This is an answer to your sig rather than a response to your valid analysis of the DNS resolution / load balancing conundrum:

"Why do we want smartphones when there are so many stupid users?"

To balance the smart / stupid ratio.

LoL especially how he would always refer to the enemy as " the enema".

A few observing grand masters at the time remarked that Gary was not trying to beat Deep Blue, but to crush it, and this probably was his undoing...

Glad to hear it, I checked the same Wikipedia article just after I posted this comment and also Googled her name for articles and pictures.

What struck me was that there are no pictures of her when she was carrying out her wondrous exploits at the age of 8, and precious little analysis of her abilities outside of documents posted in India.

That's a crying shame for such a prodigious talent.

Yep. India's Shakuntala Devi (known in those days as The Human Computer) as a girl used to challenge the mainframes of the 70s with such prodigious feats as multiplication of 2 massive numbers, and frequently pointed out correctly that the computer was wrong after assessing its answer.

As usual, nothing was made of this ability aside from its sideshow value, and no studies made of her brain capacity or computational methods.

Last I heard, she's reduced to making a living selling horoscopes and the like, if she's still alive.

Question is, do we really want to know what our capabilities are as human beings, or do we just want to keep selling big iron to governments and corporations at great profit?

The story circulating was that Sun Microsystems was actually offered to Google ahead of any other suitors, with a strong suggestion to purchase in order to indemnify themselves from precisely the kind of litigation they may now be facing.

As the rumour goes, they passed, and the rest is history.

Yes, they have. It's called Chromium OS.

Android is a stop-gap measure, a kind of half-way house to their "holy grail" of Chromium OS and the Web, which is Google's natural element.

It must be said that Google has been moving with ungainly haste, leaving gaps in their strategic defence which may be exploited by adversaries, or simply have adverse consequences as a result of the haste of their movement. A lot of their moves are as a result of reaction to others rather than considered, original, planned action.

Precisely. I was inadvertently infected by the sdra42.exe Trojan, which installed a spam server on my PC.

My ISP disconnected my 22Mbps ADSL link, and then called me to inform me of what they'd done. When I asked for information and help in detecting and removing the infection, they simply gave me their ticket/case reference and said to call when I had found and eliminated the offending virus, and then hung up. And that was their Security department.

Thank goodness that I had an iPhone 3G to surf the 'Web and bone up on the infection, and could use my work connection to download the tools I needed to defeat this virus. It took several days, with no help from my ISP whatsoever.

I also have some pretty interesting pictures sent by a colleague who is director of a Telecoms carrier in Afghanistan.

In the lawless and war-torn sticks of Helmand Province, their engineers literally dash in and out of their remote stations to respond to and fix faults, and frequently encounter multiplexers and other equipment riddled with bullets - sabotage by insurgents.

Machine-gun damage, never mind shotguns...

If you work for telcos that have thousands of miles of fibre traversing farmland, you'll quickly come to appreciate (especially in the hunting season) that shotgun damage is a fact of life.

And no, the hunters are not shooting at the fibre or insulators, but at the pheasant, grouse and other flying game creatures that routinely alight on the overhead cables (usually power lines) that carry the fibre.

Like my electronics teacher told my class "if you really think that n-p-n junctions are actually how semi-conductors work, you'll believe anything you are told".

The scientific and logical explanations for the phenomena that underlie the technology we use are simply that, explanations. You'll never see n-p-n junctions under any microscope, because there probably aren't any.

Even if there were, think about it, it won't make the phenomena of natural processes any less magical.

All is magic...

Sounds like a sensible and fair measure, until it comes under test itself by extenuating circumstances, like someone who has a significant involvement in the greater good (e.g socially, scientifically or in a critical peace process) but not a registered organ donor being passed over in favour of one simply because that's the new rule.

As usual, this will probably go unnoticed until some pretty serious consequences emerge in hindsight.

There are always two sides to the coin.

Not likely. Netscape seemed to be the one have paid the price for Apple's freedom from their clutches. QuickTime was to be the other sacrifice demanded by M$, but Apple stood firm (thank goodness), and the rest is glorious history...

The iPhone vetting process is closer to Slifox's "error on the side of caution" method on his outbound firewall, with the default being set to DROP (deny the app), followed by a specific whitelist (approved apps subject to continuous monitor for "good behaviour").

Quite a number of approved apps in the iPhone App Store have been caught out doing naughty things like accessing and sending "home" users' Contacts - email addresses, phone numbers and home/work addresses - where they really had no business requiring such information for their function (battery charge display apps, games etc) and have promptly been expelled from the app store - quite rightly in my opinion.

The price of true freedom is eternal vigilance, not laissez-faire do-what-you-please laxity...

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter...

When "their" interests dovetail with "our" own short-term self-interest, we brand them rebels, or better yet, freedom fighters. When they're on the other side, they're always terrorists...

Conditions change, and the enemy of our enemy can no longer be our friend - betrayal ensues, and blood oaths are uttered - and suddenly the 180-degree transformation is complete. This is the folly of short-term, self-serving isolationist interest as a valid option for steering foreign policy.