Of course, you can take the whole "taxes are another expense" too far. I know somebody who tried putting his previous VAT return into his purchase ledger - effectively trying to claim the VAT back on the VAT he paid out to HMRC. It wasn't done on purpose - he was just an idiot.

In 40 years people have also got a lot heavier.

No, they're both evil - the difference [IMO] opinion is that Wall Street does their evil in public and doesn't pretend that it's for your own good.

Moving Dropbox data to the Republic of Ireland makes it more legal for the NSA to access the data - they're definitely not accessing US citizen's data - not that I imagine it makes much of a difference.

The difference it does make is that it's harder for the TLAs to get warrants to access the data - they now have to go via a foreign government's legal system, rather than the US rubber stamp system. The Irish government *appears* to have been less than accommodating - as show in the Microsoft email case:

The Faulty Logic at the Heart of Microsoft Ireland Email Dispute

That, and the fact that Dropbox probably have to pay a shitload less tax now.

I had a guy in our office asking why his Sky Go account wasn't working in Chrome - apparently they've no plans in ditching silverlight even though MS discontinued development three years ago - and since NPAPI has been disabled in Chrome (and will be removed in September). It also broke another colleague's Java cribbage game.

So, Google can do 60fps HD using HTML5 video and Sky need still need silverlight. I'm guessing it's a DRM issue, but if Netflix can do it then you'd have to imagine that News International can too.

It's not. However it isn't beyond a reasonable expectation that a dodgy touchpad driver shouldn't be able to kill an OS.

But they got the second most senior employee.

I'm not sure where ARS got that from - I couldn't see anywhere in the filing that specified ownership of the phone, and any references were to their phones or her phone.

Maybe it's a UK thing, but I can sign up a new account without a facebook account.

Which is why you don't keep your data centre in the basement, in fact nothing of importance should be kept in the basement. Sandy and Fukushima are prime examples of that.

On this site there was a report after Sandy from a guy who literally had his team carry fuel up flights of stairs to the generators - the data centre and the generators were out of harms way, but the fuel was in the basement, along with the pumps. I'm guessing that storing fuel half way up a building is frowned upon. I don't know the feasibility of having the pumps beside the generators - it'd be a bitch to prime them, but in theory once the generator is running it doesn't matter if your fuel bunker is 6ft under water.

Are you suggesting that chastity belts should remain unlocked?

What have languages got to do with it? Languages are just like standards the GP mentioned (Unicode, ASCII, etc) - you need to understand the language to read the message, just like you need to understand how ASCII encoding works. Using a [non made-up] language means that you are designing the message to be read by anyone who receives the content - just because they may need to do some work to understand it doesn't make it encryption.

And yes, I'm aware that the US used Navajo radio operators during WW2, and that it worked. However, it would have taken just one Japanese linguist who had studied native American languages to have recognised Navajo (not necessarily understand it, but use it as a crib). Which is why the US didn't use this method in Europe - because of German linguists and anthropologists efforts to understand the languages (the method was used during WW1). It's also the reason why the US used *actual* encryption devices.

Or accountant, or lawyer. Bonus for those who fucked their accountant and got their prostitute to do their tax return.

Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire have the most white populations, and their gun-related homicide rates are 0.3, 0.8 and 0.4 per 100,000 respectively. That's between 1.5 and 4 times the gun related homicide rate in the Netherlands. And that's the Netherlands as a whole, not a conveniently cherry picked stat that I've allowed for the US. I couldn't find a racial breakdown for Dutch murder rates either, not that it makes a difference.

I've had to use gun-related murder stats as I couldn't find comparable numbers for gun related violence.

Rely? I know people who would have read that article (on a site like the BBC), but don't know what the speed of sound is. They would however know it's somewhere between a commercial aircraft's speed and a fighter plane. So "10 times the speed of sound" is better than "3400 m/s".

Saying that, using the speed of sound can annoy me because if it's a high altitude thing, is it 10 times the local speed of sound or STP speed - at -40 there a 10% difference.