It seems the fact you travel internationally is a great reason to keep tabs on you. Add mobile phones and laptops to the list of things you shouldn't carry when traveling internationally if you wish to avoid security hassle, along with explosives, guns, drugs, knives, scissors, nail clippers, tweezers, breast milk, toothpicks, sports equipment, medicines, tent pegs, children, people named Mohammed....

I had a PC a while ago that my friends called the Fish Tank. It had a UV-reactive clear acrylic case, Zalman GPU and CPU aftermarket HSFs, the HDDs were in acoustic suppression sleeves and the PSU was specifically chosen for it's low noise output. Nothing was overclocked, the optical drives were restricted to 4x rotation speed and all the case fans were quiet models with dust filters and rubber gaskets for vibration filtering.

Considering all that cost a full third of the total budget of the system, I could have got far more performance for the money, but I would have got a lot less sleep. (Or scored rather less on distributed.net RC5-72)

Design
Speed
Price

Pick two.

Good explanation, thank you. It's always seemed from this side of the pond that American politicians have had the bone removed from their head that makes them able to compromise, empathize or sympathize with anyone outside their immediate circle, which they populated by order of campaign contribution totals.

My spidey-sense tingled when everyone was saying how blatant this propaganda piece appears to them. Usually when something biased airs here in the UK you can tell who it was aimed at by looking at it's newspaper and radio coverage the next day - the least moderate and most inflammatory coverage is the bullseye, work it backwards from there to that outlet's audience and you can usually pick out it's intended recipients.

It seems that one thing people on both sides of the Atlantic have in common is that they react to bullsh*t far more passionately than reasoned, moderated debate, and almost not at all to anything positive. No wonder we're all drowning in vicious rhetoric. And I'm watching with fascinated interest to see what the NSA's next play will be, because that one seemed to have sucked - options seem to be some kind of Hail Mary reversal, some weird kind of land mine long play, or their spin doctors update their LinkedIn profiles with "Unemployed".

Hey, park that Americentric horse for a second. The only exposure we've ever had to 60 Minutes in the UK was when it was mentioned in Die Hard and turned up in Charlie Wilson's War. I wouldn't expect you know anything about who takes to heart the opinions of This Week or PM's Q's. And, you know, the Internet is connected to pretty much the *whole* world.

Want to try and expand on that answer a bit? Sub-groups, outsiders, age/sex/location demographics, stuff like that? Anything?

Strange bedfellows and all that. I bet there were some surreal scenes when the anti-NSA protest groups gathered, met their usual opposition, read each other's placards and banners, did a double take, then started checking their directions to make sure they were at the right protest. Hell, you want to really freak them out, get Tammy Baldwin and Sarah Palin on the same soapbox denouncing the NSA, it'll be the most ambivalent crowd in history.

But seriously folks, between the UK and the US, I don't think there's one decent, credible politician with even the slightest scrap of meaningful power making themselves heard right now.

Out of interest, what political groups is 60-minutes known to gain political traction with when it airs stuff like this?

Forgive if I'm being naive and out of touch, it's a long way to America from here, but I was under the impression that Fox News was the outlet of choice for Tea Party supporters and activists - they already seem to be out protesting against the NSA's surveillance, so maybe they realized it wasn't worth the shot at convincing them otherwise?

In some ways the NSA are their own worst enemy in this situation. Snowden leaked huge quantities of documents directly from the horse's mouth, so to speak, that broadly incriminates the NSA of a host of crimes they were supposedly able to self-regulate against. The problem they have now is one of credibility - they have no channel through which to put out their version of the story that will allow it to carry the same credibility as Snowden's leak.

I work in the media sector and myself and know that no self-respecting spin doctor could get this so badly wrong as it seems on the surface - there was a target demographic of supreme importance that they hit square in the face for some reason. Not that I can go looking for them from the other side of the pond...

Not having access to 60-minutes in the UK, it would seem the main thrust of the NSA's argument is that the system has checks and balances for exactly this sort of situation, and that Snowden should have notified the right people about his findings rather than go public. What it doesn't seem to mention is that these very same people should already have known about this - everyone whose responsibility it was to either refrain from these actions or say "No" when someone else asked if they were allowed had already said "Yes" so I think removing the system's responsibility for self-regulation by public release in that context is exactly the right thing to do.

By trying to paint Snowden's actions as irresponsible by failing to follow the preapproved script for this sort of violation, they are also trying to cover the arses of the self-regulators by claiming ignorance of the matter on their behalf. It's simultaneously a smear-attack on Snowden and an attempt to save the faces of the people he's made like utter f***wits. The logic-fail in this case is that they can't cover up what we already know from their own documents happened, so the ignorance play only makes the self-regulation argument even weaker as, prior to Snowden's releases, it had already comprehensively failed to protect those in it's charge over a long period of time.

While most people replying to this seem to have gone the way of the Thinkpad T-series, I went with a 15" Edge. They are significantly cheaper than the T and are obviously not as durable, but the keyboard is excellent and I'm very impressed with the engineering on this thing. Removing a single panel from the bottom exposes the RAM, HDD and the Mini-PCI slots. The keyboard is easy to remove and, although it's not got the Ultrabay system, I picked up an aftermarket caddy and swapped the optical drive with the HDD (SATA2 port) and put an SSD in the free bay (SATA3 port). The battery is easy to replace and the screen has a matte finish to it - I'll never buy another laptop without that last part.

On the downside, the screen resolution is not great at 1366x768 and the battery life is mediocre at best - 3-4 hours of light use or 1 hour if I really push the AMD A6-3420 APU hard. Speaking of which, while I may have sprung for the quad-core option at build time, I wish I hadn't - the reduced overall clock rate of a single core when running a single threaded process doesn't hit the speed the dual-core would have managed, even with it's turbo boosting features working flat out.

So, although I have misgivings about this thing, there is one massively important thing that just wipes the floor with almost every other option I looked at - price. It was around a third of the price of other options I considered (Thinkpad T-series and Macbook Pro included) so the fact it's survived two and a half years before the rising threshold of my processor requirements has started to outpace it is highly impressive.

If I'm understanding this correctly, the music labels are now resorting to re-educating future generations in a futile attempt to protect their obsolete business models. Their meddling with the legal system, constant redefinition of copyright terms and heavy-handed persecution of those they see as "offenders" have, as predicted by everyone except them, done nothing to prevent people doing what human beings have loved to do with audible culture for millennia - sharing it. These idiots probably see this as a good idea. What next? Selectively assigning breeding privileges to the population based on an exam paper sponsored by the Corporate Overloads of America to ensure your opinions conform to our scientifically proven CorrectThink(TM)?

Good to see the playground my-console-is-better-than-your-console war is still going, I remember watching the SNES and Megadrive owners fighting it out when I was in junior school.

Now get off my lawn!

Yup, just like it's always mentioned in any news story about him that Assange is evading extradition on rape charges.

Grats. Which constituency are you standing in? I'm gonna collect dog turds from the park, put them in paper bags with your leaflets and set them on fire on your voter's doorsteps. You know, just as a standard welcome-you-in thing. You're welcome. ;)