The USA is spying on the UN and European Union
The USA is spying on peaceful countries like Brazil, Belgium and the Netherlands
The USA is spying on Brazilian oil companies
The USA is spying on Airbus partners

What we see is 2 things:
1. The USA does not trust peaceful sovereign countries
2. The USA has economic motives for spying

To return to a situation of trust amongst friendly countries, this has to stop immediately and completely.

I have one too, the Sinner Mango+ with a 170W assist. It has an 11-speed hub gear in the rear which allows me the switch gears while standing stil, and a big metal U-ring which I use to chain it to an ebject wherever I park, not only against theft but also against strong winds which my blow the velomobile away.

My car ride to work is 38 km and takes between 25 (holiday season) and 60 minutes (normal traffic outside holiday season). With the Mango+ it always takes 65 minutes as I am not slowed down by traffic. The removable battery needs to be charged home and at work, so half my energy cost is even subsidized by my employer (but it isn't much anyway). With motor off, I cycle at ~32 km/h, with power I manage 38-42 km/h. The seat is comfortable and all 3 wheels are sprung, but it still is a bumpy ride due to the road quality, and the fact that you must keep your tires at 5-6 bar to reduce drag.

Without the wind cooling you, it can be hot in the summer, even with the foam top off. In the winter I wear a nitted cap, and a shawl around my neck, the rest stays warm inside. For me it keeps me in shape without loosing time in the gym, I exercise in the time I could have spent in traffic. At work I take a shower, which I would have taken at home if I went by car. I clock in after the shower, of course. For safety, I have daytime running lights (LED) and I chose a 2-tone (red & white) paintjob. When sharing the car roads you have to drive it very defensively as if nobody is seeing or expecting you, on bicycle paths the danger is a lot less. Part of my trip is on a bicycle path parellel to the slow-moving traffic, and it is very satisfying to go faster than the traffic jam.

Sorry, couldn't resist the combination of Microsoft and throw in one sentence.

This will also put an end to piracy in the eastern part of the Indian ocean, when all ships between Europe and Asia go the northern route. Time to get a decent job?

Same here in the Netherlands. I tried to update yesterday (10-10) and today via the Update Manager, but no luck yet. I'll try again in a few days.

On my Motorola Milestone with Android 2.1:

• Default browser startup 1s, Newspaper m.volkskrant.nl 3 s.
• Firefox 4b startup 8s, Newspaper m.volkskrant.nl 3s.

Especially for a mobile browser, that's a slow start as it is more likely to be started multiple times per day,rather than burn the batteries by being on or in the background.

Furthermore I had to throw out a lot of applications to make room for the apk file. It's huge, and it needs to slim down considerably.

Conclusion, although I'm a Firefox fan, is that they need to work on install size and startup speed before I will use it as my first choice.

A little bit closer to their region and experience is Laurence of Arabia. He defeated the Otomans by concentrating on taking out locomotives. It halted the logistics completely and forced the withdraw.

Just like the current focus on fuel transport will cause enormous problems that cannot be solved by any of the (long-term) solutions here (today there was another large-scale burning of fuel trucks).

Houston, we have a problem...

It's the least we can do. You liberated us (I'm dutch) 65 years ago, let us now liberate you.

Monsanto has a long, and fortunately well-documented, history of deliberately poisoning our world with first their herbicides, then genetically modified plants that withstand larger quantities of their own herbicides, and further infertilizing that crop, so that you have to buy new seeds every year.

Couple that to an army of lawyers to sue the environmentally consious people and innocent bystanders who had their natural crop infected with blown-over genetically modified seeds from Monsanto, and anyone can conclude that Monsanto is EVIL.

If I was granted 1 wish, I wish that Monsanto would stop operating and invest their accumulated profits into undoing the damage that they did worldwide.

I support the intranet for a 7000 person company, and put up a help page telling them to use OGV (for Firefox on Windows. Linux and Solaris) and WMV (for IE).

<video src="filename.ogv" autoplay="true" controls="true">
...code for IE7 users...
<video>

Firefox reads the video tag and ignores the inside of the video container, and IE7 ignores the video tag and reads the 10 lines of WMV code.

Voila, no more flash.

I feel embarrased that a dutch university spent time on this obvious fact...

And proud because the dutch girls are pretty enough to cause this effect, ;-)

Disclaimer: I'm dutch.

My site kayakfun.info (dutch-language site about whitewater kayaking, so no tech-bias) runs Webalizer stats so I only see the top 15 agents, amid lots of bots, but here is the summary from feb 2009 to jun 2009:

• IE total went from 44% to 37% (-19%)
• Moz 5 (Fx and Safari people explained above) went from 12% to 18% (+50%)
• Opera 8.5 went from 0.9% to 2.5% (+170%)
• IE6 dropped from 13 to 9%
• IE7 dropped from 30 to 23%
• IE8 went from 1 to 5%

So "collapsing" ? No, IE total is just slowly degrading for evolutionary reasons, most likely asymptotically approaching zero after a long time. I sincerely hope IE6 and 7 drop out of the top15 really soon, IE8 is not that bad.

This is too close to April fools day to take it seriously.

We had this guy who got laid off, and left to finish work for the remaining 4 weeks, as editor of the company newsletter. He managed to let the first characters of every line in the first article say " sucks", so that if you placed a piece of paper over the rest of the sentence it would stand out clearly. Only after it returned from the printer he told us.

A few years later, when the boss that fired him had moved on and we had another boss, he reapplied for his job. When the new boss heard the story, he did not even want to see the CV. His comment "once a loose cannon, always a loose cannon".

In these networked times, you never ever burn your bridges.

The fact that in all MS programs you can never resize those popups with too-wide info, and then does not even include sideways scroll bar, is beyond my understanding. Surely most programmers at MS themselves must have noticed this, and then all of them decided to NOT fix it.

Using Linux at home, I know how it could and should be, and you blaiming their inability to fix unresizable windows on UI design rules is an eye opener.

Someone in the MS design department actually thought about it and made it illegal for MS programmers to resize popup windows so that we all feel how it is to be disabled????