I can't find the track right now, but there was a moment from a live recording which changed my mind on Bono. He's on stage between songs talking about how everyone is equal and beautiful and etc, then there's a slight pause and he says "the only difference is all of you... have made all of us... very rich". There's a little laughter in his voice by the end of the sentence.

Actually, there are some fundamental differences between traditional hosting and "cloud" services, such as Azure.

In a traditional hosted model, you get access to a physical set of resources, where you can run your application / web site / server / whatever.

What Azure supports is scaling up that compute resource seamlessly, on-demand. This means that the capacity of your hosted service will grow to match the demand being made on it - helping to avoid things like the slashdot effect, while also reducing your compute cost when the site is quiet.

There are implications to how you architect, design and code Azure solutions in order to take advantage of this, so it's a fundamentally different thing to just hosting in a datacenter.

I would suggest these are the most directly attributable contributions of the (catholic) church to mass death and misery in contemporary times.

The position on the use of barrier contraception to prevent spread of AIDS:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/17/pope-africa-condoms-aids

The position on the vaccination of children against diseases which have caused massive birth defects and deaths prior to vaccines being discovered, have been practically eliminated since introduction of vaccines and which of course could potentially re-emerge in populations which are not vaccinated:

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0504240.htm

In both cases, the conflict is caused because the obvious benefits to life and health brought by scientific progress are being held back due to the acceptance of the population of moral guidance from an organisation who draws it's position in the matter from the bronze age.

The 'killer feature' of SkyDrive/Mesh for me is the ability to synchronise files across all my devices, even if my cloud storage is full. In fact, I can select which files/folders to synchronise into the cloud in the first place, allowing me to manage the capacity I'm using and only back the most critical data up into the cloud.

Goes Google drive have this feature?

Tacking is a maneuver and I doubt anyone will ever have a vessel moving faster than the wind while tacking:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacking_(sailing)

I think what you mean is reaching:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Points_of_sail#Reaching

As an Australian citizen and having listened to Conroy speak in a number of public forums, my concerns over his filtering scheme have shifted dramatically.

Originally I was concerned that the proposal was what most people still seem to think it is: mandatory filtering at ISP level of a government-defined blacklist.

Conroy has made it clear a number of times that what he is trying to implement is quite different.

There is, and has been for 8 years, an existing process whereby Australians can request classification of a site by the classification board. If the board refuses classification (and there is some debate around the definition of RC, but that's another matter), then the board can issue a take-down notice and the site is added to a black list which is currently distributed to software filter vendors and ISPs to facilitate voluntary filtering.

Conroy is simply proposing that this filtering be made mandatory.

The reason this changes the focus of my concern is that during discussions in public forums, I heard comments from average, non-tech-literate citizens and families, who are supportive of Conroy's proposal because they are concerned about exposure of their children to unwanted material and believe that his proposal will help prevent this.

If we really want to encourage a groundswell of outrage against the proposal, we should focus on just how little content will actually ever be filtered by it. We should highlight how very marginally more 'safe' these families will be from unwanted material.

Some stark statistics might do it: There are x billion pages of content on the internet. Australians each day view x million pages (x% of the total). So far x pages have been submitted for review to the classification board (0.0000x% of those viewed). So far x pages (x% of those submitted) have been banned.

Your child is being protected from 0.00000000000000000000x% of internet content by Conroy's plan, at a cost of $x million, or $x,000 per page. 99.999999999999% of content will remain unfiltered for your children. Sound like a good investment?