And the best bit is that this sort of a campaign really wouldn't look out of place in the News of the World.

Well, it's the sort of thing the tabloids would do...

Well, for a start, 'legal' doesn't equate to 'right' - something being legal to do doesn't render it beyond criticism.

But it's also quite widely accepted that the patent system is broken - even if you decide that software patents are in themselves permissible, the length of protection the 'inventor' gets from it compared to the pace of innovation in the industry is completely contrary to the original intent of the patent - if anything, the complaint is that this might well hold up in court more than that anybody in particular is doing it.

Is there an advantage to the non-adb methods?

It's been reported elsewhere (though I have no link to hand) that the actual change isn't that Telstra are deciding to not implement it at all, but that they're considering only implementing the anti-naked-children bit of it, and not the other list, given that not many people are likely to stand up and say "Don't cut off my nekkid children!"

Of course, it'd still be a step in that direction (and, yes, once the tech's there I imagine quietly adding URLs wont be hard at all), but it sort-of goes some way to explaining why the other list isn't being mentioned.

I think the plan is to keep it in Sellafield until it's fe; that building a proper place to put it wont be political suicide, and then doing that.

It seems to be one of those things that nobody really wants to decide upon, though.

The IWF isn't compulsory, though, it's just that ISPs can play the think-of-the-children card against each other. A&A, for example, don't use the IWF filter.

This plan, as I understand it, doesn't provide for such a choice.

Ah, the old "why are you protesting against us and not against every other shit state in the world, you must be anti-semites!"-argument

No, the old playing-a-gig-in-the-country-doesn't-suggest-support-for-every-policy-of-that-country's-government statement. There was nothing about zionism or anti-semitism there at all. He even referred to it as 'occupation'!

"And the reactor design was not safe. They raised safety concerns about it back in the '60s but the manufacturer did not want to address the problem because it would have cost money. Time for you to take that nuclear reactor out of your ass. "

Surely this only further reinforces his point?

That depends upon your version of 'free'.

GPL forces the freedom of derivatives, BSD retains the freedom to make non-free derivatives.

To some, without the enforced 'freedom' it's not truly free. To others, with the enforced freedom it's not really free.

This isn't an argument anybody is about to win.

Because you're just generally interested in the browser on the majority of desktops round the world perhaps getting closer to being standards adherent?

Do you just completely ignore stories on any piece of software that you don't use?

Or, perhaps, offline-imap or fetchmail if all you're looking to back up is your mail.

I think GP expected you to have noted the adverts before blocking them.

Aren't those ones generally rather cloudy, though?

It's still cloud computing, even if you throw yet another layer of abstraction over the top of it.

It shouldn't. If the emails have gone but the index is still there then Thunderbird will just fail to get the new mail that doesn't exist. It wont concern itself with old mail, since according to the index it's up-to-date on those files.

If the index has also been cleared, then perhaps. I'm not sure if Thunderbird requires an expunge or delete in order to delete files. Here's another of those times a mail client that actually implemented IMAP would be nice - you could look at the RFC and find the expected behaviour, rather than having to guess what Mozilla decided would be a good idea.