Since you're in such a remote area, your visitors very likely also have slow connections at home too. Why not cache the updates instead? You'll be contributing towards a safer, more secure internet.

The first person who downloads them would cause a drain on the network, but at least all future attempts would be served up from your cache. You could even have a spare machine downloading the updates overnight, pre-populating the cache for your visitors, to reduce the burden updates cause during the day.

I've used the instructions here with great success on Squid: http://wiki.squid-cache.org/SquidFaq/WindowsUpdate

Apparently Apple iOS updates can be cached too, e.g.: http://lkrms.org/caching-ios-updates-on-a-squid-proxy-server/

Squid's effectiveness has been declining over the last 5 years. More and more sites are moving towards https, and most sites out there nowadays don't set caching headers in a way that allows for aggressive caching without breaking the HTTP spec.

Squid has difficulty even caching content from many CDNs nowadays -- and this is content that should inherently be cacheable (static, shared amongst all users, etc).

Fixed in SharePoint 2010. In addition to storing the files within the database, they can be stored on the filesystem beside the database ("Filestream") storage, or elsewhere, including a SAN ("Remote Blob Storage").

At this point in time, it's not really a viable SharePoint or SkyDrive replacement. While being able to work simultaneously on ODF documents is a great addition, it's not going to provide any real competition to SharePoint until you can have authors simultaneously editing MS Word documents -- in MS Word. For many small business (especially with remote workers), this is "must have" functionality.

On the flip-side, I presume simultaneous authoring in Word is going to be extremely difficult to reverse engineer; and MS ain't gonna give up those protocol specs anytime soon.

Unlikely -- doesn't work in Internet Explorer.

And if we follow the trend, pretty soon we'll be running Windows on those routers!

Don't laugh too hard, we already have Windows for Workgroups to replace Netware, Windows Web Server to replace Apache/Linux, and even Windows for Warships to replace, uh, sanity... Windows for Routers isn't too steep a slope.

FYI, there's no such thing as free speech in Australia. We don't have any equivalent to the Bill of Rights (or Charter of Rights and Freedoms).

There's an implied freedom of speech in our constitution, but it's certainly not explicit. It's been tested a number of times (with the result going both ways) in the High Court.

Don't know about you, but most of my job involves Finding information, Analyzing it, and Producing something else from it. FAPing for short. And I've been FAPing most of my life.

Except that Australian Consumer Law is ridiculously difficult to enforce. I had a Fisher Paykel oven installed 2.5 years ago, and the glass shattered while preheating it just last week. No amount of arguing "Australian Consumer Law" with the manufacturer would get them to fix it under warranty, since their ovens only have a 2-year warranty. The "reasonable lifetime" of an Oven is certainly longer than 30 months.

...except for when it's night time. Or when it's cloudy. Or when it's winter in Europe. Or when a volcano in Iceland erupts.

So... emacs?

$ mysql maildb -e "INSERT INTO aliases VALUES ('mythrowawaylogin@mydomain.com', 'mylogin')"

Ah, the joys of postfix+mysql and your own domain. Someone spams you, and you don't click the unsubscribe, you just drop the alias

I even have an alias on my phone to do it for me when I'm out in meatspace.

I'm in a similar situation: I create a unique email address for each company I deal with, and each website I register on.

The only solution I've found to be the most effective is sending these companies threatening letters. Quote them sections from their own privacy policy; usually there will be a clause about circumstances under which they will share your subscriber information. Tell them they've breached their own privacy policy, and whatever federal privacy legislation your country has in place. While you're at it, file a complaint with your country's Privacy Commissioner, or whatever the equivalent is.

Perhaps we need some sort of "name and shame" website for companies whose subscriber lists have been either breached or sold (e.g. Dell)

I don't really understand the difference between levying a higher gas tax (which is far easier to implement), and implementing a complicated system for tracking miles driven, and levying this at the gas pump.

Call me stupid, couldn't Oregon achieve two goals of their goals (reducing SUVs, and increased revenue) by simply adjusting the gas tax by the average MPG for cars each year? No crazy GPS+Transmitter system needed, no transition time to a new system, and no invasion of privacy needed...

I don't really understand why people are more amenable to a mile tax system vs gas tax... Unless you have a 100% electric car, you still pay for the additional miles driven, through the additional gas you consume. The only difference is you can reduce your taxes paid by purchasing a more fuel-efficient car...