There's also the possibility that Lamo was lying, or that the "Bradley Manning" he was chatting with was actually someone else trying to set Bradley up as a stool pigeon.

an "invisible glass" screen will achieve the same result as the "glossy screen" - no surface treatment interfering with the colour depth and resolution of the LCD panel.

Sure other stores might be cheaper in your hypothetical model, and fanboys are rabid looneys in your hypothetical model, but here's how it goes in real life:

If I want Sony music, I head over to Bandit.fm. Check out the prices for Gotye and Kimbra - the iTunes store is cheaper or the same price. If I want stuff that Sony doesn't have, I have to find the online store for that particular publisher. Or I could head to the iTunes store where the music I want is available at the same price.

The only thing I agree with you about is that iTunes is an unholy mess. I prefer the "good old days" when synchronising stuff between devices was done by iSync, and all iTunes was used for was to play music.

But as for your last example - does anyone still use CDs? Really?

An injunction simply means that the Judge has decided that there is enough substance in this case to warrant it actually proceeding. Thus until the case is resolved, Samsung is not allowed to ship a potentially infringing product.

If Samsung wins the case, Apple will be liable for damages.

So don't worry, Samsung iPad fans, you might end up being able to buy your iPad ripoff in Australia after all!

Pity it's off-base.

How about, "Apple bans game that portrays suicide & child slavery, and offers to collect donations outside the usual rules for the App Store."

But that doesn't have the same attention-pulling power, does it?

It's the go-to place because that's where everybody goes.

c.f.: the network effect

So you're okay taking someone's blood money, but you're not going to stop them committing more crimes?

I have a FireWire/USB disk enclosure, and regularly get double the throughput on FireWire 800 versus USB 2.0 (contemporaneous standards). It might be just my imagination, but the disk is quieter when running under FireWire.

So anyone who thinks the standard is "dead" is simply in denial.

I'd make an ad hominem attack about such people being happy gluing $20k worth of plastic onto a $10k car instead of buying the $25k car to start with, but I'm not normally that kind of person.

It does cost money to build the network in the first place, and funnily enough while the cost of cable is relatively small and the cost of digging it into the ground or hanging it off concrete trees doesn't change mich in relation to how many pairs are in use, it does cost a great big truckload of money to terminate the cable and send/receive data, and then route that data to someone else's network.

The costs you are indicating are similar to utilization fees. That is, if you utilize 100% of a cable's capacity, you pay 100% of the upkeep costs. Quotas are a simplistic form utilization charge, where you simply give the end user a proportion of the cable's capacity for a month at a set fee, then either charge penalty rates for over use (learn to budget, dumb end user) or shape to very low speed for the remainder of the billing cycle.

This is a model of billing that has been used in Australia successfully,with ISPs using the profits to expand their capacity. There will always be complainers, of course, but they will be the ones who assume that having a 20Mbps carrier means they should be able to download at 20Mbps all day, every day, for $20/month. Sorry mate, the world doesn't work like that.

You forgot Natalie Portman!

Ironic would be if you set up a firewall on the PABX to prevent Lulzsec performing a DDoS on your call centre, but then a major disaster occurred and half the people trying to call you for help weren't able to get through because of your firewall.

Ironic would be if you were participating in the Lulzsec DDoS and ended up taking out your own services.

Ironic would be writing a song titled "Ironic" which proceeds to describe a whole raft of scenarios which are actually not irony at all.

What you experienced was neither irony nor coincidence. What you experienced was simply as would be expected in the scenario that occurred.

Do you have any basis for this claim?

In Australia we've had caps for a long time, with some providers giving cheaper versions of Facebook (because Facebook provides a mobile-optimised version at m.facebook.com) accessed through their provider-specific starting screens. They don't block Bing or Google, they don't block MySpace, they just provide cheaper access to the things that will help sign people up to their plans.

There are laws against offering people one thing and selling them another.

The funny thing is that even with caps on data, the Australian mobile carriers are still screaming like stuck pigs about their customers having the audacity to actually use the quota that they've been sold!

They play for fun, not grinding.

I have hidden the address bar on my browsers for many years. Command+L to reveal it so I can type in a new location, or Command+Space, search term, tab, "Bing" and off we go to the search results...