This is actually one of the parts of the US Constitution that's based on an older UK law, our Bill of Rights (1689) says "That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted;"

At the end of this year, apparently. The article missed out both the product name and any links to content from from this decade, but once you know it's called the Tata MiniCat, then google finds quite a few slightly less vapourish links.

I react very negatively to adverts. The more a company puts it's message in front of me, the less likely I am to buy from them. I instinctively avoid products with heavy TV marketing campaigns, because they can't represent good value for money, given that the cost of the campaign comes out of the price I'm paying.

So I adblock everything... and by doing so, I save advertisers from getting filed under 'I hate those irritating people and won't buy anything from them'. I'm more likely to buy from a company if I don't see their ads than If I do.

Ever street around me can get BT's 'infinity' broadband, with download speeds in the 30-40 meg range, but my street was forgotten about when BT upgraded the exchange and we're stuck with less than a tenth of that speed. Getting this omission dealt with is an ongoing nightmare, BT's 'infinity' division seadfastly refuse to talk to customers. Despite *being* a telephone company, they have no phone number on their website!

After bashing my head against this one for a while I found they will talk to me when I put my 'residents association' hat on, but want to know what funding we have in place to contribute to the cost of putting their mistake right... and here's where it gets Kafaesque:

They won't tell us what the problem is, because we don't have funding. We can't get funding because we don't know the cost of solving the problem, we don't know the cost of solving the problem because we don't know what the problem is. ...but it doesn't stop there...

We DO actually know what the problem is! The green box at the end of our street is the only one in the whole city that doesn't have a new type of green box next to it plastered with BT inifinty stickers. All we need is for BT to put this new box in, which they have already done free of charge for the rest of the city, but because BT won't officially confirm this really is the problem, they won't talk to us about it, or tell us how much it would cost to do, so we can't get funding, even though the council are talking about offering us funding!

I'm sorry, but I don't believe that Microsoft making spectacularly bad billion dollar purchases is a one-time event, especially given that they paid $8.5 billion for Skype and $1.2 billion for Yammer

With my design hat on... looking at the 'page of the day', I can see quite a few things that could be simplified or made more consistent.

There are eight links that just say "edit", why not just one at the top? The pictures have all been resized to different widths (and lead to a very unfriendly 'back-end' page when you click them). There's an non-standard icon for expanding pictures (2 overlapping rectangles, not 4 arrows pointing diagonally outwards), but the contents are hidden not with a matching 'x' icon in the corner, but some text, which is inexplicably in brackets, not underlined like links usually are. There's a cryptic green 'lock' icon near the top that doesn't match the small grey style of the other icons. The 'view history' tab should probably be changed to 'article history' to be less misleading. The 'rate this page' and footer parts have a lot of wasted space and could be a lot cleaner. There's no obvious visual cue that the article has ended and the rest is 'housekeeping'. Shifting the categories section before the notes would fix this, and suggest places for the reader to go next.

One question that Ofcom haven't answered... why would anyone appeal to win back £20 of their own money, when they could sue for libel and receive unlimited damages?

The thing that stops this is the proposed claim process, which is insanely complex. It requires copyright holders to accurately predict in advance how many claims they will make, take part in a blind dutch auction over how much they are willing to pay per claim, and the cost of claiming more than doubles if you are claiming against someone connected to the 4th or 5th biggest ISP.

The does not to allow small copyright holders such as independent musicians, journalists or photographers to pursue actions. Ofcom's consultation shows that the only people pointing this out and insisting that this would be wrong were the Pirate Party UK â" we don't like the DEAct, but if we are going to have it, we want it to be fair.

There are a range of battery options $50k buys you 160 miles per charge*, $70k for 265**. The only one shipping now is a pimped out $98k variant of the big battery one.

* Tesla's claim
** EPA's measurement

Congratulations, you've just nominated someone, pretty much at random, to be the heir to the Shakespeare copyrights, and therefore owner of most of the planet's wealth.

Untransferrable copyrights look like a great idea at first glance, but unless you allow authors to grant some kind of exclusivity to a publisher, then publishers can't do any useful kind of deal with authors. If you do allow this, then authors and publishers will draw up an agreement to hand over all the functional bits of copyright that acts in every practical way like a copyright transfer.

As for copyright expiry on death, I'm not convinced handing rap label owners a massive financial incentive to kill each other's artists would be a wise move!

A blanket expiration of IP after five years would have a problem dealing with trade secrets. Do you give everyone the right to stroll into Coke and KFC's corporate HQs and demand their secret recipies? If so, how do you deal with them replying 'nope, we changed it 4 years ago' without making a lot of lawyers very, very rich?

So you're saying that Microsoft would have an incentive to improve their software more frequently. Is there a downside?

I think the consequence of the thought experiment would be that we'd start attaching equivalent value to official endorsements. While anyone could make a Harry Potter film, JK Rowling would still be able to sell the right to call just one of them the official one, and use her name in the title, the advertising, etc. I'm not convinced that this would be a bad thing. Studios would be kept on their toes by competitors, and authors would actually have some weight to throw around when it matters, rather than when they sold a transferrable right many years ago. Would the world be a better place if Alan Moore could look at the rushes of 'League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' and instead of just taking his name off it and nobody caring much, he could say 'do it properly or I'll find a cool indy filmmaker and give him the endorsement instead'?

JK Rowling has so much money she never needs to work again for as long as she lives. I'm sure she'd be pissed at a 5 year copyright duration, but she would also have an incentive to write more books that is lacking at the moment.

This is one of the big problems with justifying copyright law as an incentive, to do so implies it that more money is always an incentive, and that's simply not true.

Consider the ownership of the Beatles songs, which has presumably passed to Michael Jackson's children. Copyright law assumes that if we give enough money to these kids, it will be sufficient incentive for Lennon and McCartney to start writing together again.