Well I don't know.  Can it really be so hard to find a definition that works?

Or does it all come back to office politics?

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BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Pluto vote 'hijacked' in revolt

How long are they going to make us wait before they announce the broadcast times?

Can't wait to see how this works out. Looking at the quality of some of the recent Doctor Who scripts, I'm quite excited to see what they can do with this format.

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BBC - South East Wales Torchwood - a new sci-fi thriller set in Cardiff

Today I was shown a survey conducted in the US (I don’t know the exact source), it emerged that 17% of Americans (households?) think they have HDTV at home, but in fact don’t have it at all.

I imagine this comes from people having large screen TVs, or plugging an HDTV set-top into an SD set.

But it’s indicative of some struggles that will burden the HD services as they roll out in Europe. I still get furious when I see electronic stores selling 480p plasma screens alongside real HD sets in the same section of the store, but making the system spec so obscure most consumers won’t notice the difference except the price. I've even seen some of these lemons labelled as “HD Compatible” (twice it was hand written) which is uncomfortably close to the official “HD Ready” logo program name.

Guys, if you are trying to buy a real HDTV in Europe, make sure it has the "HD Ready" logo on the TV. Some of the stores are working really hard to get rid of their old crap TVs and screens before the public get wise. Don't be the victim.

Just because its a big and wide screen does not make it HDTV.

Its interesting that the IAU is now thinking of dividing the planets into Classical and Plutons (the latter being smaller but still accepted as "planets" so that Pluto itself doesn't get downgraded.

Personally I like the idea, especially the irony that now the famous classical music, Gustav Holst's "Planets Suite" once again aligns with the "classical" planets, as it was written before Pluto was discovered.

Honestly, you can't make this stuff up.

We just had the UK's ban on laptops in carry-on baggage retracted by the UK Government, though the Airports people are being slow to pass this on to passengers (what does it take? an email to your employees? Duh!)

Anyway, there is no way I'll travel without my laptop in close proximity to myself. A number of reasons for this:

1. Airlines are very careless with hold baggage. It gets bashed, dropped, thrown around and mangled.
2. It also gets stored with no air at very low temparatures. Is your device (and its batteries) approved for that? Might invalidate your warrantee if nothing else.
3. They dont accept any liability for it.
4. Most of my work resides on the laptop, including the applications that I use. Borrowing or renting a machine on arrival is a non-starter.
5. I'm not going to work out of a "cloud" server somewhere. For one thing, I often need to recover an old email or document from months past that I would not have planned to post for such access.
6. Laptops get stolen from checked baggage too.
7. Someone can "borrow" a case with a laptop, extract the hard drive, take an image of it, and put it back. In today's delayed flights it might make the original flight, or the bag would follow as just another delayed bag. Noone the wiser. But now someone can take their time attacking any encryption or other protection on the data without you even knowing about it. Are all your passwords strong enough for a week-long high-power dictionary attack? I doubt if all mine are.
8. I work for a high-profile company. Anyone looking in my checked bag can work that out. That makes it worth their while to do the above, hoping to pick up something with real world value.

So for me, no laptop in the cabin means no business flights. And I'll bet I'm not unique.

Well, after a long interval I decided to start doing this blog again. This was motivated by the introduction of Windows Live Writer, and the migration to Live Spaces in general.