And, to speed the machine up, make sure you straighten the cables as well.

In the good old days of analog, data travelled as sine waves. Now its digital, If there's a kink in the cable then, while the 0s still tend to slip through, the 1s can get snagged and cause a jam.

Absolutely. I used to own a lot of their gear - including a walkman, a beta VCR (that dates me!) and a very expensive trinitron screen. I was quite a Sony fanboi in my day. Now I loathe and detest them - CD rootkit, mania for proprietary connectors, lying about Minidisc "playing" MP3s, what they did to LikSang, the rootkit, DRM mania, retroactive removal of freatures people had paid for (OtherOS), being behind the RIAA, being behind the MPAA...... the list goes on and on. They actively hate and screw over their own customers, their product is overpriced, and their legendary quality is a didtant memory. Now just I regard Sony as the vermin of the consumer electronics industry, with products that are defective by design, and I avoid them like the plague. I successfully warn numerous other people off their overpriced DRMed rubbish as well. NB: to /. mods - can we have the old interface back please? The new one is *horrible*

You are assuming that the only thing the router is being used for is to connect computer(s) to the internet. There are other things to do on a home network as well, that require more bandwith than 802.11g can comfortably handle. Streaming HD video from a PC to something like one of the WD TV Live media players springs to mind (this is what I am currently looking at doing).

Of course they are available. Last time I looked, there were a range of modems and modem/routers that had dual band, dual radio, gigiabit ports and USB storage/printer connections. For starters a quick google search shows that there is Belkin (search on "double N+), Apple (Airport extreme, Timecapsule), Linksys/Cisco (older WRT610N, newer E3000). Doubtless there are more. I suspect D-Link is finding difficulty in competing, and hence the fairly implausible story.

And if *any* of the children was under 18 and an image captured was stored anywhere on the system, it's also production of child porn (which has a much higher penalty than peeping AFAIK)

It the sue the school then the long suffering taxpayers (who did nothing wrong) will have to cough up and/or the school budget will be cut causing kids education to suffer. It's the sleazebags who did this who should bear the responsibility and punishment. They should bring in the FBI and/or state police. If teachers started using camera to covertly watch kids in their bedrooms then all they have to do is seize the schools monitoring servers. If they find one solitary picture of a kid under 18 getting changed then they can go after the administrator and or any teachers & technical staff involved for child porn. Charge them with a felony, strip them of their teaching licence, give them a couple of years in Club Fed as a roommate with "Bubba", and register them as a sex offender for life when they come out.

Actually, it doesn't matter whether they can trivially break the crypto or not - if this goes through they will be too scared to check anything encrypted transiting their network. All you have to do is send something that you have the copyright to over the net this way (say, for instance, your holiday snapshots). You are using crypto to protect access to a copyrighted work - and if the ISP breaks the crypto to look at it they have broken the DMCA/ACTA! Three strikes and the whole ISP is disconnected?

That's my problem as well, and apparently IT is about to disable the "export to PST feature". I have about 10GB of email in PST files, which I break into individual .pst chunks of about 1GB for archival backup. IT has already irretrievably lost large quantities of email three times, so I do this myself as a security measure. I can copy the .ost file to my home computer, but unlike .pst files I can't then extract and archive folders (eg Sent-2008) because apparently it needs to connect to the exchange server to do this. I am a non-techie in techie hell on this - is there any easy way to convert an .ost file to a .pst file on a personal machine?

All right, I'll bite. He knows he owns the copyright because the band writes their own music and lyrics.

I't not just the legally purchased music that I can legally put on my ipod now - and will likely want to put on my new phone to minimise the number of devices I carry. Bad though that is, this is much nastier. For instance, one of my friends plays in an amateur band. He gives us MP3s of their material - in fact the 10 or so of us that get given this are probably the entirety of their regular audience. They do it for love and the delight that people are listening to their stuff - for the same reason they put cliups on youtube. Under this silly scheme, even the copyright owner couldn't listen to their own stuff on their own phone!

Apart from which, many probably do what I do. When the new TV is purchased, the old tube one (especially if it was a good one) becomes the second TV in the spare room, games room, bedroom or whatever. This is probably then the TV to which the kids are banished with their console, while the good one is used by the parents as an actual TV in the living room. No need to pension off a good large tube set that still goes, if you have the room to redeploy it.

We are still testing too, as our workplace has circa 10,000 seats and a lot of custom software that has to integrate. Personally, I hate, detest and loathe the ribbon. However, I too am screaming at IT to upgrade us. This isn't from any great love of the new version. Unlike most of the business which is self-contained and oriented around internal processes to do what we do, my team is in head office and deals with a number of external agencies. They have moved to Office 2007, and are sending us spreadsheets that we can't open. And before anyone cries "compatibility tool", which IT has tried to foist on us a number of times, if spreadsheets have more than 256 columns, or 65536 rows, or contain any of the new new formulae (which these do), the tool barfs. The process is viral. That's the main reason IT don't want to upgrade us - they are terrified that we will then email out stuff others in the shop can't open, then *poof* we are up for 10,000 new licences!

Mine is from chinese DVD players, which simply ignore the cruft, and legit discs. Do people actually still sit through the trailers?

Their DRM and rootkits provide ample grounds to passionatley hate Sony, and I do. However, these aren't the entirety of the story, and its more than just this that we hate them for. It's also the fact that they seem to hate their paying customers and operate in their own parallel universe. Proprietary connectors, feature lockouts, unfriendliness to people modding the equipment that they have bought, radio station payola, and an incessant drive to establish their own standards rather than use an industry standard unless it's so entrenched they have no point. Case in point, work gave me a SE phone recently (not one that I would have picked myself - I buy *nothing* with the Sony name on it, and haven't since I inadvertently brought one of their DRM-crippled non-CDs in 2003 and couldn't transfer it to y media player). Anyway, superficially it's a nice bit of kit. However, when I go to upgrade the memory it won't take any of the industry standard cards that I already have - oh no, I need a Sony brand "pro duo" stick that no one else uses, can't be used in anything else, and mysteriously costs about 2.5x normal on a $/GB basis. Then I go to plug headphones in so I can listen to music, the phone has a headphone connector, but instead of using a standard 3.5mm jack Sony have gone with 2.5mm, which you can't get in this country - not even the damn Sony store has them. Then their is the gross hypocrisy a few years ago when the head of Sony music in this country was also serving as the head of the RIANZ (our equivalent of the RIAA) and issuing hysterical media statements about how anyone who format a CD that they purchased to an ipod or music jukebox was "stealing" and should and would be prosecuted. Funnily, at the same time, Sony was selling a hard drive based jukebox that let you do just that - and even had pictures of the shelves of CDs you could transfer hand have available at a push of the button in the window of the Sony dealer in the CBD as advertising. Presumably, Sony didn't then prosecute themselves...... Personally, I think that Sony is over large, arrogant, and severely ethically challenged. I go out of my way to avoid them, ensure that tender bids featuring Sony equipment (eg laptops) don't succeed when I am charged with evaluating them, and dissuade friends from buying their kit. Also, other than for their top line gear, the manufacturing has been moved to China anyway, and quality is no better that kit selling for half the price. I took great pleasure in refusing to support short-listing a bid to supply a fair number of Sony laptops in response to a tender last year, so at least I get some satisfaction along the way .....

Don't think you can get thaqt in this country. It ought, however, to design a phone that does this. If a call has a number revealed then the phone rings and goes to voicemail etc as normal. If the number is blocked then the phone just disconnects the call and doesn't ring at all. Or perhaps plays a short "I'm sorry, this phone does not accept calls from blocked numbers, goodbye" message before hanging up. Should not be that hard to do at the phone end.