Correct, BT has an extensive metro ethernet network in central London, as do half a dozen other companies.

I suspect if there had been (and continued to be) cold war-era levels of political will and funding into nuclear R&D, then we would have had it in 20-30 years.

Why aren't you going to be doing any gaming? Because there aren't many games that are made to run well on Linux. And why is that? Because the graphics stack sucks for 3D. It's a circular argument that has allowed the state of Linux graphics to continue to lag behind embarrassingly. I can't see how ATI being committed to improving their Linux drivers is anything other than a good thing?

This wasn't one of those times...

NX is also an option.

BES Express is a free product. From an administrator's point of view it's somewhat limited in functionality compared to BES, but from the user's perspective the all the synchronisation and directory integration works as expected.

This is actually incredibly reassuring. Duke Nukem Forever being due out "soon" has been one of those things that has stayed constant since teenage years, while so much else about the world has changed! If it gets released, I'm not sure how I will deal with that. Truly it will be the end of an era. It will go from being a new game, to an old game, to being "retro", in the relative blink of an eye. But in my heart it will still be vapourware.

Actually it's not common for exchanges to offer connectivity in via the internet except perhaps for low-traffic connections for integration testing and suchlike. The unpredictability of the internet makes it impossible for them to guarantee the service levels that are demanded. The constant stream of pricing updates can run into the gigabits per second depending on what you're subscribed to. If you're big enough to be trading directly on the exchange, the cost of the leased lines and/or colocation next to the exchange (latency is everything) is easy to swallow. Extranets like Radianz are also a very popular option. Brokerage is still alive and well and institutions that aren't doing high-frequency trading will often deal with with brokers.

There is a middle ground between using the internet (where delivery is on a best effort basis and has no guarantees of anything) and laying your own submarine cables. Private international leased lines are readily available from a variety of vendors and are used extensively by financial institutions. They're available with various SLAs on contention, latency and uptime depending on how much you're willing to spend. Transatlantic routes are available surprisingly cheaply, as there is an abundance of bandwidth and a ton of carriers competing to sell it. It's usually provided over an MPLS core, which handles routing around damage, with a layer 2 (ethernet) or 3 (IP) handoff.

Something about stopped clocks...

Dictation software has been around for about 15 years, so that's still an option for you. Here's why I'm not using it:

• Ambiguities in speech, e.g. different words that are pronounced the same as each other
• Code-writing that involves lots of symbols, numbers, precise spacing; or generally anything that's not free-form natural language.
• The noise - I don't want to hear everyone around me talking to their computers all day
• Similarly, I don't necessarily want everyone else around me to know what I'm typing
• Noisy environments can render the whole thing unusable

My feeling is that in due course there will be a UI revolution in text input that renders the keyboard as we know it obsolete, but speech recognition isn't it.

Some studies have shown that bed bugs are the number one cause of bed bugs.

It seems I picked a perfect time to relocate to NYC (from London), as apparently this is one of the snowiest winters on record. I am in awe of the sheer quantity of snow that's lying around. I'm also impressed with the infrastructure in place to deal with it - after a foot of snow overnight the streets were ploughed and just about passable, and the trains were running. Although I gather that it was a different story just before I arrived, with the whole city shut down for about a week. However it seems like it only takes a mere sprinkling of snow to bring the UK to its knees in the same way.

Is that what I should tell my users when calls from their desk phones deteriorate or drop because their switch port is saturated by something unrelated? I don't think that would go down too well. QoS exists for a reason. Applying this to residential phone service, when that becomes packet switched (which it will eventually) doesn't need to violate net neutrality.