Gladdened by this. Studies from here have implicated violence in gaming with violent crime. You may still find mention of the 'Jamie Bolger' case where 2 nine year olds re enacted some gruesome tv violence on a 2 year old kid and killed him horribly.

I wish the guys with the telescopes cop on: Some Obstacles to life on any planet are: Lack of a moon to stabilise gyroscopic wobble; whether hydrogen would escape, or build up, while oxygen remains; whether water would boil, wash over you, or freeze all over; Sufficient raw materials and nourishment; fredom from severe meteor strikes. Suitable day & season length, etc. Even then, there's a whole lot of Catch-22 situations to prevent life forming. There isn't even a working hypothesis as to how it happened here on earth. They can't explain how the first genes ended up inside the first embryonic sac as part of a working cell, with all that that involves. It is (atheistic) faith, & hope, not science.

What's lacking here is a really good idea to cope with DDOS attacks. D.J. Bernstein, whose technical expertise cannot be doubted as much as his sanity can, suggested simply replying with an 'ack' in a dos attack. Effectively you have some daemon there who realizes "We can't handle this" and says "Plan B: just send an ack and forget it" As you work through the backlog of requests, sanity can be restored, and people can then access until plan B is needed again. It is temporarily conceding DOS, But if you don't, the system will go under. It's like the lines from 'Slattery's Mounted Fut' (by Percy French) You prefer the soldier's maxim when desisting from the strife, Best be a coward for 5 minutes than a dead man all your life!

When faced with the threat of continuing legal bills for asserting your rights, the pragmatic thing to do is comply. The Net is not the anonymous place we all thought it was. It seems America is not the land of the free unless you can afford to pay for it! Note to self: Make sure to have multiple legislatures for any controversial site I put up. E.G. service registered in country A, selling into country B and located in country C :-D.

Didn't intend to get technical, but I'll be brief. The significant difference between uPs and uCs are controlled i/o, not cache or external communication as you suggest. A uP core in an asic is still a uP in my book. As for speed, the z80 is still occasionally used and thay doesn't go above 10Mhz. uPs are not only the things you find in PCs. There is such overlap these days that the distinction is moot. Agreed, some may be officially uC and not uP but you'll only tell that from the data sheet. As the vote was obviously aimed at the non technical, I was simply making the point that there's much more processing around the average house these days than most people realize.

FYI, the following common household items all contain microprocessors: PCs; pdas; most mobile phones; fax machines; tvs & videos(in the tuning area); keyboards; music keyboards; many fridges, freezers, washing machines, & microwave ovens; some cookers; Even some remote control units for tvs, etc; All digital Cameras, etc. etc. The humble PC contains a microprocessor in the keyboard, each hd or cdrom, each video card. Even mice have a cpu, and many internal and external devices attached. All non vintage cars contain several; Engine management, fancy displays, many self contained automated units, and even pedestrian things like variable speed wipers. This is because it is easier these days to insert a microprocessor and fiddle with the code than to put the same design in hardware. Development time is faster. Many of these are no longer separate chips which stand out as a microprocessor, but simply a few sq.mm. in a bigger chip, and recognizable only in the design stage.

Have them do a linuxfromscratch book http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ keep them off a gui and surf with links or wget. I learnt on a box w/250mags HD space and 64k ram.

"Normal Tracking" - that sounds about right. What you do, what you eat, when you fart, Your love life (In case it interferes with theirs), copies of all your porn, movies, music, etc.and of coujrse, what software you install. I think people buy windows because they're masochists :-).

Yes, Several. "live" Cricket, Star Trek, election coverage, darts, tiddlywinks, chess etc. etc.

The appeal of the Spectrum (as an ex Spectrum owner) was this 1. The Spectrum was cheap (@£128 in these parts) vs a commodore for £228 which I couldn't afford for them at the time. 2. In the minds of those that mattered (kids) the commodore wasn't superior at all. The Commodore was slow, and oversized. You got no decent games for a commodore. 3. Clive Sinclair had a huge personal reputation in these islands. I felt the spectrum sucked because it's basic interpreter was soooo slow, but that meant kids could program it because it made sense of poor basic. The fact is, the commodore was a computer, the spectrum a toy. I had bought for my kids - I think the toy was a wise choice.

I feel more responsibility is called for. Let's take the example that you know someone is has cheated on his wife. Do you unthinkingly spread it over the internet? You might ignore it, kick him in the privates, or tell her quietly. Destroying an inter country relationship could conceivably cost many, many lives. Look at history.

I think this is missing the point. A patch is a patch, and a tweak is a tweak. Which one is moot. The point to me is, here was this functionality for years lying latent in the kernel, as people put up with inferior performance. As soon as the idea is discovered, more than one way of doing it is noticed. Can we have more of these life-changing performance improvements, please, and how? What other potential is tethered by sub optimal performance.