There is something similar in the UK. It's called "Are you aware we have the right to detain you without charge under anti-terrorism laws?" which is generally used to get people to shoo without all the hassle of getting banning orders.

I'm actually quite impressed with the French approach to religion in public. Either everybody can show their religion freely, or nobody can. Compare and contrast with the UK, where there have been instances of nurses being told to remove any and all religious symbology... oh, unless you're muslim, in which case headscarves are fine. Oh, and jews are cool with the skullcap. Whilst we're at it, sikhs can all wear turbans. In fact, just take off any christian symbols.

Ahh, fair enough. The US plug always struck me as poorly designed but then again I come from the UK, the land of the sturdiest domestic plug known to mankind.

Last time I was in the US travelling we experienced regular power glitches over the course of two weeks, over most of the midwest. Nothing massive, just the odd drop in voltage which made charging devices think they'd been unplugged or plugged back in combined with lights dimming.

I don't know if that's 'normal' for US power, but in the UK such events are few and far between. and generally occur for no more than a minute or two whilst the Grid shuffles some energy around.

Umm... that link is saying that £4.7 billion is needed for a Grid upgrade. Not that we need £4.7 billion to make the Grid less vulnerable to things like cascading failures.

Who decided the North American plug would be a good one for an international standard?

I believe what was meant was no external access points outside a 'secure' physical location. It's widely (although not as widely as it should be) understood that a machine which attackers can physically get to is a big problem, but if you run a network entirely inside a secured location then although you can 'get in there' to maintain it, Joe Public can't even see the network exists let alone try to attack it short of either physically breaking in or social engineering.

I'd argue that by putting them on the internet he's essentially given permission to have them searched and indexed. The webserver responds to a correctly formed request with a correctly formed response, what is done with that response has been shown to fall within that which is allowed, and if he doesn't like it then tools are available to stop it happening.

Surely controlling the pipes has some value in it? Take away the team of people keeping the pipes working and watch how quickly things crumble.

HTTP 301 Moved Permanently shouldn't.

Soap: Democracy's natural enemy.

That's the point of public domain. It's the "do what you want, I don't care" option.

We reduced five racks full of servers, plus a couple of shelves of non-rackmountable servers into three racks of gear consuming less energy (both themselves and cooling), reducing the amount of idle hardware, improving reliability and making administration easier.

Literally 10 steps down the hallway, the development team use individual machines running development environments to let them quickly test code on different systems.

I've seen virtualisation solve any problem thrown at it where the ultimate problem is that there needs to be systems doing different things running at the same time.

I'll bite, but only for one minor correction.

Mario is Italian, you bloody idiot.

Yes! Someone else who understands that you can be a hardcore casual gamer (24/7 Wii) and a casual hardcore gamer (the occasional level on the 360)!

I'm a bit weird in this regard. I love the Wii for the 'pick up and go' simplicity and fun with friends, and I also love PC gaming because there are hundreds of buttons to do exactly what I want, but I can't stand most 'hardcore' console games - especially wrestling ones - because I don't see why the combination for "kick this guy in the head" has to be up, down, X, L, L, R, down, up, shake the controller, unplug the TV and sacrifice a virgin on the second full moon of the year.