to make the analogy even better, the video feed should contain also what the neighbours do inside their houses because they may be the thieves. And also record just in case they are doing drugs or they are paedophiles. But pinky swear, we are going to be super-duper respectful of your privacy and never use the information we obtained for any other purposes.

No sorry, it is not comparable: 1. what happens in the street is public; SMS's are a private communication between 2 parties with an expectation of privacy 2. you are storing images that may be useful because there were crimes; that is the equivalent of someone being wiretapped because there is probable cause. It isn't the government forcing you to store every image in the county in the remote chance there is a crime. There isn't anything wrong with you installing a camera outside your house; there is something wrong with phone companies storing a log of every single SMS.

Considering this is Slashdot, I'll bet that more people understand Klingon than Icelandic.

This is a brilliant business move from Intel in every sense. This is what should go to the Harvard Business Review instead of Use Case Studies that can mostly be attributed to luck.

• It encourages people who know what they are doing to overclock already powerful CPUs, which means they can demonstrate machines that will hardly be surpassed by the competition.
• It is pretty low cost, because the user pays the protection AND their variable costs on new CPUs are low (most of their costs are fixed, in development, factory building, manufacturing line assembly, etc.).
• Generates good will.
• An overclocked processor will either fail soon or not fail at all... which means replacements will happen while the processor is still being manufactured.
• By the time the processor fails, is sent, comes back, etc. a lot of time is lost, and the processor value is likely to have gone down, which will likely discourage fraud by sellers trying to pass overclocked processors to unsuspecting clients.

Dublin is well known for its sunny weather and calm beaches. Oh wait, that is Dublin California. The Dublin Airport is about 5 miles from the sea, and the weather is usually windy and rainy. I cannot imagine what flying a 737 in those conditions must be like, certainly will require the full attention of a pilot. As if that weren't enough, the second hub is London Stansted which is around 30 miles from the sea, and even though the weather is slightly better, it is still not a calm Spanish summer. More likely this is yet another O'Leary publicity troll.

Mission Accomplished.

Ireland will be a test bed, and if it goes even remotely well, this program will expand to most of the EU and north america. I'm not sure how enthusiastic the ISPs will be about cutting off customers, however, I am sure that they will ham it up to get the highest possible "operational costs" from the RIAA and their ilk, to cover expenses, of course. To cover expenses per instance they will try to go after their customers too :-)

There is some competition; at least in the large cities you have multiple operators over DSL and cable service. Eircom thas a huge advantage, though, given that it is also the phone operator, so when you request a phone line installed, changed, etc. etc. they try to upsell you their own internet service.

Actually, in the UK, most of the tracks are owned by Network Rail, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Rail . Granted, the UK is mentioned as having one of the worst rail systems in Europe, but trains are actually convenient and for any internal travel probably faster than the equivalent flight. It is more expensive though

It is not large airlines (Air France and BA may be slightly better, but it is pretty standard in Economy). BA is not charging for luggage in short flights now, for instance. However, sometimes the smaller regional carriers that handle very short internal flights for major airlines, like City Jet in London City, the airline that connects Valencia and Madrid, or one of the minor Lufthansa controlled airlines, provide 1 free suitcase, food and very friendly attendants, while the major counterparts don't

Actually, I would say a decent percentage of third world airlines are better than US based airlines (I cannot specify the percentage, though).

So let's suppose I download a cracked version of Spore, removing all the locks, DRM, etc. Needless to say, there is no similar version in the market, and the version I downloaded is of significantly higher value. How will I be taxed? I can imagine the government will try to tax me even more, because it is an enhanced version

I am sorry, but I don't buy it... You have a theory how the world behaves. You do a numerical simulation based on that theory, and amazingly, it proves true. And you consider that a proof of your theory?
I guess I will make a theory stating that fairies exist... simulate that in a computer, and when fairies appear in my simulation I write an article that I have observed fairies. Mmmmhh, this certainly sounds like proving ID.