Not always. Take email, look at the costs of using Google mail vs. running a complete, resilient mail system. Control over your data aside, for most small to medium businesses gmail will be a lot cheaper, not to mention more reliable and functional.

I'm not sure, every article I've read seems to refer to websites based here rather than visible from here. I have yet to see anything that implies the law would be applied to sites hosted elsewhere or by companies based outside of the UK.

All this will do is harm European companies at the expense of ones based elsewhere.

I've seen UK based sites start to implement this, but there's no chance that Facebook, Google etc will follow suit - so if the tracking actually does have monetary value, we've just guaranteed that only non-European companies can benefit from it. Woohoo.

That's 11 elapsed hours, not 11 hours to do the work. They have a backlog. Each one might only take five minutes to process, but they'll get to it, on average, 11 hours after it's reported.

The quick workaround, if you don't mind your browsing going via their proxies, is to use Opera Mini on your phone. Since all traffic goes via Opera's servers, it bypasses the filters.

I started using it when I discovered that a (non adult) site I wanted to visit was blocked on O2. It's competitors weren't, which raises two interesting questions - could they sue for unfair restraint of trade as it gives their competitors an advantage, and could they also sue for defamation as they are effectively being accused of being an adult site?

You have to give your Facebook password to buy a book? Wow, things have got bad

Eh?

From the article

"'Only the government could have made a 'terrorist' out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in its scope,' said Judge Colleen McMahon, sentencing him to 25 years. She branded it a "fantasy terror operation" but called his attempt "beyond despicable" and rejected his claim of entrapment."

So if she thinks it's a fantasy and buffoonery, why give him 25 years for it?

I used Mandrake for a while. Not because it was an easy beginners distro - I'd started out with Slackware, but because it was easier to get stuff done. It was, if I recall, one of the first distros to come bundled with non-free software; drivers for video cards, codecs etc. While it was possible to go to, I don't know, NVidia's site, download the Linux drivers and use them with any distro, Mandrake had them bundled and just worked out of the box. It could also play most of the, erm, interesting video clips I could find...

After I got too lazy to deal with Slackware but not quite lazy enough to crawl back to Windows, it was my distro of choice, probably circa 2000.

I bought a USB drive from PC World last year. Sold as new. Got it home, found that my Windows PC wouldn't recognise the file system - it was formatted, and I could see the hardware, but the drive wasn't showing up. Out of curiosity I hooked it up to a Linux machine and had a nose. Turns out it was HFS formatted. Not only that but it had someone's time machine backup on it.

So not only was the drive - probably illegally - sold as new when it was, in fact, second hand, but PC World hadn't even done a basic format of it.

Needless to say I returned it and gave the manager a bit of a hard time...

She was hearing you say "it doesn't matter that you're not attractive, because visual appearances don't matter to me". In other words, you just called her fat and ugly ;-)