Nice slashvertisment, Colin Neagle (Community Editor covering Microsoft security and network management for Network World). I'd say "GYOFB", but you already have.

I'd keep an eye on your coworker Andy Patrizio though - he's so dumb he needs to run software to run iTunes when he plugs his phone in, rather than just disabling the service & clicking on the icon when he needs to...

And because also, if you distill the water first, you pretty much have pure hydrogen dioxide

Ummm, I'd think very carefully about drinking that...

From what I read in the press ...

Well there's your problem right there...

There are many places in the world where these problems don't exist. Most of them are about a 30 minute drive east of where you live now.

I live in Miami, you insensitive clod!

The OWNERS are grandmas who have mutual funds with hundreds of stocks.

No they're not; this was a privately held P/L company - no public shareholders & not publicly traded.

It is (or was; it's being forcibly wound up now) a privately-held "Australian Proprietary Company, Limited By Shares" - not publicly traded, no public shareholders, and limited to a maximum of 50 private shareholders.

Quite likely the only shareholders were the 2 directors who have been singled out as being "knowingly concerned" with the deceptive and illegal practices. I'd look, but the ASIC and government websites seem to have closed off the couple of holes that allowed you to see the shareholdings of P/L directors, and I'm not paying to find out...

I gather this is data being published by a government agency. As all agencies are funded by taxpayers, all records -- with exceptions for security and privacy -- should already be open to the public. Creative Commons seems inappropriate here; the correct notice should be "Public Domain", or is Aussie law different in this respect from US law?

US law is actually the one out of step with the rest of the world - in the vast majority of countries, government records are under some form of copyright, not PD.

What is the point of putting a creative commons license on data that is not copyrightable.

You can't copyright facts, but there are copyright-style laws covering a collection of facts organised into a database.

Or everybody could just understand that US copyright law does not apply world-wide and that, in many more countries than not, facts and collations of facts are often copyrightable.

Maybe Tom &Jerry were sent here by Satan to distract the human race while evil aliens silently take over leading positions in world governments? Now we'll never know the truth!

Nah, that sounds more like Disney to me...

The first one I saw was a program on a CP/M system in the mid-80's. Later in the 80's I had a similar program for PC/MS-DOS. Both were called "realtime", IIRC.

Around the same time I also had a talking watch - from Tandy / Radio Shack? - that spoke the time in the same fashion. I'd set the alarm for 4:25pm & play it over the PA at work when it went off - "Attention please! It's almost four thirty PM".

It could also be set to give a reminder 5 minutes after the alarm time - "Attention please! The time is now four thirty PM. Please hurry!"

You mock - but ...

Negatives for all the Tom and Jerry shorts prior to 1951 were lost in the 1967 MGM fire. Up until 1954, T&J was produced in Academy ratio (1.37:1), which is almost indistinguishable from 4:3 (1.33:1). Later ones were produced in a variety of formats from straight Academy ratio, to widescreen 1.75:1 on Academy ratio negative, to Cinemascope.

The only real difference between initial theatrical and current TV/DVD releases of the pre-1951 cartoons (apart from the obnoxious habit of whitewashing out the culturally-insensitive bits) is loss of the original titles on some, and the odd 'lost' sequence.

"Vinyl's an interesting case - there's something to be said about its distortions, but it's also because of the limits of mastering which resulted in the loudness wars not happening to it. (Note: it's possible to have dynamic-range-compressed masters sent to Vinyl, in which case they sound just as awful as the CD)"

Errr... you do realise that the "loudness wars" began before the Age of the CD, don't you? Over-compression was a common discussion point in the audio engineering trade & audiophile magazines in the 70's, and it was taken to extremes on rock/pop singles & compilations. Not only was it possible, but it was commonplace.

And that was on top of the necessity for a certain amount of DRC anyway, just to 'fit' the signal onto vinyl's limited dynamic range (55-65dB max for a pristine commercially-pressed album vs 96dB? for a CD). Better than that is theoretically possible - in the case of vinyl, careful cutting and a willingness to ignore the effects of pickup compliance on tracking can get you get up around 80dB (IIRC, the famous Telarc release of the 1812 Overture in the late 70's was up around there, but only the best turntables could track it through the cannon shots), but ultimately you're limited by the noise floor of vinyl at one end and the ability to cut/track the groove at the other.

So vinyl by definition requires noticeable amounts of compression, and the "loudness wars" of over-compression started well before the advent of CDs. CDs certainly made it worse, though...

You're forgetting this is brought to you by the Mozilla Foundation. It's a good feature, you will like it, and if you don't then you'll just have to get used to it because they're going to remove other features you actually use until you do.

Seriously, I'm convinced those clowns would rather run the browser into the ground than admit they made a mistake...

It works well, but I've always been annoyed that Firefox doesn't just dish stuff off to the built-in Mac PDF renderer - which is resident all the time and is necessarily snappy.

There used to be a plugin to integrate Preview into FF & render PDFs in the browser.

Unfortunately FF4 in 64-bit mode broke it, and FF18 seems to have killed it completely. Pdf.js is clunky, slow, broken on many PDFs, and the cross-site restrictions of js mean it's useless on many academic journal sites. The other recommended alternative, Schubert|it PDF Browser Plugin, is a piece of shit.