It is getting some interest for financial services such as trading and trade processing - again online patching is great as is the built in messaging and scalability.

it is not quite clear to me on what legal basis English Heritage can claim ownership of the photos one takes. IANAL, but to my mind they can't claim copyright:

They can assert their rights as a condition of entry to the property. This does happen also on entry to various museums which may explicitly forbid all photography or just commercial photography. If you photograph Stonehenge from somewhere else (especially from public land), then there can be no objection or claim to copyright.

# even if a building would be a "form of expression", it is not theirs (being listed as world heritage [unesco.org])

The term "world heritage" is only a special designation which may give access to grants. It does not "belong" to UNESCO, it is theoretically under the 'ownership' of English Heritage.

I went there with my school when I was young and many years ago before EH took over. There was no boundary, and I even ended up sitting on one of the fallen stones (not forbidden in those days). What was more interesting were some of the nearby complexes such as Avebury which had a proper museum.

The answer in short is - yes. A lot of the data on a passport is not encrypted at all because any country with a reader should be able to use it and the formats are well documented. At places like Defcon, most people do not have their passports with them so a demo is hard (except for the Feds) but it would be trivial in Asia or the Middle East where foreigners are obliged to carry them. Note that if you are trying to hack multiple RFIDs at a range, you probably will need a bit more power. RFIDs are powered by the interrogation signal.

Actually +5 informative for Fred Flintstone!!

Note that E71 processor runs much slower than the E72 or the other modern Nokia smartphones. The slower processor was to extend battery life but it is my impression that some apps have issues with this such as the earlier nav applications.

Look at the Jules Verne [wikipedia.org] - a man-rated cargo carrier (i.e., an actual pressurized spacecraft) that was used once, filled up with garbage, and disposed of via re-entry.

Progress could also hold atmosphere although a bit smaller. There is no airlock to the garbage scow so it has to be capable of holding pressure. The problem remains with Progress or Jules Verne that you would then need somewhere to put your rubbish and something to shoot it with to make it burn up in the upper atmosphere. I have visions of a garbage bag sitting on some kind of mass launcher on the outside of the ISS - actually that would be kind of fun.

That said, the one server per service concept is a mentality I do not subscribe to.

This is where Microsoft came apart. Due to their pricing model, there was always pressure to stick as much on one box as possible. This in turn led to interesting side effects.

Linux always made it easier to have many boxes, which tended to simplify problems. VMs meant you no longer had to worry about physical machines and you can still limit resources - useful if the OCR turns out to be a CPU pig.

Many systems are better dedicated to a single problem, i.e., just because you have a server doesn't mean to say that you have to serve everything. VMs are a great solution to this allowing you to partition up your server so that each service that you provide runs in its own little virtual box without having to worry so much about unwanted interactions.

In a large conventional business, the head of IT (probably an MBA) will be wooed by Microsoft and its partners. In a startup, someone really technical has the choice instead and is going to go with what they know. Once the product is launched, MS is out of the equation, it hardly is going to get rebuilt in .net at that stage.

And where does all that power go? Seriously, where does it go? The address space of a PDP is 64K. That's it. It would be hard to do a "Hello World" in that space on the netbook.

No, go to India and sign up with an offshored IT provider.

What are the temporary import rules? Usually there is a period of time that you are allowed to drive a car that has been type approved somewhere else, particularly if you a non-resident (so reasonably likely to re-export).