Actually, I live in the UK and what little I know about US wages comes from friends working in tech jobs in CA. But regardless of the actual figures, even if the average salary is double or half of what I said, the point was that 12 years in prison is an unfair punishment compared to the actual crime.

He was on US soil, so he can be arrested for actions illegal under US law. This is a fairly common precedent when the law was broken in the US but they have since left. This is newsworthy because the crimes occurred outside the US but he was still considered to have broken US law.

I wanted to make this point, but more so. The guy sold copyrighted material to 300 people. Let's say $100 a pop, which sounds high for someone to fork over for known pirated material. That's $30,000 which is by my reckoning about 4 months salary for the typical person in the US. But this was actually over a 3 year period.

Piracy is bad, and I don't agree with it, and even more so because my livelihood comes from software development of things that are typical targets of piracy, but the punishment here seems massively out of proportion to the crime. 12 years in prison is in the same ballpark as a murder.

Granted, I'm not an American, so my understanding of US law is a bit wooly, but somebody please correct me if I'm misunderstanding the story so far.

• The "authorities" wanted him to hand over the encryption keys to his hard disk, which would have incriminated him and this violated the fifth amendment.
• He never handed over these keys, yet the "authorities" were able to eventually break the encyrption anyway and prove he'd committed a crime.
• This judge says that this evidence can't be considered because they'd previously asked for the keys and he'd refused.

Where is the common sense here? This guy clearly had child porn on his computer - it's been found without violating his fifth amendment rights. He's clearly committed a crime and the common sense thing here is to try him and convict him accordingly. The encryption keys to the other hard disks now would just provide additional evidence and perhaps the identities of other perpetrators. But if they already have enough to convict him, there is surely no common sense in letting him off while they debate whether they should be allowed access to the other drives or not.

I seed what you did there... I'm all ears.

No, but it's an ingrained habit now...

We'll have to wheat and see what their report says...

No, just forced to invite every potential house builder in for a cuppa so they can see what modifications you made...

All kitchen units in the UK have been measured in mm for as long as I've owned a house and been interested in such things (so at least 9 years). A standard unit is 600mm deep and usually 600mm or 450mm wide.

I think it's fascinating that people think the only use for a domain name is for web content.

It's perfectly possible to register a domain name solely for use as an e-mail address, and in fact I have a couple of domains I use this way. I'm not saying it's what's going on here, but just because you see a parked domain page when you type it into a browser, doesn't mean it's not used.

I quote like it too, when I only had one card - I could just wave my wallet over the machine and it'd work. Now every bank card I own has been upgraded without me having any say in the matter, they interfere with each other when they're all in my wallet and now I have to take the card out to use it. Once I've done that, I might as well also enter the PIN and prove it's me.

I too really hate the fact that these cards were sent to me in the post, pre-activated, without even informing me they were coming and in one case with over 9 months left on my existing card. They could easily have been intercepted and I'd never even have known as I'd have just carried on using the old card.

"Wait, I know this. It's a UNIX operating system!"

Lucky we have other suitable domains for things like this, e.g. amazon.info...

That's exactly why I ended by pointing out that this time around there is competition and hopefully this will lead to a lower price to the customer.

When 3G was rolled out in the UK, the cost to the customer was prohibitively expensive that uptake was pretty slow, despite the fact that billions had been spent on acquiring the licence for the spectrum, let alone from the infrastructure costs. Gradually, it's come down to a more reasonable price, but it's still prohibitively limited by bandwidth for the majority of people - 250MB per month is often considered generous.

And so now we come to 4G. I happen to be on a network that was an early adopter of 4G and they've been pushing it agressively since they got the licence. Yet, it's only available in 10 cities (not mine), costs a minimum of £50 per month and the monthly bandwidth allowance can be used up in a matter of minutes if you actually use it.

Hopefully this time, with lots of companies getting in on the action rather than just a couple, there'll be competition and it'll actually become a viable technology for the customer rather than just being good in theory.