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From January 16th 2009, BT made calls to 0870 / 0845 numbers without costs for 14 million residential customers who are on its Anytime/Evening & Weekend call plans. As the 1st United Kingdom phone company to do this, BT’s news was very heavily publicised in the national media and online - when it was first announced at the start of the year.

The cost to BT associated with this change is said to be tens of millions of pounds, according to the company’s official press release and seemingly, in order to recoup some of this, BT is increasing the charges for some of its services from 1st April 2009.

These changes include:

- Standard BT line rental increasing from £11.50 to £12.50 per month.
- The cost of UK daytime calls rising by 0.59 pence per minute to 4.50 pence per minute.
- The call set-up fee is increasing by just over 1p.
- The monthly charge for each of its calling feature services increasing by 79p to £2.50 per month.
- Packs of 2-4 calling features (call waiting, call barring etc.) rising by £1.57 to £5 per month.
- Packs of 5 or more calling features increasing by £2.10 to £7 per month.

Price hikes aside, BT’s bold move with 0870/0845 numbers is great news for businesses and organisations that use 0845 numbers, as many of their callers can now contact them for free – meaning they are likely to receive more enquiries and sales.

0845 numbers are the United Kingdom’s most popular non-geographic number range and as well as being highly memorable, enable organisations to smarten up the way they deal with calls without extra equipment or hardware.

Examples of such call management systems that work in tandem with 0845 numbers include:

- Online call re-routing which enables companies to y control where calls to their 0845 numbers are routed to (e.g. to another landline, mobile or even internationally). This helps them to recieve more calls.
- Welcome messages that create a professional impression for callers.
- Caller options menus (e.g. press 1 for customer services, 2 for sales etc.) that enable callers to reach the right department, first time.
- Call statistics which tell firms the amount of calls to their 0845 number, missed calls, geographic location of callers etc.

Like all non-geographic numbers, 0845 numbers also enable companies to attract more sales and enquiries from outside of their physical area as callers won’t judge them on their location.

Overall, BT’s news has been a positive step for businesses with 0845 numbers and the company’s residential customers who are on one of the associated call plans - although the cost of achieving this looks set to be balanced up by BT’s upcoming price increases in April.

Though at a snails pace, the music industry is moving away from physical media like casettes and CD's and towards a purely digital distribution system.

It makes sense - if you have a decent Internet connection you can listen to music right in your web browser. No need to travel to the corner shop and spend your money on a physical recording. And if you really want a local, offline copy, you usually find and download a MP3.

The above paragraph sounds enticing, no doubt, but how does it work in practice? In this article I'll show you several ways to listen to music online. And don't worry - you won't need to download files and bother with converting them to a format that your PC will understand (e.g. converting .flac files). The majority of music sites don't even ask you to sign up.

First up : Pandora.com. Pandora is a US-only Internet radio service. It uses something similar to a genetic algorithm to find out what your band/style preferences are and supplies the audio stream via an easy-to-use, flash-based player.

You will need to register to start listening to Pandora, but registration is free. The only major downsides are that it won't work for anyone outside of USA and you don't have direct control over what tracks are played.

Deezer.zom is another free Internet radio/audio search portal. This time you don't even need to sign up - just enter an artist or song title in a search field and start listening. Deezer also includes many social community features (these require registration), a news section and the ability to easily buy the playing track should you want to peruse it when your connection is down.

The download functions is aimed mainly at iTunes users, but you can usually convert the iTunes format to .mp3 without much hassle if you want to use it with other players.

Lastly, Last.fm is my personal favorite. It's another "smart" online radio that will automatically construct a playlist based on songs you like. Unlike Pandora, it has no country restrictions. You can also install a stand-alone Last.fm player which means you don't need to keep your browser open to listen to music online.

Last.fm also includes numerous social networking features. For example, it automatically finds users with similar music tastes and lets you add them as friends.

Well, that concludes this short overview of online music portals. There are a lot more similar sites out there, but these three should be enough to get you started.

Dolphins are marine mammals that are closely related to whales and porpoises.  They are considered to be amongst the most intelligent of animals and their often friendly appearance and seemingly playful attitude have made them popular in human culture.

They are often regarded as one of Earth's most intelligent animals, though it is hard to say just how intelligent dolphins are, as comparisons of species' relative intelligence are complicated by differences in sensory apparatus, response modes, and nature of cognition.

Dolphins are social, living in pods (also called "schools") of up to a dozen individuals.  They are known to have sex for reasons other than reproduction, sometimes also engaging in acts of a homosexual nature.  They are capable of making a broad range of sounds using nasal airsacs located just below the blowhole. They are sound oriented in that they constantly scan their surrounding with bursts of sound.

Dolphin echolocation clicks are amongst the loudest sounds made by animals in the sea.  They have demonstrated a wide range of sounds and are believed to have a unique 'language' of their own. They are conscious breathers, this means that they have to be awake or semi-conscious to breathe or else they will drown.

Dolphins are mammals, not fish, which means that, like humans, they are warm-blooded, breathe air and give birth to live young whom they feed with milk. Dolphins mate in spring and early summer with the gestation lasting from 10 to 12 months. They are well known for their exceptional learning abilities in captivity, and the songs of whales have been shown to be culturally influenced.

They are capable of imitation and memorization; they demonstrate foresight, learn from observation, communicate experience, solve complex problems, perform elaborate tasks, and learn multiple procedures simultaneously.