I've rarely, if ever, had a good reason to encrypt my email. I think the largest number of encrypted emails I ever sent was on a "crash Echelon" day back in the late 90's, which was hardly a good reason. ;-)

I used to sign almost all my non-list emails. (Mailing list software sometimes didn't like signed messages.)
But the problem with signing is that some very dumb (usually big business or government) mail gateways would see the PGP/GPG lines and assume encryption, even though it was just a signature. That meant my mails were being blocked regularly "due to encrypted content", which was a PITA for both me and my recipients to deal with.

Frankly, because of those kinds of issues, I gave up even signing my emails.

I would still sign or encrypt if there was a good reason to, but given my email usage I think signing is more likely than encrypting. And even that would be fairly rare.

It seems that this is hideously lopsided. One out of the six speakers being openly against the bill is an outrage!

Given how much has no doubt been paid by companies for their representation, that sixth person is a bit of a slap in the face. They should take action immediately, and refuse to pay their representatives.

(More seriously, American politics is becoming a textbook on how not to represent the people.)

As others have said, they offer this as an option, but nothing more.

The clock can be set incorrectly, the sending number set incorrectly, and all sorts. (These we call a TSI - Transmitted Subscriber Identification.)

I'm managing a fax system that handles around 100,000 faxes a week (I work for a large financial insitution). If the sender's number in the TSI was even remotely useable, we'd be able to route faxes on it - but is just isn't. Something like 50% of all faxes we receive - often from large household financial names that should know better - have a junk TSI.
That's 50% of volume, by the way. When we break it down to senders, it's well over 75% incorrect.

So whilst in theory we could route faxes via TSI, in practice we route faxes via the inbound number that the sender dialled. Nothing else is reliable or usable for routing faxes to their destination mailbox/application/printer.

If you go all VOIP, then you'll find there's a FOIP standard too - Fax Over IP went through just the same reliability/complexity/dependability curve as VOIP did, and just like VOIP has recently become something that's well supported and reliable enough to be useful in business.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FoIP, which redirects to the page about the T.38 standard which FOIP has pretty much settled on worldwide. (Like VOIP, there were a few competitors for transport standards when FOIP was being born.)

So fax will continue even when the analogue telephone lines die.

As for outsourcing faxing - maybe. But many companies have legal obligations that won't allow their data to go off to some cloud which, inevitably, will end up run from a jurisdiction that they can't countenance. Plus it removes the amount of control you have over backups of sent/received faxes, blacklisting, esoteric routing and so forth.

If fax is just a small part of your business, then who cares? The outsourcing is attractive at first, but people will end up just sending a PDF by email if they can.

If you need faxing in your business, for some legal reason (e.g. it's the legally proven contract medium in your business line), then you need fax anyway, and having your own fax system will still be very attractive, if only because handing such a critical resource across to someone else isn't good business smarts.

I didn't know about the radiofaxes - that's my something new learned today, thanks! :-)

No, we just have copyright laws that have no concept of fair use.

Therefore we can't time or format shift, can't use copyrighted material in parodies or for other works without getting permission from the copyright holder, and so forth.

Nobody ever prosecuted anyone on these issues unless it was blatantly criminal activity (e.g. selling dodgy copies on a market stall). But ignorance of the law is no excuse, and under these laws about 95% of all UK citizens are criminals. I doubt you'll find anyone alive since the 80's that hasn't copied music to tape for listening in a car/walkman, recorded something to videotape for later viewing, ripped music from a CD as an MP3/AAC file, and so forth. It's just become one of those laws that's there but nobody cares about.

I've not checked the proposed changes, but I suspect that it's a fairly broad - and long overdue - attempt to introduce a more US-like set of exceptions. I doubt that we will be allowed to legally circumvent DRM, though - that would be a step too far for the corporate lobbyists.

People are just reporting the "legal to copy a CD" thing because it's attention grabbing. Most readers will look at the headline and wonder what it's on about, as they didn't know it was illegal...

"Some of you may have noticed if you've tried to drink during the course of the last few years that your drinking water is now natural gas. That's because we've been doing invisible drilling in your area, which is turning your drinking water into natural gas. Don't worry, that just means it's working."
- Frack Johnson

*coughs*

Your timeline is wrong. Creative's first MP3 player was a full two years after the first commercially available MP3 player, maybe even three.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3_player

The first was announced in 1997, but I'm not sure when it shipped - hence saying two years, to be generous to your good self.

My first MP3 player was a Diamond Rio 500, which shipped in 1999, the year before Creative's entry to the market. It had a USB connection, which was much faster than its predecessor's serial connection. And a whopping 64Mb of internal memory meant you could fit two whole albums on it (at 128kbp/s using VBR, assuming they weren't long albums). Plus the SmartMedia slot allowed for another 32 or 64Mb of storage. I seem to recall I had a fancy leather older for mine, which held a spare SmartMedia card, meaning I had two permanent albums and then a choice of two cards, each holding two more albums.

And I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.

*ahem*

Anyway, Apple did have a chicken and egg dilemma. The original iPod shipped in 2001, and iTunes wasn't a store then. Heck, the initial first generation of iPod wasn't even Windows compatible - the first revision to (1a) shipped in 2002, and was Windows compatible because it shipped with the 3rd party MusicMatch software, which was replaced by iTunes in the third generation (shipping in 2003).

iTunes became a music store in 2003, meaning that Apple shipped iPods for two years and expected customers to rip their own CDs.

For what it's worth, I don't necessarily disagree with your premise - that old publishers are dying, because retailers/manufacturers (Amazon/Apple) are cutting out what they view as an unnecessary middleman.

But your supporting facts aren't historically correct, and perhaps those supporting facts show why Apple/Amazon have taken the iTunes/Kindle road - because they saw how bad the middlemen were and decided to circumvent them.

VMware can grow disks. If I were doing this, I'd start out with a ~400Mb disk and grow it from there. MS-DOS 5 could cope with that, and the first time you'd need to grow the disk would probably be at around the Windows 2000/Windows XP install stage I think.

(In this case, it probably requires a bootable Linux distro for resizing the partitions on the virtual hardware disk though.)

VMware can also change the RAM available, too. Again, start small and grow bigger as you go. Whilst I haven't tried something as extreme as this, I've often created a small image (say a 5Gb to 10Gb disk and 256Mb of RAM) when evaluating a distro, only to extend either the RAM or storage at a later date. It's a minor faff, but quite doable...

The City of London won't like it for similar reasons.

Various exchanges open at 07:00 around the world, local time. Which gives London a 1 hour edge on the rest of Europe for trading.
Combine that with your observations on scheduling, and the fact that we speak English, and you've got the three reasons as to why London is treated as the "gateway to Europe" by many businesses.

Get rid of that, and you have to ask why you wouldn't just deal through somewhere like Madrid...

Risk management.

Every change is a potential new bug. Even your security patch may bring a new security issue.

You test and you test and you test, but nothing's certain in the eyes of management. So the shipping is delayed, the testing continues, and eventually you have a batch of bugfixes and patches you're fairly certain works well together. Traditionally, you call that collection a service pack, and you ship... ;-)

(Remember the blue-screen problems a Microsoft patch caused some folks a while back? That was embarrassing. So don't kid yourself that this isn't risky.)

This is also why companies prefer to move to an established "cadence" or rhythm. Monthly security patching is Microsoft's preference, for example. IBM has some software divisions which keep to a four or six month "point release" shipping schedule. Not good enough for v9.0.2? Well, it'll probably be in v9.0.3in six month's time...

That cadence helps with testing, and reduces the risk you're taking, and therefore helps to preserve your reputation and therefore your business.

Open source projects often just ship "when it's ready", and are more open anyway. They're not thinking like a company which is trying to manage its reputation and maximise business (well, profits really).

An open source project just wants to ship something that's reliably usable and useful. That changes their motivations, and therefore changes their management of patching and shipping...

Please define "cannot sustain itself". The only evidence you provided is residence owenrship rates, which is not a valid comparison within the topic of debate.

Property markets vary worldwide, not just due to demand or supply, but also due to the local legal frameworks. North Continental Europe tends (as a generalisation across its many countries) to give a fair amount of rights to those renting. Redecorating, for example, is a right that my Continental neighbours have which as a UK resident I don't have as easily. If a UK renter wants to redecorate, they usually have to seek their landlord's approval - but if they were living in France, they wouldn't.

With greater rights and protection for tenants, many people in Germany and its neighbours probably never feel as great a need to own property. It's a simple trade-off - you own it, you get benefits like equity, but have to deal with all problems with the property. Don't own it, and you never get equity but your landlord has responsibilities.
Now, in the UK, we have more restrictions as renters so ownership is more attractive. But in Germany or France, my understanding is that the better protection of tenants means that ownership is less attractive. Not unattractive - just not as attractive as in other territories.

So residence ownership isn't a good statistic to compare, as it has reasons beyond city design or population sustainability.

Although to be clear, I don't understand what either residence ownership or population sustainability have to do with the conversation here either. It seems like you're just clutching at straws to justify the American city design of Suburban Sprawl, rather than attempting to understand how other countries that are more land-constrained have dealt with the issue of city growth and the transport requirements it brings...

(See? We got back on topic!)

Just so I'm clear on this... Your solution to "Fuel is getting more expensive, at some point I may not be able to commute" will be "I need to buy a new car".

Hmmm.

I think I'm beginning to see why America has such a large deficit...

I think you'll find it's giving significant advantage.

To the bank accounts of Intel and AMD, as it's giving people (often gamers) a "reason to upgrade"... ;-)

Generally, though, I'd agree with you.

When I last bought a machine, it was before the time of Windows 7. 64-bit was an option, but not a good one. So I went with 32-bit and 4Gb of RAM, mostly because of reasons I suspect you'd agree with:
a) For playing games under Windows, I lose nothing. A 768Mb graphics card means I lose 768Mb of RAM under Windows, but the game itself can only use 2Gb and that still leaves 1.3Gb for the OS to play in for disk cache. What's the problem?
b) For doing anything productive I use Linux, where PAE allows all 4Gb to be used with no RAM loss, and no noticable performance hit.
c) 64-bit Windows XP was utter crud, mostly because of driver issues.

64-bit is inevitable, but I wonder how many people will actually use it that much. People editing video at home stand more chance than the average gamer of using >4Gb. Try telling that to a gamer, though. ;-)

I like my physical media.

For music, and movies, and so forth, anyway. It gives me freedom, to some degree. For instance, my collection of CDs is reasonable (500+), and some of them haven't been MP3'd yet. But worse, some were MP3'd years ago, at a low bit rate because when your player only has 64Mb of storage (yes, MEGAbytes - a Diamond Rio 500 - look it up!) you have to compromise a little.

I'm now slowly going through them and re-ripping at a much higher bitrate. In that scenario, having media wins.

However, I'm racking my brains trying to think why I'd want the media for games.

I had the media for games a while ago, and it was a PITA. I then bought the iD Complete Pack on Steam - every iD game up to that point. I still had my media for old iD games like Quake III and Quake III Arena, but installing via Steam was much easier. No mucking about with CDs, no hunting through packaging trying to find what the serial number's written on... And no having to find and download the patches, then install them - sometimes in a specific order.

With Steam and no physical media, I just download, copy the serial number, and go!

It's not like a re-install from original media would allow higher quality. Just more hassle.

I did once have an attachment to the original media for my games. Not any more. Not since I had to rebuild a machine and had to go off finding patches, hunt for lost manuals with serial numbers in them, and deal with scratched media. When I had a brand new machine later on, I just shuddered at the thought of the pain and time the physical media route would take. Then I saw the Complete Pack on Steam, and got my wallet out.

I can still just about see a point to having the media for music and video materials. But that's partly because backing up virtual only media (especially video) can take terabytes once you've got a reasonable collection. And partly because I'm loathe to do any encoding at anything but a very high quality level, as I've learnt my lesson!

I suspect that by the time I'm halfway through re-encoding my CDs, I'll be contemplating whether it's not just better to go looking at how much they'd cost to buy from Amazon or wherever... It may not stop me from re-encoding, but it might convince me it's not worth buying the physical media for my new music purchases any more...

Sad but true. It'll be the end of an era.

One final sad thought on the end of eras... I remember when albums had two sides. But right now it looks like I will have to explain to my children (well, my mates' children) that we once bought songs in bundles called Albums, on which the artists had sometimes painstakingly arranged songs into a specific order, for a certain effect. And that part of the pleasure of listening was to play the album, in order, to get that effect.

Ye gods, I feel old now.