People need to learn how to use English correctly, informally or not. "Should of" does not read correctly nor does it enhance understanding, therefore it is nonsensical to use it. Informal usage should not transfer to the written word. As far as I can gather the usage comes from ill-educated people that spell phonetically with unusual accents such as Essex English. I consider it close to txt spk for parsing ease when reading, and the poor use of language really gets in the way of the author's point coming across.

Yep, sounds like a great idea in theory. What happens when I'm trying to work through a migraine? That definitely changes my computer use patterns and mouse usage characteristics.

May apply more to the usage of mobile smartphones to prevent being fraped these days.

Most home burglaries are during the daytime - but your point is still valid.

For my mobile internet, I use Three, and I have 15gb/mo. Plenty for my usage pattern on the mobile. I can also tether on the work BB but that's a little frowned upon..

At home I have a Magnet DSL connection, with the line rental bundled. It's fiber to the estate I live in, and have 4Mb down/ 1Mb up. It's a grandfathered connection in the current offerings - i.e. not available. I was chatting with the techs in the company as I know a few of them personally, and they don't have any metering in place on that offering. I regularly saturate both up and down for weeks at a time without problems. Pretty cool for tv shows (that I have already paid for through a sky subscription and a TV license fee).

I would like to have a faster unmetered connection, but at least the one I have is very stable with fantastically low latencies to my common internet places, as monitored by my smokeping installation...

When I started having an Internet presence, there was only one of me online, as I have a pretty unique name. Once the social media sites became popular, I found that there was a father and son in the next country over that had the same name. Unfortunately for that son, who went into showbiz, I got all the good names online before he did, with twitter/FB/google+/linkedin etc. It is amusing though that some of the people wishing to hire him end up calling on me instead.
At least 47 of the first results for a Google search on my name gives stuff that is me-relevant. ;)

:)
My first computer was an Amstrad CPC464, with a Z80 and 64kb RAM. My current desktop has 16Gb RAM.
However, a few servers in the DC downstairs have half a terabyte of RAM - so I'm not entirely sure if there should be another option..

I can easily see the flashing of PWM driven LEDs as used on cars, to the extent that I can identify the brand of a distant car at night purely from the speed of the flicker of the taillights. I can also easily see the flicker of my Galaxy S3 screen, especially at night. During the day I can easily see the flicker of LED DRLs.
Whatever way my vision works, I often end up gaining detail from a quick scan of my eye's focal point around what I am concentrating on. When a PWM-driven light source is in my field of view I see it as a trail of distinct dots, where a continuously driven light would appear as an evenly illuminated streak. Maybe it's just because I've got a lot of practice of looking at things from 30 years of observational astronomy so I am used to getting the best from my mk1 eyeballs
Cinemas are often painful as I can very easily see individual frames in panning shots, even with the motion blur on the individual frames. Motion blur annoys me as my vision system can't figure out if it is out of focus or blurred, so my eyes get very tires from certain films :(
Back in the CRT days I could easily differentiate between 85hz and 100hz monitors, and I could identify whether a game was operating at 100hz or 120hz if the monitor framerate was higher than that. Mostly by being able to see each frame when the POV was changing quickly, and I could gauge whether there were 8 or 10 frames used for a rocketjump and that kind of thing. This led me to having to spend real money on decent monitors that I didn't see the flicker on.
Newer flat panels have light sources that are a lot more steady, and that never truly drop in brightness as there is no longer an active scan in progress. These no longer flicker as much as older monitors did.
Ophthalmologists didn't find anything odd with my eyes at that stage, it was just my having a particularly discerning vision system. Lucky that I have, as I've located drusen on my retina that I've spotted early enough to possibly be useful in any treatment of this precursor to macular degeneration. Sucks, but I'm still in my 30s so worst case I have more time than most to get used to using peripheral vision for daily tasks.

Excellent news - more and more reasons to stay in Ubuntu and less and less reasons to boot to Win7. Hats off to the devs that have ported this. Does this mean that we can expect HL2 etc to follow shortly, given it's the same engine?

This will be interesting. I've seen Wii consoles used in the odd hotel lobby outputting to a tv, just running the news feed. Much cheaper and easier for the average person to set up than a PC or paying subscriptions to a news service.

This is one appropriate course of action for someone in that position that made those comments. However it should have been treated publicly as a firing offence though instead of a graceful exit, as most companies I know would have seen these communications as an example of gross incompetence and would have treated accordingly.

There was a patch for SuSE recently to fix a 208-day bug, where certain CPU registers on a particular CPU would hold their value through a reboot. We patched servers in work, and they still fell over at various times past 208 days of uptime. It was then realised that there was a need to fully cold-boot the affected servers for the condition to clear correctly.
So, that was one example of a patch that required shutting down the power.

Rule 34. All that needs to be said..

I own a domain name, and when I sign up to online forums I use unique email addresses specific to that particular forum.

Last year, I started to get spam to the email I signed up to http://www.astronomyforum.net/ do being a good net citizen I informed the admins of that forum about this. I found out that I wasn't the only one that was getting spam to addresses that were used specifically for that forum as there were three other users that were saying the same thing. What was the admin's response? Perma-banning my account on that forum.

Definitely not the expected response, but apparently it's typical behaviour of those running that site to do this once it's known that the email list was compromised.

Thankfully I had no real personal details in the database on that site, but it's a pity to see such a knee-jerk reaction to something that most real admins would be happy to know and then be able to do something about it.

What would you do in the same situation? I just walked away and blacklisted the email address used, as I am still receiving spam to it.

Actually Polaris is not the easiest - it's any stars nearer the Ecliptic Pole, which is based on the Earth's orbit. This is in Draco, and the nearest naked-eye star to the Ecliptic poles are 36 Dra in the northern sky at about 2 degrees from the ecliptic northern pole, and Eta1 Dor at the south ecliptic pole. Surprisingly enough, the LMC is only about 4 degrees from the southern ecliptic pole.
However, Polaris would show the most diurnal parallax, as that is indeed based on the earth's spin.

It's been a long road to the current state of play with the original limited release of the specs for the older ATI cards through to the current state with near-parity with the Windows drivers. It's really good to see this right now as I am in the market again for an improvement to my current graphics card. My number one option was the Nvidia 660, but if this set of code makes things that much better then I may go for one of the AMD 79xx cards instead.

I was in college in the University of Limerick with the Irish developer behind the drm-next tree, and he's a really great guy. He was a member of Skynet, (the UL Computer Society) along with some other people that have gone on to be fairly visible members of the wordlwide Linux community, including the likes of:
Mel Gorman, kernel memory hacker;
Dave Airlie. AMD graphics developer,
Caolan McNamara, who did the first MSWord converter.

Irish Linux hackers FTW :D