Ironically a couple of sentences earlier in The Queen's Speech, she read the sentence that "The government will protect freedom of speech." How can you do that when you're spying on people, and wanting to know what they say at all times? Never accept the line they are pushing that, oh, we'll only log the from, to and date/time headers. They will store the entire email, storage is dirt cheap and cost is irrelevant when you can rely on the taxpayer to throw unlimited money at pet projects.

Earlier today politicians said that tired out line "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." I didn't hear them say that when they were using the courts to stop their crooked expenses claims from becoming public knowledge.

The facts are simple, the state is VERY afraid of the free exchange of ideas, and are doing whatever it takes to stop people from doing something like kicking corrupt politicians out of office, or holding corrupt companies to account.

Just before the 2010 general election, the now ex-Labour government shoved through (mostly) to BT, the main backbone company in the UK £10bn to upgrade switches etc. to enable spying on all phone calls and internet traffic in real time. Imagine what you could do for an economy instead of spying on people, you built a phone / data network that is faster than your competitors for businesses.

Oh well, you can dream on with politicians having common sense. They are more worried about themselves and what people are saying about them, than worrying about the economy.

I use Linux, and everything in Firefox is accessible mostly with a few choices at the top of the titlebar. On the rare occasion I need to boot back into Windows, the Firefox version now has one icon where most the features now live, so now you have to dig under multiple menus to find what you want.

Get the Windows version back to the way it was, and stop expecting me to hunt through multiple menu layers to find what I want.

While it's good to read that Mandriva has continued, I forked off to Mageia which is currently on version 2 beta3 testing, seems to perform better than version 1, but the only down side is some packages that are in Mandriva are still not in Mageia. But for most people - that is the normal home user, it should be fine if they decide to install Mageia.

Don't forget, it was the workforce that Mandriva fired in the first place that led to the Mageia fork, and a drain on programming talent that Mandriva needed.

It's a clear signal to people that if you run a business and your server is in the US, the US can kill your business stone dead in a raid which may have nothing to do with you other than being co-hosted at a server farm. And people wonder why less business is going to the US.

It's a well known (documented) that the London bid team gave bribes to the IoC to win the bid. Strange how not one person from the IoC or the London politicians are in prison. Better throw people in courts for photographing, that'll show those pesky taxpayers who footed the £10bn ($15bn) and rising bill.

Just to add some detail to the "London" Olympics, the BBC has gutted their sports presentation for this event. They've lost half the Formula One coverage (with it going completely on contract end), and recently horse racing, and other sports too just to pay for the Olympics coverage. So while people wonder why for the next few years there will be no sports to watch on the BBC, they can reminisce on the 20-ish days of political jerk-off "sport" they didn't watch for the Olympics.

Is it right to sexually molest every man, woman, and child and get away with it under pretext of security? How does the USA like it's foreign tourist trade now that it's dropped off a cliff?

That is all.

So what? Ebay also did this with Paypal. Before Ebay ruined itself, you could have a choice of payment processor including the one they most liked you to use - but was NOT compulsory to use their payment processor (which was NOT Paypal).

Then one day, Ebay decides to make it compulsory to have Paypay as a payment option. Around about that time I gave two fingers to Ebay. You WILL NOT force me to use a 100% unethical bent company to sell my no longer needed stuff, and have not used Ebay since.

And so Google are going the same way. Oh well.

Ordinarily I would not care about the street lights, but these days there are cars with VERY powerful headlights, probably Xeon etc. and they look like someone has left their main/high beam on, dazzling oncoming traffic. And there are drivers that insist every day is foggy and the front and rear fog light dazzles you. And then there are the drivers with one headlight working, not bothering to fix the other one making it hard to guestimate how wide they actually are.

At least with street lights, it helps to lessen the contrast between the lights and darkness, and helps you see how close you are to on coming traffic. The UK has some pretty small roads, not the kind of wide roads the US have (if you look at Google Earth).

Dear Google, Microsoft, et al., the internet IS NOT YOURS. Take your locked down crap that way ----> /dev/null

I am interested in this tablet, not because it is best / most up to date, but it pushes Linux. What I mean is, it's not relying on a locked down version that the likes of Google pretend is Linux. It's not just a question of free as in no cost OS, but freedom to do what you like... which is not the same as installing re-engineered OS versions but might brick your device as that's how the hardware was designed.

To that end, I'd love to see a 100% Linux phone, nothing relying on Google with it's bits locked down or tracking