Here in Europe, at least we have doors that can be closed :)

Sadly every office I've worked at in the UK has been a big open plan floor, with very little private, quiet space.

The area I'm currently in has people who play music through speakers, a football table, people using speakerphones, and the general noise of approximately 40 people nearby.

Without headphones, I would never get anything done, despite the fact I prefer to work without music.

Hey, we could start one off, by supporting a few choice characters. I'm sure that'll go down just fine.

This also helps in situations where your ISP is highjacking responses stating that a domain doesn't exist, and rerouting them to a search engine.

It's all very well having that happen for HTTP requests, but it can cause havoc with things like e-mail.

Media Browser solves a lot of the problems with playing downloaded video, providing a far better interface for browsing things then the default Media Centre one. I had the same problem with the almost unusable video browser in MCE 7, but now that I'm using Media Browser I'm a lot happier.

I've still not found anything to do music nicely, but I'm not really bothered about that personally, since I stream that to an AirTunes base station from iTunes.

It is possible they sold the ISK online, converting it into hard cash.

MCE in Win7 just works

And that is the crux of the matter really. I spent a long time messing around MythTV, and various frontends for it, but in the end I just installed Windows 7, and used MCE, which has been faultless since I did so.

It also has the benefit of working as a really, really, powerful games console.

Leaving the admin interfaces exposed is fairly common practice for ISPs, since it allows them to reflash and do maintenance on routers they are responsible for.

The good ones have the competence to limit that access to the IP range that maintenance will be happening from though.

I don't think this is actually an issue though.

Most of the people I know who have phones using keypads and a 2-inch screen don't use them for browsing the web, and have no intention to do so.

If I'm building a mobile web application, I'm going to target the touch screen devices, because those are what people who actually use mobile phones to browse the web are using.

Modern smartphones can handle just about anything you throw at them. The UI is the problem, since what works on a 22" widescreen monitor, with a keyboard and mouse, doesn't work on a 9" touchscreen.

We're not going to see alternative mobile UIs going away any time soon, and that in my opinion is a good thing. The desktop version will work if you really want all the features that it comes with, but it's not going to be the optimal way of using things.

Native mobile applications are also a big factor here, and are often a far better choice so long as you have the man power (or money) to produce them, since they give you a far more targetted UI, which can integrate with a phone's hardware features to provide something even smoother.

There aren't that many of them - certainly most of the web applications I've seen are checking for a session cookie, not checking what IP address you're coming from.

It's been requested a couple of times, but quite quickly disabled, because people coming in through proxies which use bonded lines aren't as rare as you might think, and people would keep getting their session dropped.

Thus I'm not at all surprised that a non-technical member of the intelligence/law community could fall for a phishing e-mail.

The question is, why is someone that "non-technical" in charge of cybercrime for the FBI? I'm not asking that he be able to crack his way into anyone's computer, but it would be nice if he had a little awareness of these things.

Hell yes.

As someone who has lived in London, and still spends 5 days a week there at work, a big part of the environment that draws people here is the mixture of different cultures, and the way they blend together into new things.

Most record contracts include a clause that you're studio time is paid for out of the money made from the albums, so Sony didn't provide facilities, they hired the facilities to the artist.

There are parties other then the Tories who are "not Labour" - why do people insist on believing we're a two party state? If more people would use their votes for some of the smaller parties, maybe we'd actually see something useful happening in parliament, instead of two groups of people with more or less identical policies flinging shit around like monkeys.

Britain's typically have 35 or 37.5 hour weeks, often including lunch.

I wish we did! My contract states 40 hours a week, with an hour for lunch not counted in that time.

In practice lunch is 15 minutes to grab something to eat, and then back to my desk, and I rarely leave the office on time. We used to have reasonable hours, but those days are over.