I wanted to make this point, but more so. The guy sold copyrighted material to 300 people. Let's say $100 a pop, which sounds high for someone to fork over for known pirated material. That's $30,000 which is by my reckoning about 4 months salary for the typical person in the US. But this was actually over a 3 year period.

Piracy is bad, and I don't agree with it, and even more so because my livelihood comes from software development of things that are typical targets of piracy, but the punishment here seems massively out of proportion to the crime. 12 years in prison is in the same ballpark as a murder.

Granted, I'm not an American, so my understanding of US law is a bit wooly, but somebody please correct me if I'm misunderstanding the story so far.

• The "authorities" wanted him to hand over the encryption keys to his hard disk, which would have incriminated him and this violated the fifth amendment.
• He never handed over these keys, yet the "authorities" were able to eventually break the encyrption anyway and prove he'd committed a crime.
• This judge says that this evidence can't be considered because they'd previously asked for the keys and he'd refused.

Where is the common sense here? This guy clearly had child porn on his computer - it's been found without violating his fifth amendment rights. He's clearly committed a crime and the common sense thing here is to try him and convict him accordingly. The encryption keys to the other hard disks now would just provide additional evidence and perhaps the identities of other perpetrators. But if they already have enough to convict him, there is surely no common sense in letting him off while they debate whether they should be allowed access to the other drives or not.

All kitchen units in the UK have been measured in mm for as long as I've owned a house and been interested in such things (so at least 9 years). A standard unit is 600mm deep and usually 600mm or 450mm wide.

I think it's fascinating that people think the only use for a domain name is for web content.

It's perfectly possible to register a domain name solely for use as an e-mail address, and in fact I have a couple of domains I use this way. I'm not saying it's what's going on here, but just because you see a parked domain page when you type it into a browser, doesn't mean it's not used.

I quote like it too, when I only had one card - I could just wave my wallet over the machine and it'd work. Now every bank card I own has been upgraded without me having any say in the matter, they interfere with each other when they're all in my wallet and now I have to take the card out to use it. Once I've done that, I might as well also enter the PIN and prove it's me.

I too really hate the fact that these cards were sent to me in the post, pre-activated, without even informing me they were coming and in one case with over 9 months left on my existing card. They could easily have been intercepted and I'd never even have known as I'd have just carried on using the old card.

Lucky we have other suitable domains for things like this, e.g. amazon.info...

When 3G was rolled out in the UK, the cost to the customer was prohibitively expensive that uptake was pretty slow, despite the fact that billions had been spent on acquiring the licence for the spectrum, let alone from the infrastructure costs. Gradually, it's come down to a more reasonable price, but it's still prohibitively limited by bandwidth for the majority of people - 250MB per month is often considered generous.

And so now we come to 4G. I happen to be on a network that was an early adopter of 4G and they've been pushing it agressively since they got the licence. Yet, it's only available in 10 cities (not mine), costs a minimum of £50 per month and the monthly bandwidth allowance can be used up in a matter of minutes if you actually use it.

Hopefully this time, with lots of companies getting in on the action rather than just a couple, there'll be competition and it'll actually become a viable technology for the customer rather than just being good in theory.

I'm sure you're trolling, but just in case you're not. X11 was designed to solve the problem of how to interconnect a screen on machine to a server, because when it was designed the model was very much big multi-user servers and research on how to migrate from dumb text terminals to dumb graphics terminals.

The result is a well designed stream-oriented protocol, designed such that high-latency links wouldn't cause a bad user experience. That stream protocol doesn't need to run over a network - it can operate just as easily over a UNIX pipe and in fact, that's how almost every distro has it set up nowadays by default. It could just as easily run over a serial line.

Since local machines became more powerful (a trend that started in the 90s), it's often now the case that the multi-user server and the X display are been run on the same machine and various optional extensions have been introduced to support sharing data through shared memory.

However, even though the approach taken by Windows is to lump everything together in one monolithic block, that doesn't mean it's the right way to go. If you actually look at how a modern GPU is designed, the model is actually far closer to X than it is the Windows API. You put commands into a FIFO command buffer and at some point later the GPU executes them, and you want to minimise the synchronisation points between the CPU and GPU because this always requires one waiting for the other. This is exactly analagous to how X commands are put into a serial stream and executed some point later. You'd notice, if you actually looked into it, that even GL is designed this way.

The X model makes sense. The GL model makes sense. Tightly coupled frameworks don't because they're inherently limited to current technology. See how Windows has migrated from GDI through the various versions of DirectX until it's finally closer to the GL model. The model SGI introduced 20 years ago and has been little changed since.

It's not a niche feature. Just because you don't need it, it doesn't mean that millions of others don't.

Even on my home network I use X11 between machines every single day. It's the simplest solution to an awful lot of problems when you're using more than one machine and it generally works much better for interactive use than remote desktop or VNC on a local network.