No, it's like how convicted pedophiles are not allowed to live or hang out near schools.

Obviously one has to draw a line somewhere, but comparing a computer to food is obviously not a rational comparison.

(And FYI, the analogy would be "People accused of lock picking are not allowed to have lockpicks". Which should be obvious.)

First off, £350 is probably not particularly out of line for the cost to process the records. If we were talking £350000 pounds, yeah, that would look like an attempt at censorship. But there's nothing pecular about £350. Secondly, if anyone in the media had felt it was even remotely newsworthy, they would have paid it. The media pays processing costs for records all the time. All that this means is that most news agencies consider Warg a non-story.

Agree, never my snarky post higher up in this discussion. The fact is COBOL is proven to scale and does the things its really good at; probably better than anything else. IBM mainframe MVS platforms are probably the best damn environment to run it in to with the longest stretch of forward and backward compatibility to maximize your software development investment. Generally the calls to kill off COBOL come from the ignorant.

Never a death panel when you need one.

Warg's restrictions are special specifically because the crime his charged with is hacking. Banning a graphing calculator is probably overreach, but it's understandable why they'd want to keep him away from computers.

Sort of like the last leak, the "Kissinger Cables", that were publicly accessible data that journalists and historians have been making use of for years, which he downloaded, reformatted, and set on the Wikileaks site.

New slogan suggestion: Wikileaks: We Open Governments (by taking the data they've already released, running it through a couple python scripts, putting it on our site, and calling it something new)

High energy densities and high currents are emitted when shorted and you end up with maybe a spark. Quite a safe spark though given the pathetically small voltages they can store.

Voltage is irrelevant. If a short releases the stored energy, all of it is converted into heat, since it has nowhere else to go. If stored energy is significant, and is released in a short enough time, this results in an explosion.

So, the safety-relevant questions are: how much energy can a capacitor store, and how much currency can it supply?

If you build a datacenter with its own solar, wind and hydroelectric power supplies, why would the price raise?

Because hydroelectric sites are taken, and your customers might take issues with their clouds disappearing when eclipsed by real ones.

Because only 100,000 people live up there, an area 3/5 the size of the USA....

(I live in Toronto, and I've been north. It's pretty much devoid of people up there...)

Mother nature has already shown us that dog-eat-dog is the best way to adapt, survive, and even thrive.

Except that dogs adapt, survive and thrive by cooperating. In fact I'm pretty sure that a dog that resorts to cannibalism will be put down pretty fast, by humans or other dogs.

The business world is the same way.

Yes: cooperation is the best way to succeed there too. That's why we have anti-trust laws: peaceful cooperation is such a winning strategy that companies will always resort to it unless prevented by force.

I have work to do so my company can kick your company's ass and put them out of business.

I work for a paycheck, and entrepreneurs work for profit, but I guess some men just want to see the world burn.

It is nothing of the sort. They went a long way toward throwing away the tremendous gains of the 2009 "new" Start Trek movie.

The first movie took great pains to give them a brand NEW Star Trek world with all the possibilities that implies. It breaks all necessary ties with the past, and gave them a new start.

So what did they do? They made the second movie a blatant derivative of "The Wrath of Khan".

With all that possibility, they came close to throwing it all away. As it is, it was WAY too similar to that other Khan movie.

Pardon me, but I go to movies to see new things. This wasn't it. My rating: FAIL.

Criminals are flat-out evil. By definition.

No, that's not the definition of criminal.

It's no more sadistic to hate criminals than it is to hate homophobes, conservatives or Christians.

What if the homophobe lives in Iran? There, homosexuality is a crime, so according to you homosexuals must be evil, thus the homophobe is hating evil people which, again according to you, is okay.

For that matter, what about a state that has anti-sodomy laws in books but then removes them? Are all the homosexuals instantly de-evilized when the law is struck down? And what if an Iranian homosexual and an Iranian homophobe leave Iran and enter USA? The homosexual is no longer a criminal, thus not necessarily evil, thus the homophobes justifications fall flat.

My, it is a weird world authoritarians live in.

No, it isn't. My comment has nothing to do with trying out new stuff. I try out lots of new stuff... that's how I learned about all the stuff I was commenting about.

My comment was about people who put stuff out there they think is new, when it isn't.

You missed my point.

Of course new stuff is built by people who genuinely wanted to improve on the old stuff. And that *IS*, as you say, how we improve.

But the fact is that most of them fail, and many of them -- many that I've seen in recent years, at any rate -- fail because they did not know their history. If they did, they would have known that it had been done before and failed then, too. Often for very good reasons.

If you're trying to improve something, make sure it's an actual improvement, yes? Rather than a reversion to something that we already knew doesn't work well.