...and argue that it is, which a private individual rarely has the resources to do.

Got to love the legal system.

To protect their interest, they are trying to enforce laws that are currently being broken. Seems reasonable to me. Hopefully, this will deter the casual downloader who isn't particularly aware of the illegality of what they are doing.

It's a slippery slope though. How long before Ryan Giggs or someone like him demands that they block Twitter to protect his super injunction?

Disappointed that BT are rolling over on this. It's the thin end of the wedge, and once they make it known that they are willing to censor one site then every special interest group and their dog will be getting court orders to silence parts of the web they don't like - well in the UK at least.

...we going to see an earthquate and tsunami in Germany to justify this fearmongering?

the BBC isn't a public body in the sense that is, say, the British Army. The Army is funded by a general, compulsory taxes on income and other trade. The BBC is funded by a licence which you only need to pay if you choose to watch (possibly time-shifted) live broadcast television

A tax doesn't have to be universal, unless you're also going to argue that the tax on cigarettes and alcohol aren't really taxes because only smokers and drinkers pay them. The licence fee is a compulsory tax on anyone who watches broadcast TV, whether or not they consume or even care about BBC services. Now I'm not saying that I don't enjoy BBC output, or even that I necessarily resent paying the licence fee, but please don't try to use weasel words and pretend it's something it isn't. It might be a special purpose tax and the money it generates might be ring fenced, but it's a tax and the BBC is a public body.

Look, we can all observe an assault undique to neuter and privatise the BBC.

We can? In case you hadn't noticed there's a recession on. Why should the BBC be exempt from making the same cost savings that all public bodies are having to make?

To be honest I didn't even know they provided "contractual support" for OpenSolaris, but surely the fact that they won't support you in using it doesn't nesessarily imply that it's being canned. Maybe it'll just be an unsupported "unstable" version that you can play with before getting "real" Solaris.

share the 3G HSPA connection with various Wi-Fi clients as an instant access point

Great... I can has cheap 3G data access now? Don't know what it's like in the US, but this side of the pond I'm looking at at least £1 per Mb.

the exact money figure is mostly a distraction from the issue. If he's done something *actually wrong*, then the fact that he can't pay the fine shouldn't mean that he gets off scot free.

No it should mean that the punishment reflects both the harm done and his ability to pay, unless you're saying that what he did really does merit the punishment of lifetime bankruptcy. It should cut the other way too: if he'd been rich he should have been fined more.

Microsoft may offer tools for volume license customers that prevent the Ballot Screen update from being installed on all computers covered by the license.

I'm still waiting for some confirmation on this. I do not want this thing appearing on my carefully locked down staff and lab desktops, which incidentally all use Firefox anyway in case you're thinking I'm an IE astroturfer.

Not that I ever used it to generate a completely new SID, but what I did find it invaluable for was to set a machine's SID back to its old value after a re-install. This did away with the need to change the ownership on all of the user's files still on the hard drive and meant that most of the time their user profile would just keep on working as if nothing had changed.

This only happens on new installs

Well, according to what I read here:

The browser ballot screen is a web page that will be shown to any European Windows user who has Internet Explorer set as their default browser. It will appear:

• following a new installation of Windows 7 during the first automatic update
• during a future automatic update of Vista and XP, and
• whenever the user chooses to return to the web page.