The website for Halesworth, a Suffolk market town known for brewing and malting, boasts that it gives local people "the advantages of the new millennium, while secure in the roots of the past". When it comes to broadband, however, some residents are still stuck in the last century.

England's southern counties perform particularly badly, with West Sussex and Hampshire accounting for a quarter of the UK's 20 slowest locations. Faraday Avenue in Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, may be named after the inventor of the electric motor, but it has the fourth worst broadband, with a speed of 0.182Mbps.

The average speed is 6.8Mbps, but not one street on the list has a speed over half a megabyte - the 50th is Bloomsfield in Burwell, Cambridge, with 0.454Mbps.

By comparison, residents of Britain's fastest town, Leamington Spa in Warwickshire, enjoy average speeds of nearly 19Mbps. They can download a song in two seconds and a full-length feature film takes five minutes.

 

Furthermore, this, or any other form of technical measure, is not possible without secondary legislation being passed by a separate vote of both Houses of Parliament, which has to follow scrutiny by committees of each House (the "super affirmative" regime). In addition there will be an appeals process through an independent body set up by Ofcom.

On France, Doctorow is wrong again. The Hadopi regime is doing what it was designed to do - deterring people from using illegal sites: 50% of users in France who have received a notice (or know of people close to them who have) have stopped consuming illegally. Furthermore, a total of 72% have either stopped or reduced illegal consumption.

Applying criminal sanctions to copyright infringement would be unprecedented in the industrialised world says Doctorow. Really? Actually, criminal sanctions have been a feature of UK copyright law since at least 1988 (see s107.1 of the original act).

Asked about the changes, Vodafone said the new "line rental" (monthly contract) costs represented an average increase of less than 1%, adding: "We haven't put up line rental charges for more than four years."

A 13-watt-per-channel Class D amplifier drives two, three-inch, long-excursion polypropylene woofers and two, one-inch silk dome tweeters. The amp is strong enough to fill an average bedroom with sound, and it's fine for providing background music in larger rooms, but we wouldn't rely on it for a lively party. We've said the same about the Sonos Play:3, but the Sonos produces just slightly better fidelity. If you want AirPlay support, crave boom in your room, and are blessed with plenty o' coin, the $600 Zeppelin Air is the way to go.

As with other AirPlay devices we've tested, iHome uses BridgeCo's DM870 networked media processor to handle wireless media streaming. The DM870 also runs the Bongiovi Acoustics Digital Power Station software, which is intended to restore life to music that's been encoded using lossy codecs such as MP3 and AAC. The Bongiovi DPS (sorry, but we can't help but pronounce this "bong-jovee") does make compressed tracks sound better; but if you're going to use iTunes and an iOS device, a far better approach is to encode your music using Apple Lossless and preserve fidelity in the first place. You can disable Bongiovi DPS by pushing a button on the included infrared remote control. The remote has a number of other functions that aren't included on the unit, including level adjustments for bass and treble, shuffle mode, and repeat. 

Live at the Grand Opera House

• Cy-Fi Bluetooth wireless sports speaker

With the Authors Guild's recent move to sue a bunch of university libraries for daring to make certain works digitally available to students as "orphaned works," the latest move by the guild is to engage in a massive game of "gotcha." It started by going through the list of books that were proposed as orphaned works -- and finding one of the authors, followed by an effort that potentially found a few more.







the Authors Guild seems to be that it's sticking it to universities and their libraries. The Authors Guild should be

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Polyamorous Google Wallet adds Visa to its arsenal originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

In response, Lawson decided to then mock the takedown itself, with this lovely design: With it, she included the following text:

, but the second you bring in backup, you forfeit one very important tool: your rights.

Getting IT policy right is hard, because technology is a moving target; but getting IT policy right is vital, because today there's virtually nothing we do that doesn't touch on IT, and tomorrow there'll be practically nothing that doesn't require

I've read that original document, and I'm afraid I have to disagree.

only $10k still seemed value priced, but everywhere you looked companies were extending their products a little closer to the mass market. Whether it's a heavy duty wall mounts, wireless hi fi systems or, most surprisingly, $300 powered shades from companies like Lutron, custom theater equipment is getting cheaper and ready to work in more homes. Interested in remaking a home theater while spending less than $10k and without building an entirely new house around it? 2011 may be your year.

Blu-ray discs will be the first ones to ship with the embedded metadata, while partnerships with chipmakers mean software updates could start rolling out shortly for manufacturers that choose to deliver them -- the demo ran on an HDI Dune player -- and next year's new devices should ship with the feature included.

CEDIA 2011 odds and ends wrap up: THX, TiVo and plenty of projectors originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 15 Sep 2011 23:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.