'nuff said.

If you don't want to be blacklisted, then stop sending spam. Simple.

I've seen this story several times before with people complaining about "blackmail" with different blacklists and filters, and in all cases I have ever seen there has been some sort of real problem. Remember that there are different levels of blacklisting, from the lowly backscatter blacklisting which hits a lot of legitimate organisations, up to Level 3 (which indicates that you've been informed of a problem for a long time but basically don't give a fuck), up to the next step which is de-peering or permanent widespread blacklisting. OP is clearly drinking in the last-chance saloon on this one.

Top tip: running an ISP is harder than it looks. Not managing abuse of your systems will eventually cause major problems, and in the worst cases will drive you out of business and have law enforcement forcing their way into you server rooms to take your kit. Don't assume that YOU are the innocent party and the the complainers are just making it up if you want to remain in the ISP business..

That's more than I pay for shared web hosting with "unlimited" everything, including shell access and the ability to set up my own private Git / Hg / Svn repositories.

They will probably make a mess out of it... Last time I went to Staples, I wanted to print some chapters from an Open Publication License book and a datasheet for a Microchip ethernet controller. They refused to print the book without written permission from the publisher, even though the Open Publication License was clearly stated. As for the datasheet, they wanted to charge me a copyright tax because it has "© 2004 Microchip Technology Inc." on the cover...

I said "no thanks" and ended up printing everything on a small mom and pop shop, no fuss at all. Plus no fee for handling USB pen drive, no waiting for almost an hour while someone prints a few hundred photos or decides on wedding invitations, and cheaper prices...

 

It has already been done with a product called Vin Diesel. Sort of ;)

I've been using Seamonkey from the days when it was just the Mozilla browser. All the important Firefox extensions seem to work with it, and it renders most things just fine. It's more stable than Firefox and more traditional in its layout. Is it a lot better than Firefox? No. But it is a little different.. and it has a web editor and email client built in that are fine for occassional use.

And an Android client.

This looks like the long-rumoured Google fightback against Apple. Google have come under criticism (rightly so IMO) for allowing its partners to be in the frontline against Apple's patent trolling. I think Google have several other Motorola patents that they can follow up with.

Perhaps Apple will see sense and start to realise that it didn't invent the smartphone. The ideal solution is for everyone to stop suing everyone else and for fair licensing of real patents and an end to patenting the bleeding obvious. But somehow I feel that isn't gonna happen..

The recent takeover of Digg killed what what was left of it stone dead. On the other hand, Reddit's corporate parents leave it well alone and it has prospered. There is a lesson to be learned there.

Well, RIM are definitely following the path of Nokia. There's a direct parallel between what happened with Maemo/MeeGo and QNX. But the difference is that Nokia shitcanned MeeGo when it realised that it had missed the boat by about two years. RIM doesn't seem to understand this, a 2013 release date for these new QNX based devices is simply too late.

Don't get me wrong, QNX is a rock solid OS to build your mobile platform on. MeeGo is (was?) also very good. You could also say a lot of nice things about WebOS or any one of a number of other failed operating systems. Consumers simply don't want that much choice, the marketplace looks like the home computer market in the 1980s at the moment, and we all know what happened *there*..

What's the difference between a smartphone and a feature phone? Today we see feature phone with far more features than old smartphones have, for example: the Nokia Asha 311 has WiFi, 3G, a 1GHz CPU, capacitive touchscreen, media player, radio and Bluetooth. The only thing missing from a typical modern smartphone is GPS.

The difference is deeper down though, traditionally smartphones can run native applications to extend its capabilities. These applications will typically have full access to the entire device and treat it as a computer. Feature phones are limited to applications running in an environment such as Java, and they can only interact with the virtual machine that the environment presents. So typically feature phone applications are less capable than smartphone ones.. and on top of that Java, is a battery killer. Of course, some smartphones rely a LOT on Java applications too (such as BlackBerry devices) in addition to native applications.

One thing I can't understand though is why Nokia are even bothering with Series 40 at all when they could simply have used S60 (which is a proper smartphone OS) on these cheaper models. S60 is looking good at the moment.. just at the point it is being discontinued.

"This Is the Way the World Ends" by James Morrow. It's a book about the aftermath of a nuclear war.. yeah I know there are lots of those, but this one is so incredibly bleak that it makes Neville Shute's "On The Beach" look upbeat..

Seriously? Yes, MSDOS (and QDOS) were definitely inspired by CP/M. But it's hardly a big programming project is it? One bloke coding by himself could conceivably write a CP/M clone for Intel processors. I think that's probably the most obvious answer..

What next? Proof that the Apple II wasn't copied from the Commodore PET?