So how many of his women did he offer to you?

It's just as crazy as paying money for a string of 1s and 0s in an mp3 file.
So maybe these criminals were not thieves at all. They must have been pirates.

I can't see why a domestic user needs that speed.

So that you can exceed your download cap in 5 minutes instead of half an hour?

Boron nitride is not diamond at all, and lonsdaleite is described by Wikipedia as an allotrope of carbon that is found in meteorites and is harder than diamonds. Perhaps these people have just re-discovered something that was already known.

"Did this particular guy "learn from his mistake"?

Well, he claims to have "inadvertently" forgotten what he did. If he forgot about it, he can't have learned much from it.

I don't know about the law in the US, but here in the UK you must NOT tell the police if you come across kiddie porn accidentally like this.

In the UK, possession of this stuff (even cartoons) is a "strict liability" offence. If you've got it, you've broken the law, no matter how you came by it. So, if you tell the police that you've got it, they can (and will) prosecute you.

There are lots of laws like this in the UK, and they are becoming more common: the government likes them because they eliminate any possibility of people successfully defending themselves in court. Of course they leave open the possibility that you can be forced to commit a crime against your will - even by the police - and then punished for it.

You do realize, don't you, that the airlines that say they need "proof of ID" and will only accept a passport, do so because they are being forced to act as unpaid police and immigration agents?

It's a good example of the privatization of law. The government can say "we have abolished the need for passports to travel in Europe" while in fact making state surveillance more, not less, pervasive.

the rule should be a simple one: if you are an EU national you are allowed residency in the UK, otherwise not

Why?
OK, we've got a political treaty with the EU, but if you were starting from scratch, why pick on any one country and give its people more favourable status than any others?

I stayed with them for a few months after their takeover by Thus, until a new ISP installed ADSL+ in our exchange. In that time, the bandwidth I was getting deteriorated enormously, and their customer service changed from an engineer who understood "I can see your pings hitting my firewall" to a call centre worker in India who could only say "reinstall windows". And after I left, they forgot to remove me from their billing system, so they kept sending me letters threatening court action and bailiffs.

That must have been a couple of years ago now, and they were trying to get this e-billing system to work back then. They kept on sending me emails about it, but I could never log in to it. If it's taken them until now to get it working, their competence must be worse than I remember.

Fantastic, so after you are done rounding up all the teenagers posting with attitude and skinheads, how is this system going to help find competent threats?

There was a case here a few days ago, where some teenagers who wrote in their diaries some fantasy story about blowing up their school were arrested and held in jail for some months and then tried as terrorists. Luckily they got a jury trial: the jury acquitted them straight away, and then took the trouble to wait outside the court to congratulate them on their release.

The next step for the authorities will have to be to abolish jury trials for terrorist offenses.

Actually, the metadata (program times, etc) can be downloaded for free, in machine-readable form, from one of the BBC's own websites: they also supply the data from all their rival broadcasters. So programs like mythtv get this data for free.

There's a disclaimer that it's for personal use only: I think they are at the same time providing the data feed free to everyone, and also selling it to Microsoft for use by their media player program. I hope they're charging Microsoft a lot of money for it.