threegee

I wouldn't go to "a den of sonic inequity", but I could be persuaded to go to a den of iniquity - even if the organisers didn't know the difference! The Beats Per Minute thing is a simple inverse function of mean climatic temperature. Doesn't take a PhD to work that one out BBC News 24.

"Annual results statements issued by the banks in recent weeks have revealed the extent of the payouts." http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/448121b6-ea1c-11...00779fd2ac.html

Having people sitting at computers all over the place actually trading carbon emissions is about as crazy a situation you can imagine. They contribute absolutely nothing to anything. In fact all those pointless offices contribute to the very problem they are supposed to be combating! Yet, the real poluters - those distributing huge amounts of plastic - continue in their addiction to automation convenience tax free! There's no beach anywhere on our planet that isn't totally littered with the stuff, and wildlife can no longer cope. Why no tax on plastic packaging? Because it's politiclly unacceptable; it would lose votes! The logical extension of the carbon trading madness is to trade deaths. When you die all your carbon is released to the environment again, so, using current logic, somebody must pay for this. A carbon tax on dying is the obvious solution. This would introduce the offence of intent to die without a permit!

It's a matter of degree. It's not happening to anything like the degree the politicians have been suckered into believing. And, in historic terms, it is completely insignificant. There is nothing to put right except clean up the obvious pollutants. CO2 is NOT a pollutant - it's part of the Earth's biosystem. That's where it came from in the first place and that's where it will go. If true then why are more and more people dying of hospital related diseases? Other countries have nailed this problem stone dead! Ask any professional and they will tell you that youth facilities and education will vastly alleviate drug abuse and related petty crime. But - apparently - there are few votes in providing the necessary.

I mention that only to relate it to real world problems; our own little corner of the world; and this bit of cyberspace. Honest I do! That's a very unscientific, and unconvincing, argument for spending a huge proportion of the entire world gross economic product. So why don't we start building a fleet of giant nuclear-tipped rockets to blow the next wayward asteroid to kingdom come? There's universal scientific agreement that we face the "big-one" sooner or later. Even the broad range of statistical possibilities will have few if any dissenters. The solid evidence and inevitability is there right now, and by the time any specific threat is clear it will likely be "too late to do anything about it". I think the reason it's not a hot topic is that the sums don't add up, so it's better to put the possibility to the back of our minds and only act as best we can when disaster is looming. The GW doom+disaster scenario on the other hand has no real sums, or any convincing evidence. It's all pure conjecture by those who have a lot to gain by promoting it. There are many dissenting scientific voices but their plain speaking doesn't put food on anyone's table, or build any reputations, or sell any popular newspapers. My bet now is that these scientists will be slowly but inexorably be proven right. But that won't stop all sorts of circle-squaring and self-justifying nonsense from those who have been sucked in by this tulip-mania. Yes, it does. But only what we can see and measure directly. The oceans are a huge CO2 reservoir, vastly greater than you could imagine, and all part of the self-regulating mechanism we've been provided with. They've survived far worse than a few car exhausts in the past. Where did the exhaust emissions come from in the first place? It's a closed loop, but with a little engineering and ingenuity we can make it a much tighter closed loop for recirculating the Sun's energy. Bio-fuels are one of the answers but there is no single magic cure like we were led to believe (by our politicians!) in the 1950's.

Clean environment very good - global warming utter tommy-rot. Don't confuse the issues! If a tiny tiny fraction of the money being squandered on this nonsense was spent of provable environmental improvements we'd all benefit greatly. Al Gore is someone looking for windmills to tilt at. Bush is presently perceived as an environmental Luddite - I think quite unjustly, though he may be one in other ways - so it pays lawyer's party Gore to go for this nonsense. It's a good living and a way to rise in public esteem - without actually doing anything!

I've long suspected that it was all a load of rubbish, but now the sceptics have convinced me. Of late it has become an entire industry with lucrative careers built on the myth. When you use a limited data set you can "scientifically prove" almost anything, but as more and more conflicting data comes in this becomes increasingly difficult. I have a feeling that this mass delusion is about to be exposed. Slowly at first, then on to the amusing part i.e. watching the "ship jumpers" and their attempts to rationalise their past barmy behaviour. How can we even contemplate spending the vast sums being bandied about on such a crazy idea that we can have any major long term influence on the Earth's climate? Is it even desirable to try, given the huge natural changes that have taken place in the past? Don't get me wrong, I'm very much in favour of cleaning up the unholy mess we make of our planet, not breathing in muck and lead etc., and certainly DO more than most. But, if politicians spent just a tiny tiny part of the money (our money!) they are throwing at GW on cleaning up our hospitals properly, thousands of people wouldn't be dying every year in the UK alone. We could get kids off the streets and out of the drug habit, and still have change to do other important things. Why are staggering sums of public money available in a vain and pointless attempt to alter the world climate by a mere degree or two, but totally insignificant amounts never available for a town like Bedlington to build a youth/sports center and address real problems?

Note that WMA files aren't a method of encoding/decoding like say MP3 is. It's a wrapper around several different codecs. Some lossy some not. One of the codecs is MP3, and much of the information on some of the others isn't available to other developers! The point I'm making here is that WMA support from anyone other than M$ may not be complete or buggy. OK, OK, delete the "other than M$".

Seems like you already know! Non-specific questions get non-specific answers. The question doesn't even say the burning is to be done with a computer let alone which computer, which operating system, and what additional software/hardware is to hand - it could be with heated curling tongs! Was sitting next to a guy at dinner last night and a computer question came up. He said he'd had the machine back to the shop to correct this or that, and, making a square with his hands on the table, that it was a tiny machine. Oh, said I, an UMPC then? Blank stare. Runs Windows Tablet Edition then? Blank stare. It was a very good buy, said he, only cost £212. Immediately my mind started churning through what tiny bit of obsolescent crap only cost £200 and what closed, highly-forgettable, OS it might run. What make is it? It's an ASUS, he said. What usable ASUS UMPC can possibly have cost only £200, and what outdated version of Windys were we struggling with here, thought I. Inspiration then hit: It's not a Eee PC - is it?! Yes, he said, a tiny bit surprised. Then, it runs a version of Xandros Linux; luckily you've got a huge amount of PD software available to do your xyz task. You install it from a repository using the package manager off the command line! Very, very, confused stare. I poured another glass of wine. Moral of the story: you can assume diddly squat until you are specifically told. Not even that you've got any sort of disk drive available. And, even when you do guess dead right, often you still can't provide more than generalisations!

On a more general level what you need to produce is known as a "red book" standard CD. This format goes back almost 30 years, and is now also known as IEC 908. That's the only format that is guaranteed to play on any audio CD player ever produced. You can't include MP3's or any lossy modern format files on a red book CD unless they are trans-coded back to a raw bit-stream first. Essentially red book CDs have a fixed 44100 samples per second of the sound waveform each stored as 16 bit values (64K distinct waveform levels) recorded for each stereo channel. So the constant fixed bit rate is 44100 x 16 x 2 = 1411200 bits per second, even for silent passages where there's no real data. This is horrendously inefficient by modern standards. All of which explains how you can fit countless hours of high quality MP3s etc. on a CD, but an absolute maximum of only 78 minutes of red book audio.

Some more questions: Was the opposing case put to the people they asked to legitimise the process? And if so, and by way of balance, were equal public funds spent on the process? Were the long suffering Bedlington council tax payers asked for an opinion? After all it was they who in large part funded the houses in the first place. What - if anything at all - do they, and the Town get out of this? How much did the local council taxpayer get stung for in the "professional" and other fees associated with the whole exercise? I fear yet another instance of "politics on the rates"! Some answers from our local politicians, please!

It rather looks like a lot of expensive spin on p-p-p-p-privatisation. Now remind me here, but when Maggie told WDC that they had to sell council houses to their tenants wasn't there an almighty stink from our local labourites, and opposition at every turn? So, in the ruling (New) Labour Party book it's not OK to let people own their own homes, but it's OK to let a private company own them. The argument then was it would reduce the stock of public sector housing to the needy, now it appears to be that it will release huge amounts of money to spend on much needed maintenance. Being able to stand on your head - and claim that it's everyone else that is seeing things upside-down - seems to be a particular requisite of Wansbeck politics! If only one single Labour councillor had the guts to come on here and explain what they really believed in these days. They won't because the new politics requires them to be heavily insulated from the public by spin doctors. And, in a brief moment of honesty and clear thinking, they may say something that the big-brother party machine won't forgive them for!

It's OK madam comrade! The decree says that everyone who voted for Chairman Gordon to be Prime Minister will be permitted to remain in Bedlington. As we're such a shining example of democracy then surely that must mean most people?

Hasn't everything already moved? Anyway, we sure are Passionate about Wansbeck - but maybe not in the way those on expense accounts and large publicity budgets would like to assume! Nice prophetic touch the setting sun. Doubtless all drafted by another master of spin.

Sadly, this is what happens when you buy your cues in Netto!

Yup!! Now how much are the shares worth? Government can't be seen to be subsidising all those "idle rich" shareholders by supporting their risk-taking habit.

I loaned our telly to downstairs for a few days almost a fortnight ago now. And, despite the fact that it's only a lightweight 26" LCD, can't be a**** to go get it and plug it in again. It only just became clear that reading books and listening to internet radio on the notebook computer is far more entertaining than all the mindless drivel on TV these days. How long can I hold out TV'less (the first time for decades)? No idea, but when I go to get it it will probably be just to fill the empty space in the room, and certainly not because of boredom. What I really want now is a decent pair of Bluetooth speakers for the notebook computer.

Doubtful. Probably a "buzzword" Monsta has never heard of!

Solution for Woolies: Fit castors and rebrand it the HiLita!TM Note: Please send £10K consultancy free c/o Bedlington.co.uk.

Never had a problem with poor penguins (idle or not). The problem is with penguins who don't know how to behave on someone else's iceflow.

In which case the filter is unlikely to be the real cause of the problem, but the swap has improved the s/n ratio just enough for now. (Note that doesn't necessarily mean that the new filter is any better than the old, just has slightly different characteristics in your circumstances.) Your modem/router probably has a line diagnostics page. You need to watch both the downlink and uplink s/n figure. This can vary wildly with the time off day and will likely be worse after dark. A low figure is bad and likely to coincide with the intermittent problem, a high one good.

http://beedogs.com/ The world is waiting. Or maybe not!

Yet another place Ryanair ruined with their 1p long-haul flights then?

The answer might be that we've got a MS Certified Expert - or whatever the buzzword is - in town (no sniggering at the back!). Will see if I can persuade him to field it.

He?! It was undoubtedly a female "alien"! She's migrated to planet Pluto (sp?) now (global warming?), but I'd be careful what you say as I'm told she/it regularly reads this forum, and can still make strange things happen in the town by telekinesis (or something very very similar)! And friends, this is a true story. I know, I was that soldier. Err... I mean that photographer