it was the sales droid who lied - it is him who should be castigated for lieing - presumably to earn a few extra $ commission or bonus. All those who were conned into paying for something that they did not need should be able to seek compensation from the sales droid - the fine NOT to be paid by Verison. The droid's manager and managers all the way up should have to pay in proportion to their take home pay.

Unless there are consequences it will happen again. Not much different from the bankers who caused the rest of us so much pain and, by & large, have escaped personal penalties.

1) Tell us that it is not effective; thus we need not worry about loss of privacy; thus we might we well let them continue ?

2) It is not effective because they have not got enough money for XXX; so: please Mr congress critter - vote them some more money

3) It is not effective; you need not worry about encrypting your communications; hopefully enough idiots will believe that!

Pick one of the above or come out with more suggestions.

Was any attempt made to correlate people's views with the propaganda^w news sources that they viewed/read the most?

From the penultimate paragraph:

When the last star in the Universe flickers out, those photons—long since shifted into the radio and having diluted to be less than one-per-cubic-kilometer—will still be there in just as great an abundance as they were trillions and quadrillions of years prior.

and that is all that there will be left --- according to current theories at any rate!

What happens if you are listening to a radio play while driving ... and a scary bit happens so your face reflects this. Will it put the brakes on because it thinks that there is something wrong ?

Surely the case should be against the film studios that made the films and not Netflix which is just distributing them ?

Also:

• * the post office should also check every parcel
• * the train company to check that no passenger is a crook travelling to do a robbery
• * bakeries that no one buying buns is going to put poison in them and so kill old ladies
• * clothing shops that no one buying a mac is a flasher

The word will be a safer place if everyone checked that their customers were innocent!

I agree completely. There is no reason that a program cannot read UTF-8 and store as UTF-32 internally. There is a trade-off between time and memory. Note that UTF-16 is also a variable length encoding scheme so you still need to start at the start of string to find the nth character.

Unicode and how it is represented in a file are two different things. Unicode is a good idea, it solves many problems and contains all the (to me) strange characters used by: Greeks, Chinese, etc.

How to represent it in a file is different. UTF-8 is the obvious answer today, but other encodings were tried by different organisations first. The big win of UTF-8 is that you can have characters from very different regions on the same web page (or in the same file) - something that you cannot do you you adopt a purely 8 bit code like iso-8859-1.

We are still in transition: there are files encoded in various ways out there; however I think that UTF-8 will eventually become the encoding mechanism that everyone uses - so files encoded in other ways will become increasingly rare. So: a bit of patience please.

Those are the current limits. So do you build your business round the database that is free today and hope that: a) your business does not grow so that it needs more, and b) that MS does not reduce the limits and catch you. Either way you run the risk of ending up having to pay the license fees. Why not pick a database that will always be free - and keep that cash for something else ?

So if someone makes a complaint about corporate GPL violation - will the violating company's web site be blocked as well ? If so it could be useful. However I suspect that this law is aimed at protecting corporate profits and not controlling corporate robbers.

It is not how they are doing it, but why -- what have they got to hide? If they are not doing anything wrong then they have nothing to fear by us knowing!

I am not a sheep.

Will it include corporates such as newspapers who grab images, etc, from individuals' web sites and publish it on their web site and ignore any attempt by the copyright holder (individual) to get proper compensation ?

I doubt it - such laws do not seem to apply to corporates.

I much prefer chatting face to face, but in a distributed environment that is often not possible - so what I will actually achieve is phone or email. Having said that: a written form (eg email) can be better at communicating decisions that are complex and need to be remembered.