I thought it was to overturn the decisions of national establishment and replace them with decisions made by a supranational establishment instead.

With respect of the human rights laws, they seem to be more of a stick to beat the government with than anything used to really protect human rights - the latest scam from the ambulance chasing human-rights lawyers is the case of a foreign criminal who used the human right to a family life to defend himself from being deported after serving his sentence. Only in this case, he was had threatened to kill his family and was banned from seeing them.

Is state snooping on communications against our human rights? Is it against the human rights legislation?

Its the solution that's been touted for decades to the 'single sign on' solution. It does work - I know police forces and similar that use them without fuss.

There are plenty around, and sure you have to remember a pin, but its usually way less complicated than remembering a huge long password, plus its the start of a single-signon solution that no-one can argue against once you're using them.

If you use Windows, Microsoft has a lot of resources about smart card login

the internet has never been end-to-end, its always been packets shovelled through a myriad of devices routing your packets to the destination.

Stuff like caching and proxying are useful to the well-being of the internet, if I am watching the same movie as the guy next door, we don't need twice the bandwidth to the datacentre that's located in god-knows-where. Local cache makes things work a lot faster.

I suppose Google can afford to puts its own caching proxies across the globe, so its not much of a problem for them, but it might be for everyone else.

Maybe we'd be better off without https and instead encrypt the underlying communication between the end-user and the ISP. https isn't going to stop the NSA after all, but it is a good thing to stop anyone sniffing all wifi traffic.

You can see it - look at arstechnica.com and if you view the html source you'll see a large comment section embedded in it advertising some braindeadpayments.com system.

It works as a little game apparently, so you can put tokens in the URL (of the advertised site, not the injected site) and it'll play some slots game.

I really doubt Ars put it there, so its been injected along the way.

who cares really?

The numbering should go 1.. 2.. 3.. etc.. thousands.. tens of thousands.. hundreds of thousands.. millions.. too many to give a fuck about.

It's quite likely the cloud is helping, as now companies can fire up new servers and load balancers to deal with increased traffic in seconds

then why didn't they?

The cloud is just as resource-constrained as the old datacentres used to be, only shared across many customers. Its like all those customers joined together and put all their old servers into one big datacentre. "The cloud" doesn't magically increase the number of servers present, it just shares the load. Normally that's fine. But when everyone wants to use it all, all at once, even the cloud goes slow.

or its because so many e-commerce sites are now hosted on the "cloud" rather than their own servers in a datacentre.

Amazon created their cloud as they had lots of spare capacity in the off-peak so thought it'd be a good idea to sell it to businesses that would use it when the holidays were not on, and Amazon would use it for consumer ecommerce when the holidays were on.

But now, both Amazon has sold its capacity to ecommerce places who need it when Amazon needs it... hence slower sites. I'm sure the same could go for Azure, too little capacity oversold.

It wasn't - but it got imported very recently. This year was the first I heard of it over here.

We have the equivalent - Boxing Day (26th December, day after Christmas day) which is when the sales used to start, but for some crazy reason the shops decided to have sales *before* Christmas so everyone popped out and bought their Christmas presents on the cheap. I doubt Boxing day will see the same level of chaos.

It makes no difference how god they might be, but the excuse needed to make people buy more of them.

The government until recently said that diesels were the preferred choice and were more fuel efficient, so people sold their old petrol cars and bought diesels.... now they say the opposite and guess what you think they want to happen.

I'm sure they simply looked at the research of how well their car industry was doing and decided to come up with any reason to persuade people to buy new cars.

Diesel is a great fuel to use, very efficient, and the modern engines are not the oil-burners of the past, coupled with the catalytic converters in the exhaust, its often said the emissions are cleaner than the surrounding air in many cities. Certainly, diesel engines are cleaner than petrol ones, and if you consider the biodiesel that many are part running on (I understand the USA runs B20 diesel anyway - that's 20% biodiesel mix in all diesel fuel), even cleaner.

I wonder how much effect a storm will have on some equipment 25 metres below sea level?

You've not been to Scotland :-)

The waves don't need to be large or on the surface - most "wave" machines are located underwater and get a steady undulation of water going past them.

Of course the best thing about this type of renewable is that it generates electricity all the time.

for me the search box is essential - sure I can search in the main 'awesome;' bar, but there's a plugin that turns your search terms in the search box into clickable 'find in page' buttons so you can find the relevant part of the pages that were returned as results.

Otherwise, I'd get rid of it of course.

The money simply gets sucked up and will never be returned. That's what we're working for these days. It sickens me.

That's bad enough, but to rub our noses in it, the accounts of the EU are not audited, and will never be - the EU commissariat have said as much. I think its because if it ever were audited, we'd see just where the money does disappear to.

it comes down to the accounting lure of a low monthly fee (operational costs) vs high one-time costs when you buy equipment (generally capital costs)

rent the servers then. Most server manufacturers will rent them either directly or on a 3-year rent-until-obsolete-and-replace contracts. It costs more over time (especially if you keep them running for decades) but it does what you want for the beancounters.

I think people want to go cloud because of all the hype and advertising. Your boss will have read lots of material pushed at him saying how wonderful the cloud is. Who's he going to believe - scruffy old you, or some very well presented glossy brochures and case studies?! :-)