Print them all and put them in labelled shoeboxes.

ah hatez teh goolge

That's probably the best short description of Microsoft's TCO comparisons that I've seen, thank you.

"You can do it online, but it's much more satisfying calling them up and asking them to turn on porn on your mobile phone contract. Added points if you put on a creepy voice when doing so."

I'd not looked at it quite like this before and thank you for your insight. I realise how timid I'd been up until now :-). Luckily I already have the creepy voice so this actually should be super easy. Since 3G access improved around here I will even be able to make the call from within the shrubbery at the local park.

On the other hand I might join the pseudo-libertarians and whimpering bedwetters. I just want to know how it feels to actually propose and apparently believe an argument that goes:

A: "Waaah! I am being censored and oppressed! Wahh!"

B: "Don't be upset, you're not being oppressed. You can change it whenever you like. Look, it's the switch right here, clearly marked and rght in front of you."

A: "Waaah! I am being censored and oppressed! Wahh!"

B:"Are you OK? Is there someone who looks after you? Perhaps Mummy or Daddy will flick that big nasty switch for you."

A: "Waaah! I am being censored and oppressed! Wahh!"

A: "And I want I ice cream! Waah!"

B:"How many ice creams am I holding up Winston?"

A:"I like strawberry flavour best".

"Nothing about the definition of censorship requires that it be coercive or non-optional. For instance, there is something called "self-censorship"

That is a very desperate rationalisation of a very disingenuous and transparently stupid position.

Censorship by govt or media outlets or other authorities is never optional. Uncle Joe Stalin or Adolf or Pol Pot or King Saud never did ask if you'd prefer it on or off.

I've lived in countries where there is real censorship and harsh penalties for breaking it (or even just trying to). Trying to equate that, on a weak semantic excuse, with ISPs being required to give account holders the *option* to filter XXX/p2p is not only wrong headed but displays incredible conceit and ignorance.

There are real issues with press freedom here in UK, ranging from concentration of media in a few hands to increasing government interference with actual journalists and news organisations. These are very serious dangers. So what do the hipster activists scream about? Mum and Dad might filter their porn so the house doesn't shake to bits from their idiot bearded teenager's one handed nocturnal manipulations. Well done hipsters, you dumb, self absorbed cunts.

"I suggest blocking religious websites by default, and any website which criticizes a certain political party. Would there be outrage then? You bet."

But this isn't happening. You just invented it. If you want to have a debate you need to examine the facts and then proceed, not invent some stuff and then pretend the invented stuff is real and bad. This is why I mentioned *faux* outrage and *disingenuous* posturing. I should have added infantile foot stamping and bed wetting.

"...censorship should not be the default."

It isn't. Censorship is coercive and non-optional. An ISP's *** OPTIONAL *** filter which is *** ENTIRELY CONTROLLED BY THE ACCOUNT HOLDER *** is not censorship. It's an account option.

On the other hand, all you pseudo-libertarian, unthinking lefties are so fucking inept, stupid and easily led that it probably does seem like and insurmountable obstacle to you. But that's your problem. The rest of us just toggle a switch and are not censored.

No you don't have to call in. I'm in UK and have broadband both on landline and on mobile, each on a different ISP (TalkTalk and giffgaff respectively). Here's how I ensured my services are not filtered:

1) log-in to my account page on ISP's website.

2) Look see if "family safe" filter or whatever it's called is enabled. Make sure it isn't (it wasn't enabled by default on my landline but was on by default on my mobile ISP).

3) err, that's it.

It takes less than a minute for the change to take effect. You don't have to spend money, speak to anyone or offer a reason.

When you get past the faux outrage and disingenuous political posturing of people pretending to be injured or outraged what you actually find is a convenient system that allows anyone who has an ISP account to decide for themselves if their guests/children/employees can access p2p/chatrooms/XXX/gaming etc. I run my services unfiltered. Nobody cares.

You have that a bit mixed up. FLAC, or any *lossless* format, is intrinsically gapless and, unless you misconfigure your ripper, you will get an identical listening experience and of course bit identical audio data (including pregaps, gaps, silences).

MP3 is not designed to be lossless nor gapless. Some encoders and rippers can implement true gapless playback but many players still make a mess of it. Lossy formats *designed|* to play back gaplessly include Ogg Vorbis and Opus, but not MP3.

I have a large CD collection which includes many live performances, full ballets and operas, choral works and so on, which play gaplessly on CD (or any original medium). They have all been ripped and encoded to flac and play absolutely identically with any competent player, even as individual flacs. No need for cue+image rips or even m3u/pls playlist files.

...great for yogis and ok for you.

To me the amazing thing is that within the Conservative Party (the dominant partner in the UK's coalition government, and usually presented by the press as anti-liberal, antediluvian, small minded and exclusively self-interested or overly class conscious) there are people who do sincerely believe in small government and the duty to spend tax income prudently. Some of these people have achieved minsterial office and are trying to put into practise what they believe and propound. I find it reassuring and entirely positive that they arrive at the point of advocating Free(dom) Software and decline to simply concur with the payment of hundreds of millions of our money to (mostly foreign) businesses for no public benefit or advantage.

It's a shame and a scandal that the "left-wing" and "liberal" representatives and parties have failed to realise that being bonded to unethical, solely profit driven (and mostly foreign) corporations does nothing for the public purse or the public good.

We had 13 years of supposedly liberal left wing government and the result was that we approached being bankrupt, handed over billions of tax pounds to greedy banks and foreign corporations for no result, fought wars that only benefited foreign powers and a handful of greedy politicians, and gave up rights bought in blood such as habeus corpus, jury trial and control of our own borders. The idea that the Conservative Party could be the UK's leading proponent of sound financial sense and a pragmatic and ethical approach to government IT purchasing and practise is almost enough to make me wonder if I took a lot of acid in the 60s or alkalines in the 70s but there it is, they are actually doing it, and for entirely rational reasons.

Hail Spode!
Hail Stallman!

There are British citizens or residents who, in a private capacity, engage in armed conflict abroad, often due to alliegance to ideologies and religious beliefs that deem their home country to be a target, and they come to the attention of the state, and other states who also fear being targeted by the same people for the same reasons. They may have to explain themsleves on their return home, and may be arrested if suspected of criminal activity. In the mind of some slashdot submitters and editors this can apparently be equated to the imprisonment of hundreds of millions of people, and the killing of many hundreds or even thousands simply for trying to travel abroad.

Dear fucking cretins at slashdot,

here is a small hint: there was no equivalent of Heathrow or Gatwick airports or Dover or Southampton ferry ports in the DDR, the USSR, or any of the other "people's" republics. If you're British and you want to travel abroad do you know how hard it is? You go to the ferry port and get on a ferry. You need some money and some ID such as a driver's license. That's it.

I'm pleased that people who train for and engage in murder and kidnapping are actually faced with the prospect of being held to account, whether they do it here or in Syria or Pakistan or Ulster or anywhere else.

So if you think just getting on a boat or aplane and crossing a national boundary should amount to a license to do as you please and some kind of immunity then just fuck off and get a clue or if that is too difficult maybe you can ask mommy, but please stop whining and regurgitating your misunderstandings, half truths, and flat out lies.

The nature of government is that it has the power and authority to make laws. Sometimes it proscribes activities and sometimes it mandates them. If this is something that you find unsatisfactory or suprising then you are either a moron or a very fundamentalist kind of anarchist or libertarian.

We live in a democracy, and the authority of the government and the sovereignty of parliament are hardly illegitimate. Democracy doesn't mean "I personally can do whatever I damn well like", it means we choose people to perform a role which combines, amongst other things, representing their constituents and also using their own judgement and following their conscience, and sometimes just doing what has to be done even if it won't win a popularity contest amongst the guardianistas and twitterati. The point about a democratic system is that we get to collectively choose our lawmakers, and ultimately to dismiss them if we are dissatisfied. We'll be having an election in May 2015, at which point you can express your support or otherwise via the ballot box. In the meantime you can lobby your MP, your local parties and so on, and make your views known directly.

"Any filter that is optional now, can, with the backdoor nod of an elected official, become mandatory over night."

That's complete nonsense and mere assertion. It is also demonstrably untrue. The ISPs have agreed to implement optional family filters and to enable them by default on new accounts (existing accounts are not modified). This has been done at the urging of an elected government, not "with a backdoor nod". The ISPs are not obliged to do this but the government (an elected government made up of two parties in coalition in a parliamentary democracy) has said that if they don't do so then it will aim to introduce legislation. It *cannot* be made mandatory without legislation.

The Conservative party would like the filters to be on by default by law (mandatory) while their coalition partners the Liberal Democrat party disagrees, which is why it hasn't happened and probably never will unless either Labour or Conservatives gain an absolute majority at the next election (if any party has a history of state interference in absolutely every facet of life it is the Labour party).

Even if the Conservatives had got their way and the filtering was legislated it would not change the fact that the account holder can switch it off or on at will.

Your "crux of the issue" simply doesn't exist.

Please don't spoil the story by introducing facts! There is a large array of whiners, bedwetters and fungible rent-a-gob pseudo liberals, all eager to scream "Censorship! Oppression!". If everyone finds out that the filter can be switched on and off at will by the account holder (like any other service or config option - via the settings on their ISP website account page) they will all be revealed as hysterical bloody idiots and empty headed nutcases and it will degrade the /. click farm efficieny. /. seems to have one of these UK censorship stories every week and they always come back to the same thing - it's the ISPs' filters, not the government's, it's optional and if you don't like it you can either scream like an infant or you can switch it off. Apparently the typical /. respondent prefers the "scream like an infant" option and to continue to pretend to be oppressed.

So please keep your awkward-but-true facts to yourself because you risk being identified as politically unreliable and incorrect and also negatively impacting on 3rd party ad revenue. It'll be a re-education camp for you if you carry on like this.

I just enabled the Kids Safe filter on my TalkTalk broadband. It takes about a minute to take effect after being toggled on or off or the settings changed. I checked that it is active by trying to visit an online betting site. The filter blocked it and informed me that it had done so.

Next I visited http://www.samaritans.org/ and then http://www.childline.org.uk/

Both pages load perfectly normally and are fully accessible. Anyone in the UK with an ISP that offers this filtering can check this for themselves.

If *completely optional* filtering was in fact some kind of draconian censorship then people who object to it would not need to resort to making hysterical misrepresentations, would they?