This is such a grey area and I would be surprised if there is not some precedent in law that would classify reading someone's mail and private data as a serious offence without the express permission of the owner of that data or a court order requesting such access. Stating that we own the infrastructure therefore we have the right to do what we please is not a valid excuse.

Consider the following. Say a person owns the building that houses a post office, would they have the right to enter that post office and demand to read mail without proper legal permission? Why would private email be any different from private physical correspondence?

When acting as a System Admin on occasion I was approached by management requesting me to read other peoples email which I promptly denied stating that I would need a court order to do this. The reason for requesting a court order is mainly to cover yourself in case there were legal implications. The only thing relating to email which was acceptable was checking if particular email had been sent and where too, which required a check of the logs. Even then I required written permission to do this. Was I being overly cautious? Well yes since it may not be a good excuse in a court of law stating that I was ordered by management to do specific investigations without the proper legal authority.

Was Microsoft breaking the law demanding that the particular System Admin read certain mail for them? Well I would hate to be in that System Admin shoes right now since they effectively did the "break and enter" while management can sit back with a smug look on their face.

I have found Google Docs great however if you are moving around (think consultant) then depending on a product that is on-line only is IMHO stupid because there are may places that block outside internet access. Basically having an installed Office suite such as Microsoft Office or even LibreOffice is a much more reliable way of using an Office suite.

Personally I use LibreOffice under Fedora (it can be also be installed on a MS or Apple OS as well) and I have never found issue with interoffice interoperability. What is even nicer is that LibreOffice is free and is about a 210 MB download and since I use a Linux distribution any updates can be automatically (personally I don't recommend this) or manually updated.

Why would you use 300GB disks to backup your data? The reason to use CD's, DVD's or BD's and now this proposed media is to archive specific data that you require access at a latter date. As long as the disk has a device that can read it then your archived data can be read unless the disk is damaged so any archived media needs to be preserved (minimum of two copies) and checked periodically.

It must be noted that there is huge difference between a "backup" and an "archive". If you only use HDD's to "backup" your data you are not really doing a "backup" you are effectively mirroring your data disk(s) at a specific moment in time and you would need multiple HDD's to do this if you are seriously considering any backup strategy which for home use can be expensive. As for "archive" you could consider a HDD to do this however HDD's are much more prone to failure than passive media such as tape, CD, DVD and BD.

One important thing to consider when archiving is to decide what data you really need to archive and in nearly all cases it is personal data which you would consider irreplaceable and a video collection while inconvenient does not fall into that category.

Now if you had moved your finger about 3 mm to your right of the letter b the sentence would make more sense. :)

Err! were does it state that Venezuela politics is communistic? although the major parities do have those type of leanings but basically the people do have the right to vote with the voting age starting at 18. If you stated that the political party has leanings of Fascist-ism then I may agree with you however the truth is much more complex. If you look at the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...> Wiki you will find out that "Venezuela is among the most violent places on Earth. In Venezuela, a person is murdered every 21 minutes." This is mainly due to the high crime rate and rampant corruption.

I will leave this to the citizens of Venezuela to elaborate further.

I fully agree, I have not watched a Hollywood movie in years.

Actually from the article Attorney-General George Brandis is the one who has flagged the changes, however he appears to agree and criticize the Copyright Act stating

then

In the article there is a statement:

Having never watched "Breaking Bad" I did a quick search and found it is a TV series which anyone with a Personal Video Recorder can actually copy if they wish to do so however this show is not a so called Hollywood movie and many people who have missed one or more episodes can actually catch up by going on-line and watch the shows at selected legitimate sites (a quick search will find them).

Of course you can download via torrent (no money changes hands) which I think the government would like to stop but there lies the problem, without snooping programs which can determine if a torrent download infringes copyright you have no way of knowing and ISP's would not be happy running this type of software since it would take up resources all for the sake of possibly catching an "illegal" down-loader. This type of thing would not be a vote winner.

The problem is that many TV shows can be caught up by going on-line and watching them at "legitimate" web sites. Bringing in legislation to block so called illegal torrent downloading will have an enormous voter backlash which no sane government in their right mind would want.