Microsoft added a 'Do Not Crack' plea button to Internet Explorer ... hackers were unavailable for comments on whether this new button will convince them of leaving the browser alone

OSX is what Linux wants to be when it grows up.

Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, I use it since 95, and I wouldn't install anything different to a server. But right now Linux interface (yes, Gnome, I'm talking about you) feels so old it's frustrating. And don't get me started about the beautiful-but-hiper-unstable KDE ... If KDE's stylists wold support Gnome's good but aesthetically blind developers, we may be on to something.

But right now Linux feels stuck on FVWM95, while OSX provides a CLI just as powerful (MacPorts rule, BTW) and a consistent-yet-usable-yet-nice-looking GUI.

Interestingly, one reason that the 49ers under Bill Walsh were so good was Walsh's insight that defensive strategy (going back to when Tom Landry was an assistant coach for the Giants) was largely based on charting play calling tendencies in down and distance situations and that the best way to attack that was to make your play calls with as little correlation as possible to down and distance. That was the major reason that Walsh scripted the first several (at times over 15) plays of the game (the average number of offensive plays a team will run in an NFL game is about 60 so 25% of the plays were randomized (from the perspective of down/distance)) and the success of Walsh's 49ers has made such scripting a standard component of NFL strategy (and I'd suspect that many NFL offensive coordinators run software that looks for tendencies in their past scripts).

What impresses me the most in this case is how everyone is mocking this guy. I mean, he screwed up big time, but as some of the articles have pointed out, he managed to identify a couple of members of anonymous (whom had not been identified before in public), and almost identified another, who admitted in public that Barr pointed instead to his girlfriend. I mean, that's pretty close isn't it?

Again, this guy is a dick head and whatnot, and got what was coming to him and all ... but he got really close.

I salute you, fellow futurama buff!!!

You should always host the MD5 or SHA hashes offsite.

In practical terms, BSB no longer exists - it was "merged" with Sky, but the result was a renamed Sky with a lot more capital.

BSB still exists... ever hear of Sky Sports (which is, IINM the single biggest driver of subscriptions for Sky), formerly The Sports Channel on BSB (Sky thought that Eurosport was sufficient!)?

The operator's Internet streaming services are, in practice, much more popular than the satellite services they were originally formed to create.

And yet 80% of the service's subscribers are only paying for the satellite service (internet streaming is not included in the base subscription)...

The US also has Sirius/XM, Satellite radio systems that, like the digital radio systems, have proven to be wildly unpopular. Again, these systems were not developed by any governments. The developers/operators of the two systems have had to merge just to keep afloat

The UK had Sky and British Satellite Broadcasting, satellite TV systems that, like the digital radio systems, have proven to be wildly unpopular.... the developers/operators of the two systems had to merge just to keep afloat.

The reason the two satellite radio operators nearly went under was because they went into a few years of trying to outspend each other on premium content and marketing, just like what happened with Sky and BSB. Merge and the dicksize wars go away and profits follow in short order (Sirius XM is one of the few American radio operators that's currently profitable).

If Nokia had introduced a digital broadcasting standard, they'd have had devices on the market, but who would have been transmitting? People who bought broadcasting equipment from Nokia? Would the BBC have bought into a single-vendor solution like that? Absolutely not. And if they'd got other companies on board, they'd have needed a similarly long standards process (see WiFi) to get them all to agree and to avoid incompatibilities between implementations.

North America's experience with satellite radio (20m paying subscribers after 8.5 years) vs. HD radio (barely 1m units in the wild after 5 years (5 years into satellite radio, there were over 10m subscribers)) plainly indicates that a more integrated hardware design/hardware distribution/broadcasting/content complex is a pre-condition for success.

On the other hand, there are advantages to satellite radio from a public safety perspective. Katrina took out nearly every radio tower in some places when it hit, but satellite could still be received. XM set up a special channel (with the American Red Cross) for emergency announcements for Gulf area responders and residents.

Also, a major component in the uptake for satellite radio is that because the broadcasters control the hardware they subsidize the cost of the radios and recoup the subsidy from the recurring subscription revenue (similar to mobile phone operators, though Sirius XM doesn't generally require you to commit for anything more than a month to get the subsidy). Even now, they spend about $50-$60 per radio on subsidies. With DAB and HD radio, the broadcasters are unwilling to fund hardware subsidies (or even to give digital radios away as contest prizes) while the only chance for the holders of the patents on the radios is to get those from the sale of the radios.

US satellite radios have a much less surprising UI.

Turn it on. If it's getting a signal with a sufficiently low BER (roughly indicated with a mobile-phone-style set of bars), the last channel you listened to is playing. Want to change to the next channel up or down? Twirl the knob one way or the other. If you want to tune the way that DAB is (by seeing a list of other channels and selecting from there) that's also available (handy when there's about 150 channels to choose from), though that method also has the benefit of allowing you to see what's being broadcast on the other channels before you tune (like an EPG for radio). There's also a feature to allow you be alerted whenever a song or artist you set is being played anywhere on the service (and a few radios let you set it to record those songs and put them into custom playlists, although the RIAA got those units taken off the market).