Actually, you're not so far off one of the more interesting "oddball" theories.

Lets assume that something happened. There was a communication blackout, the local undertaker was asked to provide three child-sized coffins and thereafter the Army Air Force claim that nothing happened.

The "oddball" theory is that a scaled-down test plane, manned by children crashed in the desert. Can you imagine the US Government ever admitting to that?

Indeed. The fact they say that no further investigation happened tells you how reliable they considered the "informant" to be.

As an aside, I find the "style" a little too informal for an official 1950 government memo; it reads like it's been edited by a tabloid sub-editor, which sounds like just the sort of source that would have an interest in sending the FBI off on such an investigation.

I was just discussing this with a friend last night - apparently you can buy off-the-shelf Freeview (DTV) tuners that output 405 lines VHF, purely for keeping "vintage" televisions working. They're not easy to find, but they're out there.

And it was dreadful, as every close-up of the "vintage" TV sets showed the RGB shadowmask of the colour monitors they had stuck inside them.

Perhaps it's a UK/US thing. To me here (Aberdeen) you always download from a remote location, and upload to a remote location. Thus, when you have a person at each end, whoever you ask the same person is always "uploading" and the same person is always "downloading" - it depends on the direction of data flow, not the relative size of the machine. By your definition, there's no term for peer-to-peer data transfer when both machines are identical.

"do we really want Amazon downloading everything it thinks you want to your tablet?"

"uploading", Surely?

Ironically, for the past 12 years, if I felt depressed the first place I would go for support was h2g2.

The problem is that, at the moment, h2g2 has *no* separate password system - it was integrated into the BBC's "Single Sign-on" initiative, then rolled forward into the BBCi Global Login. We *used* to have a separate username and password, but that wasn't good enough for the BBC who wanted every "web property" to be rolled up under the same system. So, you can't do a "forgot your password" without also resetting your password for all other BBC services. I've been talking to one of the original lead developers, and he has a couple of ideas that would involve sending out "tokens" that can be used to reclaim your account, then migrating to a different login/id system. So, it may not be as bad as I feared.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon face-down on the sofa crying a little. I joined h2g2 on May 12th 1999, and have spent a significant amount of time there almost every day since. That's almost 12 years of memories. Good friends I have met, (really - it's not just an "online community", people would get together in "real life" too.) tremendous info and insights. They were doing blogging in the form of "Journals" before the word "Blog" was coined. They had a crowdsourced encyclopaedia years before Wikipedia was launched. I hope that someone takes the site over, but I can foresee huge legal problems when the time comes to split it away from the BBC site, as it will have the same usernames and passwords as thousands of BBCi accounts.

I once used a friend's meter and returned it to him on the "A" setting. (It was a cheap meter, and switching from "V" to "A" involved moving one of the probe leads into a different socket) He didn't notice, and later stuck it across the mains in a terminal to see if the fuse had blown. Apparently it was very (albeit briefly) pretty, and I owed him a new set of probes. :-/

...did they buy up all the Kindle copies too?

I'm particularly impressed to note that they left his hands free to reach for the "vomit bag"... :-)

Many NASA missions were "non-profit".

This "2 a day" figure is what the campaigning website said in their own press release. But then they were on the same live radio show as him and didn't refute his totals, which were significantly larger. Like I say, I half-remember it as being "up to 200 a day", but I could be wrong. He definitely claimed a *lot* more than 2, and they didn't argue. They just tried to push their "if he doesn't like our system he doesn't like people communicating with him" line. I think it is *they* who are out for a bit of free press coverage.

(This is my third attempt to post this... Last twice it posted with no name or subject and vanished when I refreshed the page... I've cleared my cookies now. :-/)

First point. He hasn't just taken the address "off the Parliamentary website", he's actually had to disable the address.

He's asking the people running the campaigning website to take his address out of a drop-down list in a form on their site. They are refusing to. The page on the site lets anyone with too much time on their hands pick a subject from one drop-down, an MP from another, enter their name and postcode and hit "Send" to automatically generate a long and verbose email. It's the campaigning equivalent of SPAM marketing. He claims that for every "real" email he gets from someone with a grievance or issue he has to plough through something like 200 generated by this website. (Ballpark figure, I wasn't listening that closely)

Live on "PM" (UK news show) last night he told the folk running the campaigning site that he had no problem with them publishing his address on their site so that people who felt strongly about something could contact him, but he wouldn't re-enable it until they took him off the "automated mailing" page.