The zoom feature in OS X is configurable, but the default combination is control+mousewheel, so I'm not sure what it is that you prefer about the Windows one.

Some of us grew up in between the end of the 'OMG Communists!' era and the start of the 'OMG terr'rists!' era. The rest of you probably shouldn't be allowed to vote.

Presumably people did notice. The telephone connection to both of my last two houses comes in at the front, but there was a telegraph pole in the back of both with a wire going into the back (and then terminating). In both houses, the wire eventually fell off the back. I presume that the previous owners did notice when they re-did their telephone wiring...

My take: "Those who have never seen anything different happy with status quo".

Demographic: 18-29. That means that they were between 5 and 16 when 9/11 happened. These kids grew up with "ZOMG!!! 3VIL TERRORIZTS!!!!!"

As I said above, just because the poles are there doesn't mean that they're carrying anything. When they run the underground cabling, they generally don't bother properly disposing of the telegraph poles: they just let them fall down.

I have a house on a street lined with telegraph poles in the UK too. The poles run wires to everyone's house. The same was true of the place I lived before moving there. In both cases, the wire fell off my house while I was living there. It hadn't been connected to anything inside the house for a very long time - telephone service came in on the other side of the house, underground. They just never got around to removing the poles and the above-ground wires that didn't have a signal going through them.

My favourite book that he's written was Tuf Voyaging. Far lighter than the Song of Fire and Ice and the endings did make me happy...

------- Whoosh------>

  O
-+-
/ \

Don't touch my Carlsbergite!!!!

Even in Finance, they've done that. Look at PayPal. The only reason that it exists is that the banks and credit card companies dragged their feet with online payments. They're now doing free electronic person-to-person transfers, but it's still expensive to take credit card payments online.

Exactly. Go back a couple of hundred years and you even have well-off people saying 'I don't need to learn to write, I can afford to hire a scribe'. You had people saying 'not everyone needs to learn to read and write, there aren't enough jobs for that many scribes anyway'.

Before he retired, my stepfather was the head groundskeeper on a golf course. Not exactly the kind of job you think of as requiring coding skills. Except that they had a computerised irrigation system that could trigger sprinklers in response to various events (humidity sensors, motion sensors, time, and so on). It came with a partly-graphical domain-specific programming language for controlling it. It's going to be very hard in the next 50 years to find a job that doesn't require some programming to do it competently - even this kind of stereotypically low-tech job requires it now.

I used to pirate games and I used to buy games. I eventually couldn't be bothered with pirating and worrying about malware or with trying to jump through the hoops that the publishers wanted, so I stopped playing games altogether. Then gog.com launched and sold me games that I was nostalgic about, cheaply. Then they started selling newer games. I spent more with them last six months than I did on total on games in the five years since Steam was launched and the industry wend DRM-happy. I can download DRM-free installers for all of the games, often in OS X, Windows, and Linux versions.

It turns out that there's another answer to piracy that works: sell your product in a way that's easy to use at a reasonable price. Stop worrying about pirates and start worrying about customers. Someone who wouldn't buy your game anyway who pirates it is not a lost sale, but someone who can't be bothered to put up with your treating them like a criminal and so doesn't buy from you is. Buying a game from gog.com is easier than pirating and, if you factor in the cost of your time, probably cheaper as well.

Give me a product I want for a reasonable price and I will happily hand over my money, because I feel that I'm getting something valuable in return. Don't, and... well, computer games are not the only form of entertainment available.

I'd also like to plug the FFII for anyone in Europe. They have a few MEPs among their members and have had some important successes. Less relevant in this particular issue, but they have a lot of overlap with the EFF in other places.

Robert Conroy used the Trent Affair as the critical point in his alternate history novel 1862.

In the novel, Palmerston was not placated by Lincoln's actions, and Great Britain became an ally of the Confederacy.

Right. It doesn't seem like a threat to say 'if you pass this then we'll have to actually do our jobs!' It just makes you wonder what they're doing now instead...