We used to blame immoral living etc, say these phenomenon were a demonstration of God's wrath etc,

Now we do seem to blame every small shower on global warming.

I like the idea of a warmer globe, was raised in Scotland which is too cold most of the year. I like the idea of California sinking beneath the waves, and London too and many other places. In fact, try as I might, I'm hard pushed to see the downsides of it at all

I think in this example it would be. We do have an extradition treaty with the USA (which they sometimes honour, though most times not), so assuming a successful application for extradition they would be prosecuted under UK law - just as the Lockerbie bombers were, who in essence instigated their offence from Hamburg with the loading of the luggage containing the barometric triggers bombs

The "how dare you suggest a US citizen be subject to any foreigner's copyright retrictions" attitude from many of our American contributors puts a whole new perspective to me on the US administration's concerns about software piracy in the far east, particularly China, and on the American RIAA's continuous battle to empty all our wallets for committing what are often Fair Use infringements.

In Europe we have two sets of pertinent directives, one on waste electrical equipment (WEEE Directive), one on packaging. Both are designed to make the producer of the end product (not the components therein) responsible for the costs of disposal and recycling

Since the EU is an huge market for all producers of such products, the design requirements are already built in to comply with this and several other directives, notable recently is RoHS, which banned amongst other things, lead in most solders, and certain bromide fire retardants. It's not economical for manufacturers to produce multiple versions of products, so they will seek to minimise the number of versions as much as possible, and indeed, most electrical equipment sold in the US today complies with all pertinent EU directives on waste management, recyclability, chemical composition etc. I can buy servers from the US and they'll arrive CE marked with RoHS compliance statements in the box.

How the compliance with WEEE Directive works varies between the various EU states, but in the UK collection and recycling is done by local authorities who bill a central pool of money on a per unit basis. That pool of money is paid into by the producers of equipment on a per unit sold basis. in some other EU states it's done by the retailers.

Point is, it can be done, and has been done already - the system's not perfect, but at least it's a start on forcing manufacturers to consider what happens to their products at end of life. The EU's next target for this concept is car manufacturers.

Incidentally, we saw no price rises at consumer level when this directive was enacted, electrical equipment continued it's natural downwards price trend unchanged. We just got the same rip-off prices we always have had

Yes, but does Wikipedia apply this safeguard only to those whose family or employer have some link back to the powers that be within Wikipedia? And if so, what does that mean for it's standing as an unbiased collective work

It's been pointed out many times above that their normal policy is the more usual journalistic one of "publish and be damned".

It's unarguable that publication would have served the kidnappers' ends more than those of his victim, but that is true of all such kidnappings, and it seems that Wikipedia has no qualms publishing them normally.

True, but even that wouldn't electrically damage the camera. The charging circuits are current controlled so even they wouldn't be damaged by such an event.

Leaving marketing mythology aside for a moment, what damage could a third party battery do?

A battery cannot overvolt, so the only condition where it could supply too much current would be in the event of a fault inside the camera shorting it out. Exploding, leaking etc shouldn't be a concern to Panasonic since to claim against them you'd need both the camera and the remains of the damaged battery, which if not a genuine Panasonic item wouldn't be their liability or warranty expense.

This is surely just a ruse to get us to buy a new camera every couple of years since the battery will need to be replaced after a year or two and will be "obsolete" and unavailable by then.

Traditionally the UK military have had very little faith in GPS. Perhaps it's the selective availability controlled by a (sometimes hostile) foreign power which makes it look less than attractive from this side of the Atlantic. That's why they pushed ahead with development of ring-laser-gyro based inertial nav clusters even after GPS became a reality in the mid to late 80's.

Most modern systems such as Eurofighter Typhoon use the two devices in tandem, but since, if align settled before use, RLG IN systems can even track the wobble of the Earth's orbit, they should be adequate in the event it was felt useful to scatter a few thousand GPS jammers around a particular theatre.

The great advantage of GPS is not needing to nav align it before use, it's almost instantly available. Still, like all systems, errors in it's use can have disastrous consequences.

Now might be the time to switch to lead free, more environmentally friendly ammunition then.

At the time of its inception I wondered, but never dug far enough to find out, if the EU RoHS directive would make lead-free ammunition a reality

In my experience though that's more a big company problem, than a small company with a one man IT department.

Having done both, and currently being a one man IT dept, it's a completely different relationship with users. I think I am much more likely to be helpful and flexible towards our users here in this smaller more intimate company than I was in the super large corporation I inhabited before.

Users also are different, in the large company software and network access policies were much more respected by the user base, or it was considered a waste of time in that situation to fight against them. In this small company sometimes it seems every user considers themselves a special case and wants a policy written just for them.

User behaviour can be part of the problem. We've all come across users with 40 apps open whining their pc is slow. It's just not practical to give every user the latest greatest PC on the market with a super fast processor and oodles of memory - economics dictates that in business good enough is good enough.

In the world of the one man IT dept, managing expectations is perhaps the greatest skill of all.

And because we give them away free to secondary school children.

Been doing it for two years now here in Hartlepool, in NE England, all secondary kids get an Acer Eee-PC

Free Wi-Fi at McDonalds and lots of other places, and enough people like me who make a slice of my residential bandwidth available on unsecured Wi-Fi, mean there's very few places they can't be used.

It still looks strange though, loads of kids silently munching the junk food they've bought at the shops opposite my house to escape the diet-nazi's new school meal regime, each with a burger in one hand and a net book in the other.

And the lack of Windows seems to be only a problem for the school's staff, the kids learn Linux in no time.

It's already mandatory in the EU (and Japan I believe) for auto manufacturers to make all diagnostic code information which affects the "function or efficiency of the vehicle" freely available.

Now, while the EU obviously has no bearing on the US, auto manufacture is a global industry, standard parts abound, and most US manufacturers have one or more European brands in their stables. You'd have to have some kind of Canute complex to think that if you were to try and charge the US drivers for this information, they wouldn't just turn to the net and ask their European associates for it.

Of the roughly $8 a gallon we pay here in the UK for gas, $7 of that is tax

Mine's way lower tech than that, and yet is fine to run 4 VM's all day every day

2 x 1 gig Xeon's on a dual processor workstation motherboard bought off ebay, 4Gb RAM because that's the max the motherboard will address, two x 250Gb IDE drives. Cost of all this, under US$250

If you want a rig for "experimentation" then you don't need much more, it's about running and configuring software for me, a bit of functional testing etc, not high volume data throughput. It scales nicely too - I virtually model my server room setup on this rig, and run some data through it - the response is the same as running x1000 as much data through the real thing because each component is effectively strangled slightly by low system resources, as opposed to by sheer workload, but they are analogous from a performance assessment viewpoint.