These guidelines are not chilling: they are the opposite. Following the introduction of these guidelines, many knee-jerk prosecutions will not take place, whereas previously they would have taken place.

Whoever wrote the Slashdot headline is entirely wrong.

Was there nowhere quieter to record? Piped music, other people chatting and moving about etc. A shame...

This will be chaotic. End-user confusion or fraud will occur when WHATEVER.co.uk and WHATEVER.uk are owned by different people/organisations. Say, when the .uk domain is acquired by someone who accuses another of domain-squatting on the co.uk equivalent.

Also, the notes say that the extra costs will be used for: "[D]aily monitoring for malicious software and viruses" - monitoring of what, exactly? All pages of all web sites on all subdomains?

"Security Theater" implies that it is harmless, in my opinion. I don't believe that's the case here. What's a better term for "not meeting the objectives it's supposedly trying to meet and being actively harmful in the process"?

This is an interesting technical exercise. However, it won't stop me playing this opening as White. This opening leads to all sorts of exciting games in all sorts of situations.

It can also have a great psychological effect, not greatly diminished by this new study of it. If you need to win a particular game, playing the Kings Gambit with White sends a strong "OK, buddy, this is an all or nothing game!" message to your opponent.

Just because a computer has figured out a way to win, doesn't mean that a typical opponent will have learnt the right continuation in every variation or that they will remember it over the board.

You can "deliver better uptime" by not using DRM in the first place. Voila, 100% 'uptime' with no infrastructure required.

52-minutes is 'quick-look'?? Really?

"Here I sit, watching a freshly installed FreeBSD box run through cvsup on all ports, to be closely followed by a new kernel compilation. As the output flies by in the xterm, I find myself wondering why I don't run into more FreeBSD in the world."

There's your answer right there. Perhaps people want more from their OS than to sit watching a kernel compilation."

I think this is all a hoax. I think they really went to Mars.

What a great idea. About the only bit of personal information that most Facebook users haven't already given to Facebook is their postal address. Yet this process does just that.

Wouldn't surprise me if this "Annoy Facebook" thing was actually started by Facebook to harvest postal addresses. :-)

The Mozilla Enterprise Working Group are considering this proposal at present: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal

This would provide a 42-week 'stable' release of Firefox, with incremental backported security fixes "just like the old days".

Whether this will come to fruition or not is unclear at this stage, but at least it's being discussed.

You _can_ switch off auto-updates for Google Chrome for Business: see http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=187207 although, as they say, they don't recommend it.

I note that using Chrome for Business and allowing auto-updates means that that one can have an auto-updating browser where the end-users are not administrators. This has never been possible with Firefox. It can be done with Internet Explorer too, of course ;-)

We have neither Fall or Summer here in .uk, thank you. :-)

I am hopeful that the government is only raising this to appease those who genuinely believe it's a good idea, while planning to dismiss it later "after consideration" as being unnecessary.

Apart from the fact that it's basically technically impossible to "block Twitter/FB" (or whatever) in any meaningful way - and everyone knows it - I don't think it would have made any difference to the rioting.

After all, there have been riots and unrest for centuries. However, the post-riot organised cleanup could not easily have happened without social media. And that was a good thing. Also those caught up in areas affected by the riots were able to find out what was going on by using social media. And that's a good thing too.