Passing data signal traffic over the same conductors as mains power distribution would reduce the repeat offending rate of stealing telephone cables.

If SMS is a license to print money, international SMS is a license to print high-denomination money.

So I remain disappointed that too many US telcos have not sorted out working international SMS because it will earn them enormous wads of cash for minimal effort.

(rarely is this icon more appropriate, it's the TELCO FAIL icon)

So, I've read "Heart of the Comet" (Gregory Benford and David Brin), and "Saturn's Children" (Charles Stross), both of which are fairly hard SF that deals with the exploration and colonisation of the outer Solar System, into the trans-Neptunian zone of the Kuiper belt and the scattered disc.
Does anyone have any recommendations for similar?

Mobile phones and other devices that only download maps while you navigate are useless for navigation for anyone who travels a lot because roaming data rates are still out of control.
Mapping and navigation systems included with mobile phones currently fall into two main camps. Either they are based in one way or another on Google Maps, or they are Nokia Maps.
Google Maps assume you have a fast network connection that is cheap, only downloading information and not saving it at all on your device.
Nokia Maps can either fetch the data as you move, or you can download it ahead of time over a fixed computer's network connection and save it on your device.
Mobile data roaming rates are still completely out of control. The maximum EUR1.00 per megabyte is ridiculously high when you consider that reloading my friends page on Livejournal is between 0.5 and 1 megabyte, and many advertising-heavy websites will serve you 0.2-0.5 megabytes of advertising on each page (for example each article of a newspaper's website). In addition, data usage of many mobile services is not easily measurable and controllable - push data services push what they want, maps may be more or less detailed, etc. The combined effect is of high and unpredictable costs for any data use when roaming - costs out of control. Some telcos will allow you to contract for some data while roaming at some discount to the rates for use not arranged beforehand, but these rates are still high bearing in mind the previous data volumes, and the unpredictable nature of data transfers leave the customer open to running over a reasonable pre-arranged amount and getting a very large bill (with the alternative of buying a pre-arranged amount so large it will cover any possible use, making a large bill a certainty instead of a possibility).
So if you want to have a map abroad, you have two choices: buy a Nokia, or buy another phone and pay separately for a commercial mapping application of the sort that turns your phone into a facsimile of a dedicated GPS unit, and pay for the maps and updates for it.

I'd like to remind the entire Internet that if one wishes to contract the words "would have", "could have", or similar, this is done using an apostrophe and gives "would've", "could've", etc.
"Would of", "Could of", is nonsensical and should not be used.
"Have" and "of" are different words with different meanings.

I note, in relation to this, that my Dutch colleagues get this correct more often than some of my English colleagues, and share my irritation in this matter.

I got some reasonable photos of the Red Arrows over Cambridge the other week (keep clicking on an image to get the larger version than what the gallery display shows you).

Tracey "my unmade bed is a work of ART!" Emin is threatening to leave the UK, whining all the way, when faced with paying 50% tax on her income over GBP 150000/year. What an excellent idea, I encourage her to leave. Preferably silently.

Royal Mail is using the anniversary [of the introduction of postcodes] to urge the public to use postcodes. Almost a fifth of non-business letters, cards and packets are sent without a full or accurate postcode, it says
The Royal Mail might find more people using postcodes if they were not so determined to make it awkward to look up a postcode, to preserve their rent-seeking revenues on the bulk use of the Postcode Address File.
Currently it allows a limited number of lookups each day; previously it required a login and at that time I did not, on principle, look up a postcode on the Royal Mail website. Their current attitude is an improvement on their previous obstructiveness, but not a truly effective attempt to let everyone use their postcode.

If you want everyone to use some information, you have to give it away for free. The BSD people worked this out a long time ago. The Post Office has yet to realise this.

Edit:
Additionally their charges for any help with a postcode are carefully structured to piss you off:
When to call Call this number Cost
Monday to Friday 8am to 6pm 0906 302 1222 Call charged at 50p/min
Monday to Friday 6pm to 8pm 08457 111 222 Call charged at local rates
Saturday 9am to 5.30pm 08457 111 222 Call charged at local rates
Any time that might be work hours the charges are rapacious. If you reserve your query to a few hours, you may not pay a great deal of money.
Again, they are being seeking rent by deliberately obstructing access to the information they wish us all to use.

And that is the sort of rent-seeking up with which I will not put.

There is much smugness, especially in Europe, that the USA has decided to give up much of their control over ICANN.
Be careful what you wish for and who tries to maneouvre to be in charge. America is not the worst hegemony for the Internet - do you want to try China? The USA has been embarassed and cajoled into giving up their grip on ICANN. Do you think an authoritarian government would be so easy to dislodge? Caveat geek.

This article is so accurate that all I can say is that it is correct and you should read it. Especially if you are ever likely to deal with IT professionals in a management sense, or need to understand why they act the way they do.

Found elsewhere on the intertubes:
"... I mean the man barely has 2 braincells to rub together and at that, they generally can't even find each other to make a connection. Most people who are as mentally challenged as him can fall back on their personality or looks, but sadly for him, he's lacking in both those departments, which pretty much equates to him being an complete oxygen thief."

They don't make kernel errors like they used to.
We don't get things like
panic: free: freeing free frag
or
panic: double panic!
any more.

Today's space history quiz is to watch the video of MARRS' "Pump Up The Volume" [1] and see how many of the scenes there you understand and recognise.

[1] Notable for being the first UK number 1 hit to contain samples of other songs

As I mentioned a little while ago, AA cut its baggage allowance for transatlantic flights and now most everyone else is doing it too.
While Virgin may not be doing so, if you are connecting onwards from a Virgin flight, check the baggage allowance on your ticket and/or the interline baggage allowance very carefully.

(link now fixed)

I've been waiting for the hammer to drop on this, and it just did
Soon every other airline will restrict you to just one (free) bag transatlantic also.
Let's see if this race to the bottom ends with no free luggage on longhaul :(

(I predict that someone will say "I fly to somewhere else and they only allow one bag so stop complaining". That is not my point.)

This article about women in the US army, with 3 accounts of combat and an accompanying article is well worth listening to.

The BBC reports that:

Large parts of West Africa are struggling to get back online following damage to ... the SAT-3 cable which runs from Portugal and Spain to South Africa, via West Africa.
...
Nigeria has been badly hit because around 70% of its bandwidth is routed through neighbouring Benin.
...
The network, run by Suburban Telecom, was set up to bypass Nigeria's principal telecoms operator Nitel which runs the SAT-3 branch cable which lands in Nigeria.

But the SAT-3 cable goes to Nigeria also, as this map shows

So why are Nigerians getting most of their Internet via a neighbouring country?

Almost certainly because Nitel are charging very high prices for bandwidth, and the Benin telco are charging less. Telco monopolies are bad for people, with higher prices and lower service.

It may well be that the most significant effect of the "scrappage" scheme on new car prices in the UK is merely to allow manufacturers to advertise prices which are GBP2000 below those payable by the general buyer.

I wish to bring this demoscene demo to your attention, particularly to that of hairyears

I have very little sympathy for anyone who prats about, or damages, or attempts to damage, railway infrastructure and who then gets killed by a train. If it happened to more of the malefactors, it might encourage the others not to do so...

And when I'm feeling particularly misanthropic I think the same about the really stupid ones who delay trains by sheer force of idiocy.