England != UK. This is the Dept of Education for England not Scotland, or Wales, or Northern Ireland - all of which are UK yet, strangely, they are not England.

in days of old - you'd have to manually search an unindexed and massive collection of newspapers on microfiche to locate news articles about a crime that was "expunged" by the rehabilitation of offenders act. these days 10 seconds of google can turn them all up. There is no suddenly in the act, there's a sliding scale based upon how long the sentence was. If you're jailed for 4 years or more the conviction does not become non-disclosable. Failing to employ someone in there 40s because they had a shoplifting conviction when they were 18 is unfair on the silly mistakes of youth.

and the do no evil part of that is called rehabilitation of offenders. Most (if not all) EU countries have laws that state you do not need to inform anyone of a past crime after a certain amount of time - this means that they should not affect your employment prospects. There are obvious exceptions to this for sexual offences against the vulnerable. We like to think that once you serve your sentence your debt is paid.

SNMP your router for interface stats - you'll have to poll this regularly and keep track. http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/ is good for this, you can also do pretty graphs of CPU usage, chip temps and many other things - anything you can query directly via SNMP or script around.

a vote yes on the 18th is NOT a vote for wee fat eck. vote yes to rid us of westminster and especially the undemocratic house of lords. I'm hoping we vote yes and then we get to become a republic and have complete electoral reform that removes our political overlords and hands power back to we the people. --- sorry for going off topic.

they'll probably just DACS (pair gain) the 2nd line (which might actually be the initial problem)

the $ limit should be on the giver not the candidate i.e limit = $5k you cannot give $5k to two candidates, but you could give $2.5k to each. And you can only donate if eligible to vote. NB companies are not eligible to vote.

yes, in french it would be "la douceur de vivre"

The Matrix Reloaded started something when 'The Merovingian' wore a number of very flashy ties... the thing it started was millions of geeks saying what a shit film it was.

I feel like I'm repeating myself a lot. England & Wales does not equal the UK. This ban does not apply to Scotland where the prison service is a devolved body. Sending books to prisoners is only banned in PART of the UK.

slashdot news for nerds^H^H^H^H^H americans.

while more of a communications protocol than a language he speaks brilliant Kermit. Like many Americans, Bill does speak English which is a foreign language. His wife is French. (OK, it's really just her maiden name - there has to a be a wife/cunning linguist joke in here somewhere)

the 4th has never applied to international borders.

1) Catch 22 2) LOTR trilogy 3) Stranger In a Strange Land 4) Everything by Ray Bradbury 5) The entire Discworld Series 6) The Gormenghast series. 7) Of Mice and Men 8) Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen 9) Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica 10) God Is Not Great

by the hand that feeds it i'm going to assume the government and not the movie/music buying public - whom they already persecute.