Tooting Bec is my local underground station in South London and they have been playing classical music in the foyer / ticket hall for several years.

The sound quality is good. The volume level is reasonable.

I asked one of the staff whether he enjoyed the music and he said 'some of it' & he also said that it kept young people from loitering.

Next time I will try and find out more on London Underground (a part of Transport for London) policies on noise and social exclusion.

Personally I enjoy the few seconds of classical music I hear as I stroll down to the escalators.

The whole Sprawl Trilogy was well plotted & characterised & embedded with quotable phrases & invented meanings. I still read Gibson but struggled a little with his latest. There is a good BBC radio dramatisation of Neuromancer and also an interesting graphic novel version, unfinished.

Total nonsense! The EU is doing what the USA should have done a decade ago. If the US regulators hadn't been spineless & in bed with big business.

You Americans talk so big - when someone else shows cohones you can only scream & stamp your little feet.

I'm proud of Europe & the EU here. We'll get Windows bundled with Opera & Firefox yet.

The Tidbinbilla Tracking Station (now known as CDSCC) was opened in 1965 and is the only NASA tracking station in Australia still in operation. During the Apollo program, Tidbinbilla was used for tracking the Apollo Lunar Module.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra_Deep_Space_Communication_Complex

So Pooh 2 u all ye doubters of the Northern Hemisphere!

Anyone want to review this?

          http://www.hackettandbankwell.com/about

"Hackett and Bankwell is an educational comic/cartoon manual designed to teach the finer points of the GNU Linux platform using Ubuntu."

Free downloads as .pdf e-book (issues 1 & 2).

          http://www.intarwebz.com/hackett-and-bankwell-1-free-pdf-ebook-version-11/

No - not the article, which was excellent.

No - nor on the book - which is merely continuing a tradition of excellence in graphical education quite usual in Japan but sadly lacking elsewhere.

No - this is the /. contingent of commentators being 'funny' about foreign(er) ideas - because WE invented the internet and Cobb was an American and no darn .....

Well - you get the gist.

VERY disappointed, makes me wonder whether to stop /. watching - there are many other good tech sites with a lot less bias and a lot less jingoism to wade through.

I watch a lot of fansubbed anime & find I prefer Zoomplayer http://inmatrix.com/

I also am using a 6 year old IBM laptop that isn't too powerful & I find Zoom uses less memory & less processing power. Therefore less lag & better rendering.

I believe this is due to the fact that the actual Zoom player is a sort of framework and all the codecs are external.

It used to be a beast to set-up the codecs but now it has an excellent codec installer which downloads the latest needed codecs (you have control over which) and installs them, usually perfectly.

The only thing I found recently was that I couldn't get it to play Flash .flv although I had Flash installed. Turned out I had Flash installed on Firefox & Zoomplayer needed the IE OCX control - once I fired up IE and installed Flash it worked fine.

Zoom is well-tuned for speed & accuracy and handles subtitles beautifully with complete positioning & display options including font selection.

There is even an U3 version that runs from a USB stick http://software.u3.com/Product_Details.aspx?ProductId=114

It is of course a paid Windows application so I guess everyone here is going to put it down.

A1 - you got there while I was still dithering how to say it. I could add some personal worries like how HUAWEI software's in every darn internet cellphone dongle in the UK (and it's really good too).

No-one's mentioned the Chinese governments vast expenditure on active (read - aggressive) cybersecurity - is it not PC anymore to say this?

I'm in London UK & all for your US nerds defending our cyber frontiers 'cos we certainly can't! BO rocks!

I was up too darn late watching the Nasa TV press conference. Questions were asked about maybe the debris source being space junk from an old rocket;

"NASA also revealed that Endeavour came within a mile of a piece of floating space junk during the launch. The garbage was an old Delta rocket body that has been orbiting for years, NASA said".

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la- sci-shuttle11aug11,1,1712330.story?coll=la-headlin es-nation&ctrack=2&cset=true

Tracked back to a '70s launch apparently, though I can't confirm this apart from what I heard.