Plusnet concern me because they have abolished all their IPv6 trials and rolled out CGNAT instead. Its certainly looking like they have no plans to roll out IPv6 at all.

Which won't work when the base station is unpowered

In the UK too... I'm not sure how feasible it would be to run the fibre optic kit off a -48vdc supply that's been carried by several kilometers of wire... the equipment isn't going to be extremely low power and the resistance of the cable will not be negligable...

Well yes, ok - you have to pay for a POTS line to go with it (which is annoying - if I didn't have to pay for POTS I wouldn't bother having it; my whole home phone system runs off an Asterisk server anyway). But that's the same for all the DSL based services in the UK.

Fairly sure there's a legal requirement for the telco to keep the phones working during a power outage. Certainly do-able with fibre, but would require a UPS and regular battery servicing - probably cheaper just to run copper.

80Mbps vDSL is widely available in the UK.. prices below £10/month if you're willing to go with cheap crappy ISPs who are on record saying they have no interest in planning for the future (plusnet).

They would never be able to run *only* fibre into the home, because they need to be able to provide power for POTS; so running fibre as well is an additional cost (this is also presumably why they still run POTS all the way back to the exchange instead of handling it at the cabinet). That said, there are a number of regions where you can get FTTP if you want.

Where abouts are you? Most people can get way more than that (I'm on 8Mbps down / 1MBps up; if I turned on Annex M I'd get more upstream, and if I could be bothered I could switch to FTTC (80Mbps down, 20 up) for only about a pound a month more...) Also, British internet prices aren't exactly "through the nose" - especially if your local loop is crap (if you're never going to get a decent throughput on the local loop you may as well go for a cheap ISP).

Except there's nothing to say that a CF process would necessarily yield ridiculous amounts of energy at affordable prices. In fact the first proof of concept, if it ever comes, is likely to be just a barely measurable hair's breadth above break even. And scaling the technology to generate megawatts might well prove to be prohibitively expensive. What if a MW plant required thousands of tons of nickel? There might not be enough nickel in the world to supply a significant fraction of the world's energy supply.

Then there's the flying car problem. There is no doubt that practical flying cars are physically possible. The reason we've never seen one is that it's a fool's investment in the short- to mid-term. Any flying car we can come up with over that time scale is going to be a lot worse than buying a dedicated plane and renting a car at your destination. If there were some immediate niche application for a near-term flying car where it beat a dedicated plane and car combo, we might *all* be driving flying cars in twenty years. But there's no such niche to pay back investors. Even if CF is physically possible, if it doesn't quickly reach a stage where it beats some conventional power source economically (e.g. replacing solar panels in remote applications), it might never become practical.

Google seems to be cutting lots of services in the name of abuse...

Google Code downloads gone because they were being abused.
XMPP federation gone because it was being used by spammers.
CalDAV gone because... well, that one just seems to be because its open and Google wants to push everyone to their proprietary APIs instead.

I'm just waiting for them to pull the plug on email federation with Gmail and Google web search because they both get used by spammers too...

Guess what; pretty much any useful service is going to get abused - its an ongoing battle to reduce abuse whilst keeping the service useful and if Google are going to pull the plug on everything that might be abused they may as well give up and wind up the company now... (FWIW, I see a lot of spam email originating from real gmail accounts or using gmail accounts as contact addresses for replies; also a lot of phishing emails that use Google Docs to collect responses).

I was wrong if Wikipedia is right. It will go 40.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniature_UAV#Aeryon_Labs_.22SkyRanger.22

That makes sense, although it assumes that when they say "tolerance" they mean it can hover in that kind of wind. They might just mean it can fly and not crash in that kind wind, with the inevitable drift. You would think if it could hit 40mph, they would have shown at least one such zoom in their video.

hmmm ... I don't see where it says it goes 40. It does say this:

40/55 mph (65/90 kph) sustained/gust wind tolerance,

which is clearly different than going 40mph.

Which is why individuals can't be expected to do it - this is the government's job in the interest of protecting the law abiding public.

And the fact that these scams keep happening demonstrates that there is money in it because some people fall for it. Same with spam. So the only way to stop these scammers is to actually litigate rather than just ignoring it, throwing it away and claiming it isn't a problem.