The OpenPandora's stuff is mostly on http://repo.openpandora.org/ now. It seems to coordinate the other places.

To be fair, there are issues with the Pandora, but it's still pretty damn cool.

There are a couple of interesting games that are somewhat Pandora specific (like Super Geometry Dust), but as usual it's mostly fantastic for emulators where you've got

SNES
Sega Megadrive (Americans call it the Sega Genesis)
MAME
ScummVM
Residual (Grim Fandango)

Which are all pretty much spot on

Then you have some more work in progress ones, like

Playstation (playable enough for FF7 but some annoying lag in places)
Amiga (ugly UI to select stuff)
N64 (playable for Mario 64, but it's not ideal)

And probably a couple of others that I've completely forgotten.

I'm hoping that the UI improves as well - something like meego would absolutely rock, and it should work quite well

Or alternatively, the BBC could simply say "we won't pay that, we'll just cut you guys off" and then see how long it takes them to stop any talk of charging.

I'm sure that they will do really well selling an internet service that can't view the IPlayer.

Not seen this mentioned yet, but in the UK we have local loop unbundling, otherwise known as line sharing.

This means that any company is permitted to put their own equipment in the exchange and use the last mile as they choose. So in my house I have a choice between about 10-15 ISPs all of whom can have different policies.

I still think that net neutrality is a good thing, but if Google started to slow down, or the IPlayer then most people would simply switch to a new provider - in fact it would be likely that other ISPs would absolutely hammer them in marketing if they started to make other sites (like the iplayer) slower.

Pretty sure the A500 shipped with BASIC.

Of course, I don't have it lying around here so I can't check too much...

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

Covers it. Of course, that stopped with the A500+, but by then you could get AMOS/Blitz fairly easily (or at least minimal versions of it, as they were included on magazine cover disks)

I think it's bad public policy to have DRM affecting HD content, but this is more like DVD encryption than say, Blu-ray.

Ie, it has very little effect on technical people at all.

To be honest, I wonder what the point is - this isn't going to stop it being distributed over the Internet - the only reasonable argument is that it stops people from being unable to move HD signals from their generic boxes to other generic boxes - thus trying to up the sales of blu-ray.

I think this could be a long term boon to be honest - very few freeview boxes realistically allow you to pull content off them (at least with any ease) at the moment, and most people other than videophiles don't really care that much about HD content versus SD content.

Given that you can make SD copies of things on these boxes it might actually be a net gain.

Also if freesat is an example of it in use, then it shouldn't impact mythtv users at all.

Is there really DRM on Freesat?

It doesn't work. I have freesat, and I have raw h264 transport streams sitting on my disk.

That said, I run mythtv, which seems to support it well.

Force alarm then - nothing to see here.

Direct Debits have that handy guarantee though.

Otherwise known as the "charge the wrong amount, payment goes bye bye" guarantee.

Plus, they are significantly more convenient for most payments.

Or better, a building society cheque.

Like a banker's draft, only free

And the first bank to do this will suffer scary amounts of capital flight as half their customers shut their bank account.

It's a bluff.

Tunbridge Wells Council collect rubbish every 2 weeks, and on the alternate week collect compostable waste and (paper) recycling.

Or at least, they did 3 years ago. I doubt it's changed

It is nowhere near as good as Sevenoaks council (where I live now), which collects rubbish every week, and has the brilliant recycling bags, which are everywhere now. They also have excellent recycling statistics.

Most of it comes from the fact that councils have to pay heavy fees to landfill rubbish, whereas they can make money (or at least lose less) on recycling. Thus they want to try and encourage people to recycle where possible. This ties into the fact that people have so little respect for local council elections that they elect people who really have no clue about democracy or using the media. The fact that they don't work on shaming people into recycling more, and applying pressure to local shops (perhaps on the threat of higher rates or otherwise) into providing better facilities (say a discount for using bags, or a charge) instead (which is very easy to explain to council tax payers), or even for the stronger suggestions actually put it to a public vote if they so choose, which wouldn't be too tricky.

The 3GS is a Cortex A-8, which would be faster than the A-5.

It's clocked at 600Mhz and is dual issue. As well as that they have a beefier 3d chip as well.

The A-9 is more exciting as it is multi-core and out of order.