This is "Stasi 2.0".

Please, please. Keep detailed records of the interfering scumbags who sign up to work on this.

The chance of a revolution is small, but in that case I want to shoot these motherfuckers.

Yes, movies.

That's a really good way to introduce a particular piece of literature. When doing Shakespeare at school, we watched Roman Polanski's Macbeth.

Fahrenheit 451, 2001 - A Space Odyssey, Watchmen (bonus: original is a graphic novel), Minority Report (based on a PKD short story), and lots more. Just don't take BladeRunner. Visually stunning for it's time, so much of the book is left out. PKD stuffed so many ideas into his work that it's generally his short stories that make better movies.

I'd definitely go with this list. Two names that I'd pick out are:

• Philip K. Dick - Particularly his Hugo winner - The man in the High Castle, or Radio Free Albemuth.
  The first is an alternative reality where the Nazis won. The second is fictional, as if someone worse than Nixon was elected - Nixon heavily influencing Dick's politics.
• Douglas Adams - The Guide, humour, and a particularly cynical way of looking at the world. I'd actually say, go for the radio scripts there - possibly the TV series. The latter for the talking entries from the electronic book decades before Wikipedia.

Yes, but they never thought of this. They just wanted to welcome the largest tourists in the world.

I think most of them are already in America, and looking for their next cheeseburger.

I went from recommending AltaVista, to recommending Google when it was obvious the search algorithm was so much better. Nowadays, I don't recommend Google anymore, I recommend Firefox and a part of why I do that is because it has Google as the default search engine.

I'm probably preaching to the converted to say, that Google couldn't continue to exist without making money off that technology. And that technology enables the automation of something very valuable in advertising, contextual relevance.

The "technology tinkerer" part is Google's equivalent of a regular advertiser's department of coke-snorting-idea-generators.

They don't stand to make much money from geeks, we're the sort of people who learn how to filter out what they make money from. Text-only Adwords was a stroke of genius, when you look at what other advertisers were like at the time. Adverts that are relevant, and not so annoying that geeks will make tools to block them. Especially when the geeks might make that tool easy enough to use that the public do so.

And yes, you're right they've done a lot of interesting and good tech. Plus released quite a bit of it under liberal licenses. It makes for great PR, allows their techie people who develop these things the satisfaction that it's out there - even if the advertising company can't see a way to use it to sell ad space.

I looked at the pricetag and my mind boggled.

Yet, by your logic - if applied a long, long time ago, there would be no rail or roads whatsoever - unless they were profitable.

It seems really unfair to damn this proposal, when it seems to be so similar to what works very well in Europe over similar distances, and with - I would expect - similar projected passenger numbers.

At the stated journey time, you are definitely going to get to your destination faster than even flying - unless you have a private jet standing constantly ready to go. You will miss the drawn-out paranoia-induced security procedures that make the time from arriving at the airport to getting on the plane hours. Not to mention, the environmental cost - you do know planes use a hell of a lot of expensive fuel?

Try again.

Copyright is a social contract between the creator, and the general public, that they are granted a limited monopoly on their creation. The arguments for that, pretty much boil down to it being in the public's interest for people to have a chance to profit from their creations and thus create, and be able to create again in the future.

Saying, "Gee, just get paid what it's worth and don't bother if a megacorp rips you off to sell millions of copies" is breathtaking stupidity. You can't charge five million pounds each to an audience of 20-30 people just in case one of them works for the aforementioned megacorp and will copy your work.

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Google is an advertising company. Not anything else. Not the technology tinkerer it works to portray itself as.

I'm sure I don't need to explain further.

So if he won't read the legislation, and says he can't understand it, why the fuck is he on any committee that is tasked with looking at specific pieces of legislation?

It would be sad, if it was not such an obscene state of affairs. Yet, it is a general indication of the state of politics and how it is trending. The election of George W. Bush, based on the persona he projects, was a clear indication that there are more and more people who are proud to be stupid. I'm not sure if the US leads the way in chasing ignorance, or just has a higher profile in doing so. I do know that, while entertaining to watch, this glorification of fucktardery made me shake my head when Forrest Gump was released. At least there, the stupid guy is good.

As to applying software development and maintenance techniques to legislation? Interesting idea. And the guy is talking bollocks when he says it is pointless to make legislation generally available for review.

Slashdot proves that concerned members of the public can read this stuff. We've got New York County Lawyer. So, yes, the set of people who can comment may be very restricted outside the legal profession. Yet, people like NYCL can give an interpretation of the legislation, sort of reverse-engineering it to whatever talking points the politicians fed to their highly-paid legalese generators. They can then point at the specific bits of the legislation, and you can judge for yourself if they match the analysis. Well, if you've not been indoctrinated to vegetate in front of Glenn Beck et al.

As long as you know where these volunteer legal analysts actually stand on issues, this would very valuable. They help tease out parts of the proposed laws that have obviously been fed into the process by lobbying groups who do not have the public's general welfare at heart.

Apart from the obvious implication that an elected official thinks, "the public who elected me are too stupid for me to make any effort to keep them informed of what I'm doing. It is a near-criminal offense to refuse to give people a chance to have their say on vital laws. In this case, the majority do want a public option, and in an ideal well-informed democracy those who do not would accept that.

As with all things political, and in a huge number of other areas, you should always follow Deep Throat's advice to Bob Woodward. Follow the money.

Microsoft have made secure software in the past. I recall them touting one of the earlier stable NT releases passing some DoD standard or other for security.

What the morons from marketing did not tell you, was that the DoD had some qualifications attached to an NT system meeting their standard - the key one being: Not connected to the Internet.

I still wonder if the No Such Agency still has thousands of VMS systems. I've not used VMS (or, as it became, OpenVMS) in the last five years. I know many Unix fans really hated it, but the entire development of the OS was done using good, tested Software Engineering principles. It was fun when everyone was screaming about the world ending because of the Y2K problem. Alas, I can't find the great response one of the engineers - basically saying that Y2K was not an issue due to the internal date format, and Y10K would only be a problem for displaying the dates.

My Avira issues were around Vista's SP1 release, and yes, I did download the latest version.

Yup, I just told the Security Centre to ignore the Avira issue, and as another poster points out this no longer seems to be a problem.

Just don't ask your average user to disable a Security Centre warning, giving people the idea they could - or even should do such a thing is A Bad Idea.