If this isn't rapidly nipped in the bud Chrome will soon be known as a hotbed of Malware, credit card fraud, bank fraud and porn ads to general users. Once it has this reputation it will be very difficult to get users to continue using it.

I am part way through renovating a property in the UK and have used LED fittings thoughout. The switching power supply does seem to be the difficult part for manufacurers of LED lighting in the UK, and is also the main difference between the expensive fittings and the cheap ones. Most of the lights available have broadly similar LED light units consiting of one or more high power LEDs attached to a large heat sink. Power supply quality varies wildly with some manufacturers using what looks like the smallest cheapest PSU they could find on AliExpress. With more and more companies introducing products into the market I would recommend going to actually look at a light in a shop making sure you take one out of the box to see if a decent PSU is attached before buying anything. PSU failure will probably be the largest cause of LED light mortality.

I have had to support battery powered printers on building sites. They all suck in this environment as dusty environments damage the print engine mechanism and printheads. Most models of battery powered printer are inkjets designed to be lightweight and portable. The print engine is generally not designed for a high lifetime page count and is unlikely to last in OP's situation even without dust. Consumables will be expensive for this type of printer and availabilty is unlikely to be long term as manufacturers do not expect these devices to last. These printers are also extremely sensitive to paper condition and quality. In my experience paper cockled by humidity will not feed. Dusty environments cause feed rollers to fail sooner than usual. Feed roller spares for short lifespan printers are often difficult to obtain even from the specialist suppliers I have access to.

I can. I have quoted for this type of work in the UK before. I went to have a look at the kit first before quoting and did so knowing that the job was more complicated that it initially appeared. The people wanting to dispose of the equipment wanted to dispose of it through an auction house specialising in selling unwanted corporate assets in bulk. They wanted to get rid of it quickly and as they did not understand what needed to be done thought the job would be fast and cheap.

I found racks of working servers, disk arrays, standard PC's as well as lots of dead equipment, individual drives and older UNIX equipment. Most of the kit could be wiped with standard utilities, but the UNIX equipment and dismantled kit would take much more time so my quote allowed for this. The company chose to go with a very cheap data deletion specialist who used a minimum wage employee armed with a PC wiping CD. Of course this would not boot anything not running an Intel processor so they simply didn't bother with that kit. It didn't have drivers for disk arrays so these were missed too. As the amount paid didn't allow sufficient time to connect up to all of the drives not in a PC they didn't bother with these either. All of the kit went straight to auction from there.

I read the report from the company wiping the machines which stated that their deletion routines were successful in the summary then went on to explain in highly technical language what had not been done and why in the rest of the report. Managers would be highly unlikely to understand what had not been done from this, but would probably assume that the kit was sent out in a clean state. The contractor had actually stated what had been wiped and what had been missed, just not in an understandable format and so were probably not liable for a data breach. I pointed out that they had not wiped any of the UNIX kit and had sent a complete readable set of financial data to be sold at auction. I have yet to hear back from them.

Managers simply don't understand this area and are easy prey for the unscrupulous. They will usually choose the cheapest quote.

Why bother defending the launch ship? If you buy a container ship near the end of it's life and fill it with ISO containers with a couple of missile containers on top you can easily get close enough to a target without looking suspicious. Once you have fired all the missiles at a target it doesn't matter if someone sinks the expendable container ship. If you can afford to buy a modern missile system the cost of an old expendable container ship should not pose any real problems. You even get plausible deniability as a bonus.

Why? Who are you realistically going to strike with it.

This is an interesting question.

It seems unlikely that the US is going to face an opponent of equivalent size and military capability in the foreseeable future. States such as Iraq that fight the US in a conventional war will be rapidly beaten by the US military, however the US faces the possibility of war with non state enemies in the near to medium future. The failure to defeat Al Qaeda can be seen as an example of this. If future foes are not affiliated with any one obvious state just what is the US going to fire missiles at? If future enemies are operating from several countries at once is the US going to start wars with all of them?

Combatants from the last century were easy to spot because they mainly dressed in combat fatigues and used equipment and vehicles that were obviously military in nature. Now the US faces asymmetric warfare techniques such as IED's, car bombs, suicidal aircraft hijacks and crude biological attacks their military seems more and more impotent. The development of missile systems such as the new Club K container missile system is going to make it much harder for the US to find a target for these new fast missile systems as it will not be obvious who launched them.

The problem comes when your colonists refuse to pay your outrageous taxes which are paying for all those wars, dump your tea into a harbour and declare independence. Your colonists are likely to be at a similar military level to you and difficult to defeat.

Yeah, when I was a kid, flying was an adventure and a lot of fun. Now it's a PITA. It's been several years since I seriously considered a vacation that involved flying. I'd rather drive. If I have to fly to do it, odds are I'm not going to do it.

I feel the same way and I live in Europe. Driving from London to the French Alps, crossing the English channel on a ferry takes about the same time as flying there does. This is despite the actual flying bit lasting only an hour or so. The airline industry and governments have taken a fast and efficient form of travel and comprehensively fucked it over the years with security theatre and air industry processes. The cost is roughly equivalent to driving there even with European road fuel tax!

Driving has the advantage that you can choose to go stop where you like and travel via places you simply would not go when travelling by air. From my perspective driving offers lots more benefits for European journeys than air travel.

How long will it before the airlines worldwide are lobbying for security restrictions to be removed as it affects business?

Which makes the advertisers insistence on displaying blinking noisy crap on a technical site whose audience has a hair trigger on Adblock all the more bizarre. While the article is mainly Ars whining, most commentary on this issue misses the point that both the advertisers and Ars would make more money if the advertisers were a little more intelligent about what type of ad they display to specific audiences. I keep hearing about the death of online advertising, but as Google has shown the market can be very healthy indeed if one pays attention to the audience.

Perhaps the next few successful ad startups will be those that can place ads while resisting the natural proclivities of the ad agency and client to gravitate towards garish and overbearing. I can only hope so.

I've been thinking a lot recently about whether predatory / monopolistic behaviour is *ever* a good idea.

Monopolistic behavior is a great idea if you are the CEO of a public company. All your average CEO has to do is really push short term results hard to keep quarterly earnings obsessed Wall Street happy. The CEO usually has an exit strategy of quit with a large golden handshake plus large pension, then rinse and repeat until retirement in the Bahamas. If the company goes tits up because of this strategy who cares. Wall street will have sold the shares at a high price to suckers long before the share price collapses and the CEO will be working elsewhere with a track record of large profits during his/her past employment. Employees and customers are just collateral damage.

Should we recreate the award given to Slartibartfast for Norway too?

You are correct that none of the articles provide any evidence that Labour will fragment into separate factions, I simply wanted to point out that the suggestion originated in the broadsheets. It is possible that some Labour MP's will defect to the Liberals if Labour lose at the next general election. Labour defections have happened in the past.

Indeed. With Gordon Brown appearing to be both unpopular and ineffective this is behaviour that all the UK newspapers are indulging in, not just the Daily Mail. I will concede that the Mail is one of the worst at this and should not be considered a quality news source.

Hyperbole, really?. I think I was being quite restrained. Comparing UK government spending levels to other nations is not useful. Others have different population levels, GDP and citizen expectations. What is useful is comparing spending to GDP, the good old fashioned can we afford it metric. Why not take a look at the ever amusing (and full of hyperbole) Buring our Money blog. The articles in the debt category should convey a sense of the debt disaster Labours spending has built up with far more eloquence than I have time for here. In case you were wondering where it all goes here is the handy Guardian (PDF) chart of government spending.

The government could have handled the bank bailouts considerably better. I really liked the good bank idea I read about in the FT. This idea would have left the UK with a much smaller debt problem and several profitable banks to sell off in a few years time.

We are going to have to disagree here, the fastest way back to a healthy economy is to cut tax, regulation and the public sector. The government is now starting to find it difficult to open new lines of credit. We may be close to the time when there are no buyers of government debt. If this happens expect the government to have to go cap in hand to the IMF. It is unlikely that Alistair Darlings spend our way out of the recession plan is going to be an option.

The best way to prevent boom and bust in the future economy as a whole is to prevent future government from increasing taxes and the money supply. We also need to prevent companies from becoming so large that their failure causes issues for the country as a whole.

Smaller government, less tax, less regulation. The old fashioned ways before the cult of Keynes really. Unleashing the banking industry only seemed to be a good thing for society as a whole on upside of the boom. The resulting bust is going to be less fun. It would be nice if lessons really were learned, but I doubt they will be. It would be nice if politicians were really accountable for their actions.

Please provide a link to the poll you refer to.

Thanks for the link. I will watch that when my home BT "business" broadband link decides to give me the bandwidth back.

I go further and view all press reports with scepticism.

Lighten up, hyperbole is fun! Even when reading Daily Mail articles you often find a nugget of truth which can lead on to other more interesting sources. If more than a couple of Labour MPs defect after an election defeat it could be a disaster for Labour. After all the Liberals do not have all the Labour cruft of union support and really left wing members. These possibilities are what make even the Mail article interesting...

Presumably you are referring to this Mail article which is in fact referring to a Daily Telegraph interview with Lord Ashdown the former leader of the Liberal Democrats? This has also been reported by the Times and the Independent, making your comment somewhat disingenuous.

According to the Telegraph article Lord Ashdown is suggesting just that. Of course no one knows just yet how many Labour MP's have discussed this yet, but a huge election defeat may make this happen.

The Labour government has been spending like a drunken sailor in port. This has been widely reported both in the UK and abroad. While the UK may have less government debt than other nations the next UK government is going to have to cut back on spending on a large scale.

Please provide a link to the poll you refer to.

I go further and view all press reports with scepticism.