there.

The Russians have had some luck - the BN-600 reactor has a load factor comparable to their conventional reactors. How *safe* it is I'm not sure, but the reliability's not bad for such an old design.

If it really was that cheap you could store the energy as heat in a molten salt. Resistance heat to melt the salt, then a steam turbine to convert the heat back into electricity. You'd only get about 40% round-trip efficiency, but that wouldn't matter if the starting energy only cost a cent per kWh.

Sadly, it's rather more expensive than that.

No there isn't (unless "a certain amount" is about 5% of installed wind capacity). This shows UK generation status. Wind has actually been quite stable over the past couple of days, but I've often seen it down near zero.

Indeed you can, but what if you want, say, 50% of the electricity to be provided by wind on average? Baseload is about 50-60% of average (for the UK, which is what I'm familiar with). At a load factor of 30% that implies that at anything higher than 20% of electricity from wind (on average) means that sometimes there'll be more wind power generated than the grid can make use of. Generating electricity when nobody wants it isn't economic.

Worse than that, doubling the frequency requires 16 times the computer time, as you need to halve your spatial sampling interval to prevent aliasing. Assuming we're talking about wave equation based techniques such as RTM.

This is one of those areas which is still very much "no matter how powerful the computer, we'll use it all".

Maybe you can't, I don't know. If not it's a limitation of Windows or the SMB server in question.

The Windows firewall is a way of letting the user decide what is and isn't authorised rather than the application, which is a useful function. The problem with separate firewall boxes is that's not really possible for the average user to do that - configuring them is rather unintuitive to say the least. And having UPnP defeats the point of the firewall, as it means the application makes the decision - but it's quite capable of doing that on its own without a separate firewall box. Having such firewalls as standard will encourage application writers to rely on it, i.e. to assume the network is secure by default. I'd consider it bad practice for applications or operating systems to rely on external security measures, particularly in the modern era of mobile devices and untrusted networks.

What's wrong with that? Looks correct to me. Unless you're referring to the indicative "are" rather than subjunctive "be" - but that's an American requirement. The subjunctive is pretty much dead in British English.

So have the SMB server only accept connections from the local network. Same result.

As an added bonus, you won't accidentally leave your machine unprotected if you connect it to different network - a common thing to do with mobile devices and wireless.

That seems a bit pointless. Why have a firewall if you're going to let anything open it up? Just as effective would be to have no firewall and simply don't open ports on the end machines if you don't want to accept connections.