"to safely store all of your photos in iCloud" Rated +5, Funny. I don't mean any specific criticism of iCloud, but ...for God's sake...the idea that anything at all is "safe" in the cloud...is hilariously wrong.

In UK. If you have your broadband from BT, you can use wifi from any router that is advertising FON service. You need to logon with your BT account credentials, but it's otherwise free to use. If you are out and about, and you need wifi, just drive into a residential area. There will one or more FON routers on almost any street.

Agreed that it's not in the summary, but as you correctly note, it's just a "summary". Anyone who reads the underlying blog post will read this among the facts on which the court based its opinion: "The public was allowed to search by keyword. The search results showed only the page numbers for the search term and the number of times it appeared; none of the text was visible."

So those readers who RTFA will be in the know.

"Karpichko Information Services are proud to announce that we have won a high-profile contract worth a six-figure sum from a US client. The client, a low-profile multinational data-gathering business, wishes to discredit certain information sources and shift the blame for their own loss of control of the situation. Our operative, ex-KGB Major Boris Karpichko, enjoys a well-earned international reputation in the disinformation field, and has recently graduated summa cum laude from the IBM Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt School."

Don't I wish.

A cynic might argue that the key difference in this case was that, for a change, the ISP's, and not merely defendants, were challenging the subpoenas; but of course we all know that justice is 'blind'.

An ingrate might bemoan the Court's failure to address the key underlying fallacy in the "John Doe" cases, that because someone pays the bill for an internet account that automatically makes them a copyright infringer; but who's complaining over that slight omission?

A malcontent like myself might be a little unhappy that it took the courts ten (10) years to finally come to grips with the personal jurisdiction issue, which would have been obvious to 9 out of 10 second year law students from the get go, and I personally have been pointing it out and writing about it since 2005; but at least they finally did get there.

And a philosopher might wonder how much suffering might have been spared had the courts followed the law back in 2004 when the John Doe madness started; but of course I'm a lawyer, not a philosopher. :)

Bottom line, though: this is a good thing, a very good thing. Ten (10) years late in coming, but good nonetheless. - R.B. )

...does City of London police have any jurisdiction outside City of London? Registrar should not have caved in.

I should like to point out that I, a registered voter and taxpayer, have never been asked whether I want my taxes spent on something so monumentally stupid as a Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit. And I suspect that its creation was an idea planted, bought, and paid for by You-Know-Who.

I've done work for a local charity to select, install and implement a local open-source solution. The problems came when the national HQ with a national IT department started arguing with our choice of an open-source solution, recommending a proprietary solution on the basis that "you'll be able to get support". It wasn't just that they wanted $1200 per year per seat (as opposed to nothing per year per seat), but also that they were based in Flagstaff, AZ and had no (zero) offices anywhere in my country or anywhere in Europe. Just how exactly were they going to supply this support? Meanwhile we had two local volunteers on board, both competent in the relevant language, both of whom would be available at an hour's notice at no charge. So whenever you find yourself facing a recommender who is pushing proprietary on the basis that "you'll get support", call him out on it, demand to talk to a previous customer to find out what support experience they have had, and challenge him to match local availability and fees for people with relevant skills.

but I don't want a separate device just to do Office...I want whatever device I use to be able to run "everything I use" so I can combine stuff, rework, sort, juggle, scrape and reformat all that stuff into one coherent work output. If, like the Surface, the other apps from other suppliers are either not present or unusable with a touch screen, it's dead in the water. And it's dead in the water if I have to buy again software I've already paid for on another platform. And don't say Cloud. Cloud is dead because using it makes me legally non-compliant.

EU law already makes it illegal to pass "personal data" to any location which lacks the protections available in Europe. The so-called Safe Harbor provisions apply for te US situation, but everyone who understands the EU law knows that the Safe Harbor arrangements are just smoke and mirrors - they afford precisely no protection at all - they exist to enable EU companies to export data to the US while claiming they have complied wth the law.

I was with you until:

I don't think that's something that's particularly easy to measure. I agree that pretty much every country has a large number of stupid people and a large number of intelligent folk. To suggest however that the ratio of intelligent to stupid is better is in the US than everywhere else however is pushing it a bit.

All to often I find software does not function the logical way it should. That to use the software efficiently I have to think like the programmer(s) or figure out what they were thinking when they wrote teh program..

The old saying about walking a mile in someone else's shoes.... people do this all the time in using software.
Computer are made of earth and run thought processes of the programmer(s) thus making them a stone image of the beast otherwise known as man.

But this is not the only place the thought processes of a few are imposed upon many more, for religion, government etc,,, all use abstraction as most certainly so does programmers. And its in understanding this that we also have the metaphorical key to the bottomless pit. For that key is the understanding of the gears and bearing of how we process abstractions and why we came to create them.

The main ethical issue regarding software is the false constraints those in the field of programming subject the users to. Who doesn't know how barbarically constrained the Windows Command line is? But it is done that way under the philosophy established by Bill Gates "the way to become wealthy is to make people need you"

Ethics went out the windows when Bill Gates yelled "Piracy" over a matter of people being very tired of waiting for what they had paid for and Bills BASIC itself, was a port of those who created it.

The only way to bring Ethics back into the field of programming si to not only make it all open source and to disallow software patents (which itself is complete fraud) but to properly approach software development the way it should had been done to begin with. In the way that is natural in teh creation and use fo abstraction, without false constraints.

To understanding this is indeed possible see http://abstractionphysics.net/

My Dad used to take me to play pitch-and-putt (nine short holes, played with a 9-iron and a putter). One day when I was 9, we were both having an awful round, and I said "Dad, this is a bloody frustrating game". He replied "Yup, that's why I gave it up in 1932". I got the point, and have never been back since.