Google is a US headquarted multinational company operating in many countries under different and most likely conflicting laws. Any country they operate in has the ability to put the hurt on them in an attempt to force them to comply with their orders.

I screwed up, this statement is incorrect.

With windowx XP through to 7 big brand OEM machines had a manufacturer specific (but not machine specific) code in the BIOS. With this BIOS code and an appropriate manufacturer specific copy of windows the OS can be installed with no activation or machine specific key required.

There is also a license sticker on the machine. This has a machine specific key which can be used to install windows in the conventional manner and which would then require activation from MS. As I understand it MS's policy on activation for these keys has varied over time. There have been times when they would just activate online automatically (like a retail or system builder key) and times when you had to phone up and explain yourself.

Not sure what the situation is with windows 8/8.1, as I understand it the bios now contains a code that is individual to each machine but I dunno if anything else has changed.

If your time is valuable and you don't care about the exact specs you are probablly better off buying a prebuilt.

The big advantage to building your own is you can select compromises that don't often appear in prebuilts. For example if you care about fast boot/app launch times but don't do anything with massive CPU requirements you can have a SSD as a boot drive but have a low end processor.

With big brand prebuilts you have to watch for non-standard components. If you are the type that upgrades gradually rather than replacing the whole PC at once or if you just have a breakdown outside of warranty nonstandard components can be a pain.

With whitebox prebuilts you have to watch for low quality components. With PSUs in particular there is a lot of crap out there that can't meet the rating on it's label which is likely to get thrown into bottom of the barrel whitebox prebuilts..

Finding an "incidental collision" (that is a collision that happened in a case other than people deliberately setting out to construct a collision). is most certainly noteworthy. Lets run some ballpark numbers.

There are less than 2^33 people in the world. Most of them probablly don't use google but lets assume that they do. Further lets make a wild ass guess that each one has 2^17 files in googles database (from some googling i'm pretty sure this is an overestimate). That would mean a total of 2^40 files.

Lets further assume that the hash functions are ideal "random oracles".

With 2^40 files there are approximately 2^79 pairs of files. With a 128 bit hash (like md5) then assuming it's ideal the probability of a pair of files having colliding hashes is 1 in 2^128 so with our 2^40 files the probability of a collision anywhere in the set is approximately 1 in 2^49.

For comparison the chance of winning the lottery in the UK is about 1 in 2^24 so 1 in 2^49 is like winning the lottery every week for 2^25 weeks

An incidental collision even in MD5 either means something incrediblly unlikely happened or (far more likely) there is a serious flaw in the uniformity of the hash function's output. That is certainly newsworthy.

In SHA1 and higher any collision even a deliberately constructed one would be noteworthy (the MD5 ones certainy were when they were first found, they are old news now of course).

AIUI the ground is basically slurry. Even if you could back the machine out (which you probablly can't because the tunnel behind the machine is almost certainly smaller than the head of the machine) you'd just be leaving an unprotected face of slurry in front of you.

In the old days if you did something stupid a few of your close friends/aquaintances would likely remember but other than that it would be largely forgotton. If you lived in a small town and it was something especially big the town might remember but you could still likely start afresh by moving to a new area.

Nowadays information about people is being collated and indexed to a massive extent, so it can be much harder to get away from the stupid in your past. Especially if you have an uncommon name.

Even criminal convictions in many countries become "spent" after a certain time because allowing one mistake combined with the general tendancy of hiring processes to allow small but easy to measure things to have a disproportionate impact to screw up someones life forever is not healthy for society.

Having said that I do wonder if the current "right to be forgotten" setup in the EU is a cure worse than the disease.

Mind you the same applies if someone downloads a malware binary across an encrypted protocol

To inspect https traffic you have to force proxy it. Force proxying should be an effective measure to prevent multipath TCP as well.

Unfortunately that isn't enough, many sites copy unreferenced information from wikipedia without indicating their source. These sites can later end up being cited by wikipedia.

Especailly if you are new to a field it can be difficult to know who are the reputable sources and who are the not to reputable ones.

Interestingly even in places where companies are allowed to charge extra for taking credit cards to the customer very few do.

So you are getting the cost of taking credit cards rolled into the price whether you use them or not. May as well take the benefits.

Same reason anyone else does. They want/need to spend money on something now and don't have the cash on hand to pay for it.

Between a house and a pension pot I expect quite a lot of upper middle class people have a million in assets. That doesn't mean they have a lot of liquid cash.

A 6-core mac pro plus an apple thunderbolt display plus a high end macbook pro for when you are on the road could get to that kind of money pretty easilly without looking too suspiscious (assuming you look rich)

They did close airspace during the conflict first up to 26000 feet and then up to 32000 feet. Unfortunately that wasn't enough.

I guess they either didn't know what weapons the rebels had or didn't want to admit it for fear of advancing the rebels PR.

Lets not forget that Nokia was floundering before Elop went in.

AIUI corporate officers are given wide lattitude to do what they belive is in the best interests of the company. Otherwise you'd get a flood of lawsuits whenever a descision turned out badly. So you would basically have to prove that Elop did not belive that going the MS route was in the best interests of the community.

OCR can still be useful for search even if the accuracy is too low for complete conversion.