"It's not like they would be able to fight it if USA was the same." - Actually it IS the same. Nokia was criticised in Iran's crackdown a while back and people called for aboycott of their products, for having sold cellular network equipment that's lets the government of Iran, track, intercept and listen to calls or data - technology that was put in place when that kit was sold many years ealier in the western world. I used to sell GSM tech over a decade ago in a western nation and even then government was wanting ways in. EVERY government in the world requires this. I've never owned a RIM phone, indeed I work for a competitor of theirs and EVERY manufacturer of cellular tech has to to this. We MUST comply with the law of each nation we do business in. Why is nobody picking on Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola, Ericsson, Apple, Google and a host of others?

This is pretty crap journalisim on Rory Cellan-Jones' part - better would be exposing how all the other manufacturers of networks, management systems and handsets all do this and how it's done every day right here in our own back-yard.

At least on land; a 1000mph car, the Bloodhound SSC FTW!

Er, Godwin's Law this soon? Wow.

The major difference being the tube/valve industry was done in by the transistor - i.e. we had a viable replacement that was better. The problem with the transistor is that we don't (yet) have a viable replacement.

A good quality umbrella - but you're from Washington State - you already know all about rain :-D

"better options already exists for servers where I am guessing CFS is used." Well, that depends on your workload (which is the thrust of the debate). With one of the HPC products I regularly work with, we have a best-practice of using the noop scheduler instead of cfs - this tiny tweak alone will see at least a 30% improvement in our I/O performance (which is nothing to be sneezed at when we're moving ~700MB/s). Being able to have pluggable schedulers is great because Linux can be all things to all people and it does make sense to have options (lets not go crazy here - too much choice can also be a bad thing). People talk about the difference between Linux on netbooks and servers for example but even in the "server" space there is VAST difference between small business file & print, clustered Oracle or scientific data acquisition workloads. I too hope that this debate doesn't go away and also hope that it doesn't become as heated and personal as in the past so that we can all benefit from a selection of good ideas.

Nope but I can pay them via my cellphone http://www.pago.co.nz/, or the over the web (or via the web, from my cellphone). Usually transfers to another bank happen with 24 hours, to an account within the same bank, sometimes within 12. That's back home, but here in the UK (where I reside), I can pay anybody in the UK or EU via their SWIFT code or IBAN. I can transfer funds to accounts overseas to unrelated banks within 24 hours via Internet banking. I got my first debit card & PIN 22 years ago and haven't looked back. Don't even have a chequebook here in the UK, and the last one I wrote back home must have been like 10 years ago.

Yeah, I saw that and it made me smile. Especially after a certain space-station module could have been named "Colbert" and NASA wussed out on "Serenity" and went with "Tranquility" (the EIGHTH-placed vote!) instead.

Quite so! Hear hear!

I was a fiercely loyal Telewest customer - I always had great speeds and great service.
Ever since they got bought out everything's turned to crap. Tech-support on cheap VOIP lines from India that are so bad I can barely hear them - if the call doesn't drop in under a minute.
Link speeds a fraction of what I'm paying for - without downloading anything! Forget about watching iPlayer or YouTube. Downloads of any type (http, ftp, torrent all suck equally - I now download my Linux iso's in the office.
I am seriously thinking of ditching cable and going back to dial-up because the current performance of Virgin in our street is about the same.

Unless she is from Omicron Persei 8, then it should read: "I wuv U".