Google threatening to relocate its business to a friendlier European state is probably enough to make Irish politicians crap themselves and change the law to suit Google.

The blocks in the UK don't use (just) DNS. You can type in the direct IP address of the Pirate Bay and get no connection.

>Their decisions about their products always seem to be based on what is good for THEM

Precisely. Metro on the desktop is about leveraging their monopoly to get market share in the mobile and tablet markets: a nice unified UI that they force on desktop users to 'encourage' them to think - hey this Windows phone has a familiar interface, maybe I'll buy it, and since I know what this UI is all about, maybe my new tablet will be a Windows one too!

Meanwhile, in non-touch-based desktop land ... "THIS IS SUCH BULLSHIT!"

They may have intended it to be good for them. Apparently they just didn't think things through. Undoubtedly, bull-headed thinking imposed from the top (ducks flying chair).

It's extortion and fraud; pure criminal behaviour. There has to be more than "injunctions, penalties, costs, and a five-year disqualification for Brown and Samuel from operating a company."

I don't understand why they're prosecting the 'company' and not the people involved, who clearly belong in jail.

I just treat those EU cookie bullshit banners like annoying advertising and Adblock the fuckers.

Because that's all they are - spam advertising that's saying "Hey, cookies exist and get used, this has been a public service advertisement by your clueless overly-bureaucratic government organisation in Europe. We're here to help. Pray that we don't help you even more."

They're as annoying as pop-ups and scroll-overs. Some are ignorable and all are useless. And they actually encourage the tracking of people (assuming adblock etc isn't used) because the *easiest* way you get rid of them is to NOT clear your cookies. Not clearing means you don't see them every time you visit the website. Clearing them means they are there every time you visit in a new session.

Ridiculous and worse than useless.

Beautiful.

I still can't stand the way FF mobile handles tabs. I want to see all my tabs without having to press a button yo open the tabs menu.

It might be an appropriate means of dealing with low-res or small screens, but not on tablets 7" and up. Until that changes, I can't see FFm being my regular mobile browser.

Speaking as a non-American, NASA is one of the few things I find myself admiring about the USA, and certainly one of the most worthy.

Your government clearly underestimates the high esteem in which NASA is held around the world, otherwise it would fund the bejesus out of it.

And the roots of the next step in the evolution of non-corporate-sanctioned file-sharing began.

The ad industry launched several nuclear 'first-strike' slavos against browsers: pop-ups, pop-unders, interstitials, flashing seizure-inducing Gif ads, javascript pop-overs, flash audio adverts, scroll-overs, surreptitious super cookies, etc, etc, etc.

Fuck them. In the ass.

No lube.

Windows Blue.

It still does.

Well played.

Blind faith is useless and is fair game for criticism. Plenty of organistations believe stupid or even hateful things. My sole point is that religion isn't especially different in that regard. Capitalism, free marrketeers, libertarians, conservatives, socialists, communists ... all have done harm based on dogma and unreason.

The common factor is ... people.

And there I feel I'll have to end it, as I'm just repeating myself. Adios, and best wishes.

The point is, it's the humans not the religion that are the cause of the problems.

Only if you make the mistake of believing that the faults of religions are down to "religion" rather than that humans are involved in these institutions.

Humans pull the same crap in everything they engage in: politics, commerce, religion, families: society in all its forms.