Sideswipe: Space station data cheaper than texts

A particularly apt Air NZ cup. Photo / Supplied

On a flight back to Auckland from Brisbane yesterday, Michelle from Point Chevalier noticed the illustrations on her Air NZ paper cup showed a plane flying below an ash cloud from an erupting volcano.

True cost of texting

Dan Sadgrove thinks the cost of text messages is ridiculous: "According to Nigel Bannister, a scientist at the University of Leicester, sending a text message can be up to four times more expensive than downloading the same amount of data from the Hubble Space Telescope. A text message can be 160 characters, equalling 160 bytes (actually 140 bytes - 160 7-bit characters, so the figures that follow are conservative). Given that a text message costs roughly 20c to send, some simple arithmetic can be used to work out how much it costs per megabyte:

$0.20 / 160 = $0.00125 per byte

$0.00125 x 1024 = $1.28 per kilobyte

$1.28 x 1024 = $1311 per megabyte

If we had to pay text message bandwidth rates for home or office internet connections: downloading a 4Mb song would cost $5244.00, a 500Mb TV episode would cost $655,500 and downloading a 1Gb movie, $1,342,464." Source: http://www.physorg.com

Right rego but off road

"Me too!" says Elaine. "I was seen driving in an unsafe manner while talking on my cellphone in Wellington (I live in Northland and haven't been even close to Wellington for at least eight years). The only correct info in the letter was that I am the registered owner of the car but the car they are referring to is on exempt registration while undergoing restoration - no motor, gearbox. All tucked up safely in its shed in Northland. Surely the exempt registration for this 1962 car may have raised a few flags for the police. Their response to my letter? '... accept that your vehicle has been incorrectly identified ... in a small number of cases complainants report wrong detail. A copy of your letter will be placed on file to provide a record of mistaken identity'. So now they have a file on me and I wasn't even there."

Waste of police resources

Neil Vernon says The Community Road Watch Programme is a waste of police resources and the Government could save the taxpayer thousands of dollars by stopping it.

"I was able to prove, using GPS tracking, that a complaint was made to support a false insurance claim. The only response received from the police was to say that my letter had been filed. Any further letters I receive from this programme will be filed in the rubbish bin."

Credit for Banks

"True, John Banks' photo did not appear in City Scene this week," writes Councillor Graeme Easte. "But there was a story on page 3 crediting him with 'officially opening' the new Grafton rail station. This is not true. He was one of six speakers but the opening and ribbon cutting was performed by the Minister of Transport. City Scene has had a history in this last term of excessively quoting the Mayor and his henchmen to the most total exclusion of the rest of us."

Downfall's downfall

The Hitler "Downfall" parody videos have been told to take them down by the copyright owners, resulting in their removal from YouTube.

The Downfall parodies are a well-established part of online culture and follow a familiar format: fake subtitles over a scene of Hitler throwing a tantrum in his bunker from the 2004 film Der Untergang (Downfall). The copyright claim is being filed on behalf of Constantin Films, the German company that owns rights to the film. The Downfall format has been used to mock many things including ACT On Campus President Rick Giles' global warming nay saying. Source: Open Video Alliance