More than seven years after British Rail was abolished, the Government took a large step towards the renationalisation of the network last night by allowing the state-backed Network Rail to take all track maintenance back in-house. The news came on the day that one of the main rail contractors was accused of falsifying records. It is the most significant sign yet that the privatisation drawn up by the Conservative government and refined by Labour has been a failure
Search engine Google, owner of one of the most powerful brands on the internet, is now close to floating its shares for the first time
The Norman Lindsay Gallery held their Celtic Festival today and I went along to help with spinning demonstrations, mostly because I’ve never been their before.
It started raining on the trip up the mountains and was pretty heavy by the time we hit the turn off at Faulconbridge. That was when I noticed what I thought was blossoms across the lawn that had been knocked off the tree by the heavy rain. I wasn’t flowers, it was hail.
Got to the gallery and managed to find the other member of our group, who’d managed to get the gazebo up before more hail hit and was sheltering under it. I’ve heard the term hail the size of golf balls, but this is the first time I’ve seen it.
Needless to say we decided to forego spinning in the rain, but did have the chance to have a look around the grounds and gallery. Not a fan of Norman Lindsay’s paintings and sketches, but I do like his sculpture and there’s a lot of it in the grounds.
Nice place and, under better circumstances, it would have been a great day out. If you are in the area and a fan of Norman Lindsay it’s well worth dropping by.
With the rise of Mini-ITX motherboards and their usefulness for modding small household objects into PCs has resulted in hobbyists across Europe, the United States and the Far East stuffing the works of personal computers into toasters, humidors, biscuit tins, lampshades, even a plush ET doll
Researchers estimate that nano-velcro would be about 30 times stronger than conventional epoxy adhesives. It would bond most solids together so powerfully that the materials themselves would break before the pads of hooks came apart. It would also be about 3,000 times stronger than a microscopic version of Velcro made by carving tiny hooks into silicon wafers
Robots rarely seem cuddly, partly because of their hard metal exteriors. But designing supple skin for them has to fulfil two apparently opposing needs: being elastic enough to have the dexterity of a human, while carrying enough wiring to allow it to accurately sense its environment. Now electrical engineers at Princeton University have developed a hyper-stretchy metal film that might do the job
Taking a new twist on an old antispam method, Microsoft previews a system for singling out mail from approved addresses. It plans to use the system in its free Hotmail e-mail service
Angus Oblong has written an adorable children’s story called The Cutie Bunch Friendly Pal Pack
A home-brew supercomputer, assembled by technicians and students at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University from 1,100 off-the-shelf Apple Macintosh computers in just one month at a cost of slightly more than US$5 million, is about to be ranked as one of the fastest machines in the world
The BBC has launched the beta of iCan, its service for enabling Britons to act collectively to participate in their governments
Reporters Without Borders has just published its second world press freedom rankings. Forget Laos, Burma and North Korea — they don’t want to know. Cuba is also cited for locking journalists up. Finland, Iceland, Norway and the Netherlands are the freest places for journalists to operate, tying for the number one spot. Australia is a shameful number 50
Bill Gates has slammed moves by political parties in Australia and elsewhere to legislate the adoption of open-source software, claiming the open-source system was ‘inferior’ and said it represented a false economy in relation to lost opportunities to improve productivity. Bob Cringley explains why exactly why Microsoft doesn’t understand open-source
And what says Tupperware more than a drag queen in 50s housewife regalia… a second Tupperware drag queen
The much-maligned wolf, one of the fiercest predators on the planet, has become an important provider of food for other animals in the few years since it was returned to Yellowstone National Park
In an effort to improve its corporate reputation, adware company Gator has launched a legal offensive to divorce its name from the hated term ‘spyware‘ — and so far its strategy is paying off. In response to a libel lawsuit, an antispyware company has settled with Gator and pulled Web pages critical of the company, its practices and its software. And other spyware foes are getting the message
A window between cities that allows people hundreds or even thousands of miles apart to meet and talk in real time could make its debut in Britain next year.
Tholos, named after a type of circular ancient Greek temple, consists of a large round screen nearly 10ft high and 23ft wide. Its designers hope to see one of the first two in the world become a new tourist attraction in the centre of London.
The London Tholos would be linked to an identical one in Vienna. Through them, people in both cities will be able to see and hear each other in real time.
The cylindrical structure contains a unique technology that simultaneously transmits and receives high definition live moving images. People standing in front of London’s Tholos would see a wrap-around picture of the scene in Vienna.
At the same time, a similar London image is displayed in the Austrian capital. Citizens in both countries would be able to face each other and talk via an array of directional microphones and loudspeakers, which keep conversations private.
Effectively, it is like meeting up in the town square — except that you might be on different continents.
Given the necessary sponsors and planning permission, Tholos screens twinning London and Vienna could be up and running by the second quarter of next year. There are ambitious plans to expand the system into a network linking at least 16 European cities by 2008, and then others in North America and Asia.
Most computer hardware web sites tell you how to get your computer hardware up and running properly. Hardware Analysis takes a different approach and tells us exactly how not to install computer hardware. They document many of the pitfalls that’ll sound familiar to many enthusiasts and have some great pictures of what could go horribly wrong during an upgrade
A civil liberties watchdog group is expressing concern over the San Francisco Public Library’s plans to track books by inserting computer chips into each tome
A judge sentenced an Arizona woman to 60 days home detention for intercepting her husband’s ex-wife’s e-mail, saying the penalty is a warning to others who might be tempted to do the same
A group of geeks who reformat badly designed web sites have tackled their most ambitious project yet. They scraped the poorly designed web site for the UK Parliamentary record, Hansard, reformatted all the information and presented it in infographic Tuftean glory as The Public Whip
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