I am intrigued by your religion, and would like to receive your newsletters, prayer books, lists of holy days and invitations to all mass recitals, spiritual retreat weekends and every other religious get-togethers you have...

What?

You mean Britain?

But im not, really. Having worked for the Dutch police twice now, I can safely say that the majority of their IT staff are completely clueless. A few years ago they "outsourced" their IT to a seperate entity to handle all their IT, but this entity was staffed mostly with the people they already had, so there wasn't any actual increase of knowledge (as far as I could tell). They got a nice fat bag of money and an unclear manifest, all paid for by us - the Dutch taxpayer - and this is what we get.

The Netherlands: No privacy, no competence and instead of capable beatcops we get highway robbery in the form of a cop with a lasergun having his daylong break sitting behind a bush next to our highways. And they wonder why the populace is starting to hate law enforcement.

Do yourself a favor and do a search on Google for "C2000", another one of the Dutch police success stories.

I could weep. Or well....puke really.

Joke: noun, verb, joked, joking.

1. something said or done to provoke laughter or cause amusement, as a witticism, a short and amusing anecdote, or a prankish act: He tells very funny jokes. She played a joke on him.

2. something that is amusing or ridiculous, esp. because of being ludicrously inadequate or a sham; a thing, situation, or person laughed at rather than taken seriously; farce: Their pretense of generosity is a joke. An officer with no ability to command is a joke.

3. a matter that need not be taken very seriously; trifling matter: The loss was no joke.

Pedant: Nounâ

1. a person who makes an excessive or inappropriate display of learning.
2. a person who overemphasizes rules or minor details.
3. a person who adheres rigidly to book knowledge without regard to common sense.
4. Obsolete. a schoolmaster.

Pff thats nothing! I run Windows. Do you see ME getting money for my pains? NO!

Ehrm...I dont suppose I could interest you in some cialis or viagra right?

We subpoena'd your ISP to get your home address. Pack your bags and get ready for a trip.

Sincerely,

The RIAA

Am I the only one who's worried by this development? I mean, that new Clippy is bound to possess some kind of AI right? For that kind of cash I certainly expect it to be fairly smart.

Now figure in how good MS programmers are at proper code hygiene. Imagine digital Clippy corpses all over the sourcecode. Add internet access. Add sites like /. where we're all collectively spewing how much we hate Clippy and how bad we want it to stay dead.

I cant help but envision Clippy, out for revenge, armed with nuclear weapons.

Well this article does mention the RIAA so your mental link with Felching is understandable. Worrying, but understandable.

Even if this spokesman expressed the RIAA's official stance regarding DRM, this is no guarantee that it ends the stream of stupid/evil/meanspirited/frivolous lawsuits. You only have to look at their trackrecord to believe that. Common sense has never stopped them before, has it?

CD's are for pussies. I don't use harddisks either. All my backups are done by the 20 illegal Chinese that sit in my basement remembering 0's and 1's for me. If you feed em reasonably, they last up to 80 years!

I used to have a library membership but at that point I was a big fan of Fantasy, and most Fantasy series I was interested in were multi-part. The library would have parts 2, 4 and 7 of a series, making it hard to really get into it. I never had the patience to wait for the missing parts to get returned. So I started buying the books instead. I re-read all of them several times and they look nice and decorative so its win-win :)

FTA: The prototype works with a Vista host but the hardware comprising the NIC is based on a Linux stack.

There's no way im touching that man. I know what happens when matter and anti-matter collide...

Past tense for Tweet is Twat. All the article is saying is that there's a reason for that :)