Does anyone else find that plodding kick drum in the background really annoying? Completely ruins it for me.

A pro-active media strategy will solve it. Get in front of the story by acknowledging the sober truth up front ( "one day it will happen" ) and combine that with public education campaigns, facts and figures type stuff. The message is the exact thing we're already espousing on here - that it can't be 100% safe, but it's better than people. Give that a year or two to become the default mantra, and when that first fatality DOES occur, it'll be a non-issue. The only way this gets blown up is if it catches the public unaware and gets turned in to the Next Big Story.

The difference between GD and Word is one of presentation. Both word processors are perfectly capable of making headers and lists and tables and paragraphs, but Word can make stuff really pretty. The majority of the time I'm working on a document though, collaboration and accessibility is the most important factor. The only time presentation is an issue is when it's going to be sent out to a client, and for those times, we often edit in GD and dump in to a Word template. Word isn't going away any time soon, but it's becoming less and less relevant. We do about 70% of our documents on GD already, this is only going to grow as its presentational capabilities increase.

A story for which my signature is appropriate!

Magento is awesome, don't listen to the haters. Yes, it probably requires a VPS, but a 1gb VPS will handle a fair bit of traffic with Magento's caching turned on. Secondly, you know all those crazy requirements ecom customers want, like their own special fancy way of doing things? Magento is a thousand times more configurable than any of the other OS ecom packages out there, I can't tell you the number of times we've been able to meet a client's requirement just out of the box. Sure, it's huge and complicated, but it's also very powerful, and absolutely devours ZenCart and osCommerce, both of which I've used, and both of which have just the worst imaginable codebase.

Wow, 8 days without spam bots? Could it be time for the resurrection?

And the desire to make a patent free format had nothing to do whatsoever in even the slightest way with the fact that commonly used formats like GIF were patented?

Since when is it the role of the courts to arbitrarily legislate to protect the failing business models of certain corporations?

This is exactly right. A police officer's testimony counts for more than the common person's testimony when it comes to a straight your word versus theirs. Typically cases brought before the court are more complicated than that, but should something as simple as your word versus theirs get brought in, the copper will win. Of course, should that officer ever get caught lying to the court in any future cases, you'd have an excellent case to get your conviction overturned.

Bing results pretty good? Sure, if you don't mind them actively filtering search results to remove anti-MS content: http://advice.cio.com/shane_oneill/bing_search_tainted_by_pro_microsoft_results

I think the Pirate Party should rebrand itself as the Internet Party, Digital Party or Future Party, some such thing, and just fight for the rights of all things that service the good of the Internet, which is kinda what they're doing anyway, except to the layman, who asks "what the hell has pirates got to do with the Internet"?

MOD THIS UP

I'm serious, they're not the government, they're not the police, they're a private company, where do they get the right to storm your offices and start poking around in your computers, counting up all your software licenses? I run a small IT shop and if they ever tried that shit on me, I'd tell them to go fuck themselves in no uncertain terms. Can I storm THEIR offices and have a look at all their computers? Or should I too expect to be told to go fuck myself?

Basically every website I've ever built has a T&C, and every time we have the discussion with the client about them, it goes like this.

"We need some content for your terms and conditions page"
"ok, umm... what do you think?"
"well, we have a boilerplate T&C we use that covers most bases..."
"OH! well just put that in there!"

I've only ever had ONE company deliver an actual real true to life T&C they wrote themselves, and even *IT* was a cut and paste off of an earlier site they had that we didn't build.

All in all, I'd say that most companies really couldn't give the slightest shit about T&Cs, and it really surprises me the amount of debate that goes on about them around here. Surely people just ignore them and do whatever they want anyway? And as for "we will not sell your details", well, isn't it just easier to assume they will and use mailinator / easily filterable addressses?