With any luck, they'll also launch a range of black helmets with bluetooth speakers in them so that the riders can still hear the sound of overly-loud piston engine.

Add a small container to constantly drip black oil spots and you've almost got a _real_ Harley!

Yes, we are approaching a problem here in Oz. In Autumn and Spring, most cities still have plentiful sunshine, but the home air-conditioning load is much reduced, making many more MW available to the grid. Since the only method to regulate grid frequency is big spinning power plants, we have a problem when we don't need their power output.

But there are better solutions, surely?

Subsidise batteries, so more of the daylight solar power goes into providing night-time power, keeping households more autonomous.

Change the grid regulators to large-scale inverters, probably associated with large scale wind or solar farms.

Rover gets to his forebber home!

So, there should be a fairly strong correlation between reading speed and IQ, assuming that there's no other factors like dyslexia or lack of access to reading material early in life?

Has that been tested?

Of course, practice is a big determinant in reading speed, and it's a feedback loop. I know people who read slower than they can talk, and they find reading for pleasure to be a foreign concept.

From Google's page:

Thankfully, this AC is smarter than most petty criminals.

I witnessed one iPhone theft, a snatch and run from a bus. The owner set off after the thief but quickly returned to ask the bus driver (me!) to call the cops as the thief had a machete, and the phone owner very sensibly valued his skin more than the phone.

However, instead of just walking into the night before Security and the cops arrived, the thief went to the nearby train station. The security guards there, having been warned by my radio call, promptly apprehended the idiot and he's now doing time for assault with a deadly weapon. Oh, and for theft of an iPhone...

Think about the value of the stuff you carry around with you. If you're a man, maybe a nice watch, maybe some cash in your wallet (but less and less these days) and... your expensive smartphone. A woman might add some jewellery to that list, but probably not much day to day. So what else is a thief going to steal? Especially because there's less point in breaking and entering these days, since the old standbys of VCRs or DVD players are now worth almost nothing, and big-screen TVs are hernia producers!

Umm... that movie where US troops secured the vital Enigma machine wasn't actually accurate. It was the Brits who stole the intact Enigma and the brightest of the Brits who cracked the code and, to a large extent, helped them win the war. (OK, having a whole lot of US planes and bombs and ships and tanks and stuff to DO something with the intercepted data was also quite significant, but the intelligence side of things was all down to the Poms.)

Yes, the individual nature of the devices is the whole point of the exercise.

No, that doesn't defeat the identification, it allows/enhances it. It means that, unless the copier can decrypt the data and encrypt with a new fingerprint, the fingerprint parameter on the copied device won't match the value generated by the reader using the physical characteristics.

This sort of physical characteristic fingerprinting has been done for years on magnetic stripe cards and EEPROM smartcards, so this is nothing new in theory, just in what physical characteristics are being measured.

In mag stripes, the magnetic remanence of the strip is different from card to card, in EEPROM, differences in the voltage levels and speed of reading of the cells are used.

The general principle is that it's no point having unbreakable crypto if the data can simply be copied to a new medium. Consider a card (of whatever type) that stores monetary value for public transport or photocopying or whatever: Put $100 on it and copy the data, not knowing which bits are what. Copy that data onto a heap of cards bought with $5 of credit on them and sell them in the grey market for $50 each and pocket the profit.

With this sort of technique, though, part of that encrypted data is a fingerprint based on the physical characteristics of the original card. The new cards will generate a fingerprint in the reader that doesn't match the original, making the copies invalid.

Sure, if you can crack the encryption, this method is useless, but that's not the point. Crypto can be pretty good and costs more than a cheap reader/writer to break to duplicate cards/RFIDs.

The publishing business has always been set up in regions.

An author sells rights to publish his/her work to different publishers in different countries, and there's often either legal protection or trade agreements to prevent parallel distribution of editions from other regions.

So, a book might be published by Doubleday in the US but by Pan MacMillan in Australia, and the major book chains in Oz wouldn't carry the Doubleday version (some specialised genre bookshops might.)

This is almost certainly Fictionwise/ereader just catching up with the requirements placed on them by the publishers who provide their ebooks, possibly because the B&N purchase put them above the radar a bit more.

The TX has a reasonable battery life, especially given that your wi-fi access is likely to be in short and sporadic bursts, not 'always-on' like a cellphone.

The screen's the same res and similar size to an iPhone and the built-in browser's adequate, or you can run Opera Mobile for a few more bells and whistles.

Oh, and it apparently can be used for other stuff like movies, MP3s, addresses, tasks, ebooks, etc., etc.!