Correct: it is talking about the sales of new records/CDs. This tends to disfavour long lasting styles such as classical music and boosts the here-today, gone-tomorrow junk that fills the 'pop parade'. This is exactly what the music industry wants, they need churn in taste and bands/performers/... to keep people buying their output.

Zimmermann might well be good and honest ... but how well does he know the people who he will employ to help him ? What if one of them has a problem: financial/drugs/marital/... that allows the NSA to put pressure on them (''help them out of their sticky situation'') in return for ''something that is in the best interests of the USA'' ?

In mitigation: they do publish their source code for review. I don't know how easy it is to check that that is what is installed on the phone that you buy.

I have to ask: is there secret NSA involvement in this ? An inside man who will put a couple of back-doors in the 'phone.

I have absolutely no knowledge that this is the case, but the NSA certainly has the resources & motivation to do so. It seems to have done this sort of thing in the past.

I did not realise that bankers were around as early as 875 million years after the big bang.

Should Gemalto be sued by people who use their cards & other products on the grounds that they did not adequately secure their computer systems and thus let in outside crackers to steal the encryption keys ? That the crack was done by GCHQ/NSA does not really alter things -- they were cracked. The point of this is that successful legal, and expensive, action would make all corporates treat security properly; this would have great benefits -- more than just keeping the spooks at bay.

The only problem is that to sue Gemalto the plaintiffs would need to demonstrate that they have suffered. This might be hard, although insisting that they were all given new SIMs might be a start.

enlarge human ears ? If so, Disney would sue!

Individuals, not corporations. Think photographs as an example: if you copy a corporation's picture and put it on your web site - you will be hammered; if a corporation copies one of your pictures and uses it - nothing will happen; you can complain and will just be ignored.

Quite. I have not watched a television at home for several years. I do watch Dr Who & similar on the iplayer (which ought to count as TV), prob 20 hours/year. I'll watch a bit more if I am stuck in a hotel.

Now: ask me how much time I waste on the Internet, that is a different story :-(

TFA says that the school is called ''Kermit Elementary School'', I was expecting the name ''Hogwarts'' - silly me!

With all the delays I hope the first and not the second.

Whatever happens: congratulations and thanks to a team who have done so much over the years!

I was not talking about routers & servers at home - but the Internet backbones and the servers that people will be downloading stuff from and wanting to do so at higher speeds.

We are going to need to upgrade all of our servers and network routers!

I wonder what the latency will be ? (OK: to somewhere close in the UK)

It is the seventh most abundant chemical element by mass in the universe, but most of what was on earth has evaporated away.

People are accepted as prophets, it is a title given by the religious hierarchy. That the $deity does not exist (in any verifiable sense) does not really impact on their role in the religion. You need to be able to understand things as others see them, even if you do not agree with their point of view.

Please learn the definition of the word prophet. It is a person - separate from any deity that they speak for.