Is d) going to be "Profit!"?

If you think that's viable, you're spending too much of your life waiting at stop lights.

They still beat wireless through a 2' load-bearing stone (or brick) wall. Which is the GP's point.

Don't worry. They're just as bad in many other european countries too.

Fortunately for him, Terry Gilliam appears to be still alive. Terribly selfish that, not dying on you just so that you could lazily use a cliché like that.

Technically, it's about ensuring that you get what you think you have paid for and ensuring that you can use what you have paid for for whatever you want to. These things are absolutely fundamental to a free market even being possible.

I know it's enterprise software, but you're really not supposed to shove it up your ass each time you use it.

The way to deal with these people is to ignore whether they have the second hostage (assume he's already dead, even if that's technically premature) and to bomb the area, preferably with something like white phosphorous incendiaries. It also needs to be done soon, because people regard such actions less favourably when it is longer from the event which the punishment is being meted out for. Make it very clear that once someone starts killing hostages, reprisals will come. If you don't, the next damn terrorist group will think they can get away with this sort of thing too; you're not protecting those already captured, you're protecting everyone else.

It's a shame, but being this nasty is the only way of hammering home to idiots that fucking with is a seriously bad idea (unless you can act with more precision and kill just the terrorists). And it does work: it's been proved to work over and over throughout history. It probably needs to be accompanied with a full apology to any innocents caught up in the crossfire to mitigate incidental downstream trouble.

Pfffft, screw chipped squirrels, I want Squirrel Chips!

Similar logic applies to having the ISP cut off your connection entirely -- if they got statutory authority for one of them, I bet they could get the same kind of permission for the other (if the original language of the law doesn't cover both already).

I am not sure how it works in the U.S., but for example in South Africa, retail internet access products are usually provided subject to Terms of Service, which would allow for remedial action of some kind for abuses such as spamming, port-scanning etc.

Next up: Booting all of your connectivity -- mobile as well as hardline -- through one, integrated, Big Brother-ish app.

You say that as if there isn't a billion-dollar broadband policy (PCRF) and control (PCEF/"DPI") market

And the best way tools such as this have to communicate updates to those who shoupd get the updates is .... by email. And the Daimler solution would mean I wouldn't easily be able to see the updates I missed.

Surely there are other mechanisms to keep people stress-free while on leave? I just turn off email synching until the morning I return to work (with a suitable OoO message set).

But you can use it to store energy, and this has indeed been done and it is an important part of how the Grid works. Look up pumped storage hydroelectricity some time.

It's backed by the fact that the government can shoot people until everyone agrees that it is valid. We could beat around the bush a lot more, but the threat of force (together with the ability to pay taxes that follows from that) is a key thing in making a currency valid.

That would be a very large table indeed, as there are a lot of critical nuances and a lot of languages (even if we exclude the ones without the ability to do a useful subset of all system calls).

On Android, access to the contents of the device requires the screen to be unlocked. Does iOS also require this?

(Access to the device without installing drivers isn't an issue, but the computer OS should prompt before automatically mounting the device too, which I believe Linux does but Windows doesn't).

If you're lucky, the scripts are in Lua (or possibly even one of the other embeddable scripting languages). If you're unlucky, they're in something custom...