The Asus has to make money on that, Google has to make money on that and the retailer has to make money on that. The only reason Google are making such a big thing about buying from their Play Store is so they can claw back a little more money.

Because they know the equations for their ridiculously complicated physics stuff, and most physicists are expected to be literate with computer programming. I have two PhD friends, both in Physics (meteorology and cosmology) who are now both hardcore coders due to their training.

I wish I hadn't used all my mod points this afternoon...

If the EU is looking to fund it's support for failing Eurozone countries with Anti-Trust fines then we're in a worse shape than I thought. Does Google have 1trillion Euro in cash?

But I don't see why a company in the VPN market can not come up with a simple consumer product that would encrypt a users traffic. There has been some proliferation of this type of idea for users of public WiFi connections, ie a one-click third party app that anonymises internet traffic. I can see a market for this type of product if enough of a buzz is made about it. Of course this just draws attention to a nice little work-around that we have, and might focus attention on combating it, but judging by how cack-handed governments are when it comes it this area, I doubt it.

I already use a lightly encrypted and anonymised VPN service to avoid traffic shaping when watching movies and playing games, and when accessing US services, all this would do is make me plug my service directly into my router, instead of just activating it when I needed it. All these laws will do is force more people to go down this road, I'm not doing anything wrong, but I also don't want Johnny Government looking over my shoulder at everything I do.

Depends if you are taking a Sociological or Anthropological view of race.

Sure they are, they share many characteristics of being a race, similar cultural background, they share a Celtic background with the Scottish, Cornish, welsh and French, shared language in Irish Gaelic, small geographic ancestry from the west of Europe, and distinct physical appearance, they are all small, red headed drunks with a perchance for green and pots of gold.

It was a local man that told the US students about how the sea "washed" a 78 tonne boulder up onto the beach. I would suggest the locals knew this happened and just didn't care or bother to work out why. Occasionally a storm will blow sea-weed from the beach 2 miles to my front door during a storm, so I assume that's normal because it always happens. Their rocks are just a bit bigger :D

The only way to make any of these ID's secure is to have them linked to faces and biometrics, which are quickly accessible, and require both human and computer verifications. eg, put your thumb here Mr Up-To-Know-Good and let me check the fingerprints we have had on file since you were born, along with the drivers licence and passport we have on file for you, and any other data we have kept on you over the years. My problem with this system is, you can't have one without the other, and do we really want the other?

I live in a town of 14k people and we have just moved to 8Mb broadband speeds, the closest City, of around 250k people moved to 20Mb a year or so ago. There is no estimated date for my town to get access to BT's fibre network or Virgin's Cable network even if it ever comes to the City 13 miles away. I would not consider myself rural, im an hour's drive from the capital and 10 minutes drive from one of the major oil ports in the north sea. I'm in Scotland BTW, and the busy side, not the mountains, blue ocean, and unhappy crofters side.