If you were to build a platform above the balloons, surely you'd want 3 balloons? 2 points describe a line, and the platform wouldn't be stable if it was only supported on one axis. 3 points describe a plane -- and that's what we'd be looking for here....

This seems wrong. For one thing, wouldn't the bigger one have the greater surface tension, because it's under tension from like, you know, the air in it...?

I may have to go to the supermarket for balloons and drinking straws now....

At that altitude the air pressure's so low that you'd need a whacking great propeller to shift enough air to move the rig, surely?

Given that even your average desktop OS isn't capable of queuing file operations, I'm not that surprised if a Freesat box isn't.

Although I still don't get WHY your average desktop OS isn't capable of queing file operations, to be fair....

And there I was thinking "I bet a guys version would sell really well among cyclists.... (Although it's generally best to stick to black around the crotch area -- light-coloured lycra tends to show off contours a little immodestly...

20 years ago, the lasers and mirrors required meant while the medium was small, the read/write apparatus was humungous. This was because lasers were more difficult to make, and there was presumably significant power loss in the medium.

There have been many incremental improvements since then in both media and laser tech, so I'd guess that it's on the cusp of being a commercially viable technology. The last attempt to produce something was a disc, and aimed at the removable media market, and that introduced certain engineering complications.

These guys have a better chance, as they'll be aiming at the fixed-drive market, and now's a very good time for that, as SSDs have opened the market to non-disk-based systems. It also plays to the miniaturisation trend even more than SSDs - if they can get the power requirements low enough, the next-gen iPod won't only be able to hold your entire CD collection, it'll be able to store your entire DVD collection too... and perhaps even without any additional compression.

Put this in an Android phone and the era of the truly universal personal portable computer will begin, and office desks the world over will have mobile phone docking stations instead of PCs or laptop stands.

AIUI, the iBook format is little more than an extension of HTML. The R&D for it is negligible.

The article is about "a conservative ideology", not "the Conservative ideology".

Homophobia is by nature a "conservative" trait. In Stalin's time, antisemitism was a "conservative" trait. In Mugabe's case, we have a loosely Christian-based ideology -- conservative.

The only non-conservative trait either of them showed was for self-betterment. The conservative fallacy of blacks as inferior to the white man would never get Bob anywhere. The conservative view of kings, peers and bourgeoisie would never have got Stalin anywhere. But both are pretty much defined by small-c conservatism: keep things the way they've always been.

How about linking to an article in English, rather than a machine translation of a Dutch one?

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

The Photoshop strategy has moved on. When was the last time you bought a camera or scanner that didn't have a copy of Photoshop Elements bundled with it? As they now have another vector to catch the newbie, they don't need piracy any more.

The reason Rovio like it is because it helps "Angry Birds". What helps Angry Birds does not help the software market as a whole. Angry Birds makes money from merchandising, most software does not. Piracy targets popular items, so establishes them further. It supports Rovio's dominant market position, it harms everyone else.

Given that it's generally necessary to dispose of a firearm after it has been fired during a crime, the fact that it'll only survive one shot isn't necessarily a bad thing....

The noteworthy thing about these three is that I believe they're all parts of the NES release "The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy". It had multiple worlds, and a the end of one, Dizzy was made to walk the plank by a pirate, and had to escape from the sea by jumping on bubbles. I don't know what the reason was for the Toobin' clone stage (that became Dizzy Down the Rapids).

Not true.

What HP get is the ability to continue to sell WebOS devices, using existing staff expertise, rather than having to "retool" to support WinPhone or Android.

WebOS needs a critical mass that HP can't provide in order to be a success, so they need others to pick it up and make it a viable mass-market option, therefore attracting developers (who will mostly be looking to cross-compile products available on other platforms anyway).

Maybe this isn't "return on investment" -- maybe it's simply "cutting their losses" -- but it's either the most profitable or least loss-making option for the moment.

WebOS has to stay pretty tight, hardware-wise. Android's biggest problem is that it's available in too many formats, so the user experience is very much hardware dependent. As WebOS isn't (currently) hardware agnostic, whereas Android is (hence lack of acceleration), WebOS's niche has to be on the user experience. As a commoditised OS, it has a feeling of genericity, but if the hardware is less generic, it will continue to outperform Android (and possibly also WinPhone) making it a candidate for OS of choice for anyone trying to produce an iPhone competitor.

Are school purchases VAT-free...?

@BristolBachelor,

Plenty of services charge VAT, and an ebook license is a license is issued as part of a service (which includes storing and tracking your ebook library).

Fossil remains of the later mammoths show signs of endemic disease -- some scientists feel it's unlikely that human hunting could have made a significant impact on the mammoth population.

There's also no evidence that people ate significant numbers of dodos either -- there are two or three records of people trying and it was reportedly one of the foulest-tasting greasiest meats thay had encountered. Modern thought is that the dodo was actually killed off by white man's eternal travelling companion: the rat. Rats are now well-known for wiping out ground-nesting bird habitats by eating their eggs, and the dodo was a ground-nesting bird....

Simply being cold burns a lot of calories...

Haven't we seen humans fly it recently...?

"I really hope Raspberry Pi is open and we can all get down to the metal on it but if Broadcom is involved, somehow I doubt it will be."

If you look at open-source hardware projects, they usually sink because the specced components aren't available any more, but the Raspberry PI is as damn near generic as you can get. Ethernet controllers and USB controllers are pretty generic. ARM may be a propietary design, but it's licensable and so heavily commoditised. This means that they should be able to revise the hardware as the market changes and use components from other suppliers without invalidating the existing codebase and forking the system (and userbase).

The only truly closed component is the GPU. There really is no such thing as a generic GPU on the market, and GPU technology is changing rapidly. Mandating Open GL makes any GPU generic, and this means that they can change the GPU later when the current model is discontinued or they can negotiate a better price with another supplier.

On the other hand, if the GPU's native APIs were available, you can be damned sure that developers would use them, and software would become irrevocably tied to the current version of the hardware, which would destroy the long-term potential of the project.

In the early days of USB it was claimed that USB didn't need to be daisychainable because it's so cheap that every peripheral would include a hub. But that never happened, did it.

In my opinion, the correct place for a USB hub is in the keyboard, which can then become that holiest of holy grails: the universal docking station.

Unfortunately, that was what should have happened years ago. It's unlikely to happen under USB 3 as who in their right mind is going to make a USB3 keyboard?

But still, we should have been at the stage by now where the majority of keyboards had a pass-through port for a mouse, and hopefully devices like this will finally start the creep towards that....

The problem is that the fishing technique is called "trawling" in most of the English-speaking world, so you'll see why people get confused.

"C64 version. Sprite limitations mean that the number of lemmings is considerably less than the other 8 bit versions. Shame really."

Not quite true. On the C64 version, they used hardware sprites for the playing field and bitmapped the Lemmings onto the background.

Sprite limitations meant that the visible playing area was only a half-screen wide. The restriction on the number of Lemmings was down to the poor bitmap performance on the C64 (it has an 8x8 tiled layout, not a true cartesian map) and the fact that they had to duplicate the movement onto the sprite-mapped background to drop out pixels.

All the coordinate calculations were computationally intensive.

Or should I say I asked my parents to get rid of it for me because I couldn't face doing it myself.

"where's my remake of Bullfrog's Syndicate"

It's in 1996: Syndicate Wars.

Prince of Persia never made it to the C64 as far as I can recall. I too played it on the Gameboy.

Do you remember "The Last Ninja Remix"?

Yup, even on the C64 they were doing updates of classics. Nothing new under the sun....

The difference is that this looks and acts like a bottle... including letting air into the wine.

The difference is that PSN and XBL don't know that you already own the games, so it's sold as a new game purchase and it's left to the purchaser to decide whether the convenience of the format-shifting justifies the price.

In this case, Sony know categorically and beyond doubt that you do indeed own it already, and is setting the price for people who already own it. If it was an invariant £1 token fee, that would be one thing, but £19 as a reissue fee is preposterous.

" Going back even further, there'd be evidence of planet-toasting solar activity in ice cores ..."

Surely the evidence of planet-toasting solar activity would be a *lack* of ice cores...?

" It's actually the "Maya" calendar "

Perhaps in the Mayan language the adjective is "Maya", and indeed in Spanish, too, but there is definitely enough corpus evidence to say that in English, the adjective is Mayan. Just like "French" people aren't "Fronsay" in English, and "Italians" aren't "Italiani". I also don't talk about speaking "català" when discussing Catalan in English, and I like "Spanish omelette", not "tortilla de patatas".

A wedding ring?!? Shoorly shum mishtake. I would be very surprised to find anyone with a willy narrower than their fourth finger....

"Our miniature coverage in full" takes on new meaning in this context....

Their mark-ups aren't as astronomical, insulting or extortionate as the mark-ups on the digital downloads -- and once again the actual performer gets shafted.

You're forgetting the other option. USB. It's pretty damned difficult to plug someone's insulin pump into a USB port without them noticing. Wireless is not the only connection available to device manufacturers!

From TFA:

" No, we’re not /really/ talking about perpetual motion here. "

Was this too subtle for most of you? Remember, when a Reg headline appears in ALL CAPS!!!, it's a good indication the headline is Not Entirely Serious....