Given that WP is a constantly-edited and updated resource, freezing it at a point for optical storage is slightly problematic, as some articles will contain errors. Also as pointed out, the images are an essential part of the encyclopedia but to store those would ramp up storage costs considerably.

A group in the UK tried this, with the Wikipedia for Schools project, where they chose a few thousand articles that covered the National Curriculum (the standard list of topics to be taught in school). From there they had to manually check and edit every single article, changing media and internal article links to make them available locally, checking for accuracy, and removing external links. As you can appreciate, a Herculean effort and not probably one that could be repeated easily, given that it was a charity behind the project, receiving no government funds. That's the sort of direction I think a local copy of WP should go, a fully-checked subset of the main body of work. Read more here: http://schools-wikipedia.org/

I see quite a few teenagers with Blackberries. I reckon they care not too much about a wonderful web experience, nor a wide range of apps. But they are most certainly all about Facebook, Twitter updating and general communication. The niche for BB could be bigger in 2011. After all, web on a phone will never be a great experience.

I think it's pretty disgusting actually, as a lot of tech novices (mainly women) will trust the Next brand in terms of the clothes and home furnishing tat that they sell; by putting their name to this monstrosity they are essentially conning people. Sure 99GBP is too cheap to take seriously but novices will not view it that way - they'll think it's cheaper than the market leader and it has the Next brand, so it must be a good deal.

And if the prior 12 years should teach you anything, it's that branding and marketing is what sets nearly all widely-used software apart from the rest.

Maybe the question should be, with 12 years of open source branding, and with well-marketed products like Ubuntu, why have we not advanced further?

Why does the SIPRNET client allow full export of data? The problem lies here, does it not? I'm presuming here that Manning did not use some kind of screen scrape technique. As an intelligence analyst it doesn't follow that he would have low-level access to the database.

"Shock as marketing proves to be key battleground in war between operating systems of equivalent abilities"

Fewer chance people die?

Fortunately these are by FAR the most common data loss ailments that will hit your average clueless user. Off-site is just overkill for most. Fire is not something that most people experience in their lives. A hard disk crash, however, is. And accidental deletion most certainly is.

I doubt the OSS community will ever "get" marketing. Do not underestimate how important a simple name like "Facebook" was in helping it become the king of social networks.

Seems to me that quantifying decayed isotopes in rocks is actually more straightforward. With the added bonus of giving THE CORRECT ANSWER.

I completed 60% of GTAIV before I got round to setting up multiplayer, now it's the only mode I play and I haven't returned to SP. That's one explanation.

Indeed, what counts as 'complete', is it 100% progress, because this is very hard to achieve in many games.

Ah, this 'story' is typical Register... overblown, late, with too large an idea of its own importance and not very funny. And haven't they gone to town on it, with reports on testing etc. Why so much focus? Ah, I see, sponsored by big web host and big space contractor...

I can think of one way - keep quiet about it. But that's not the Anonymous way.

The 'everybody' you speak of is not the same 'everybody' that is the big market for OpenOffice.

It's much more preferable to the AV industry's blackmail tactics... give us your money every year and we'll try and squash these progs... but we might not... if we don't there's bugger all you can do about it.

Much better is stopping the bad sites appearing in the first place. And all for free! Stuff like this is why Google can hold on to the "don't be evil" line for now.