Like so many here will no doubt be doing, I just wanted to say 'thanks'. Slashdot was not only my favourite source of news for many years, but also Slash (the 0.3-pre tarball!) was my introduction to coding in Perl, and out of that I built my career. So my sincere thanks for all you did here, and I hope you enjoy whatever you do next.

We currently have petrol at £1.40 per litre in the UK, which is over $10/gallon. Our prices have been over $5/gallon for maybe 20 years or more. We still have single-occupant SUVs all over the place, in fact they're on the increase.

One sales droid's abject terror is another sales droid's golden opportunity.

Last time I joined in one of these threads, Rob Malda finished it a few comments later.

Are Twitter at any point going to get a revenue stream?

If you've got the kind of issues described in the article summary, your carriers stink.

Yes, they do. Why do the carriers in .au not stink - is there legislation that stops them getting up to the same kind of crap that the UK ones do? Or is there more room on their backbone networks? Or are they just nicer? :)

The UK has always had ridiculously high bandwidth prices and ridiculously low traffic caps, on all Internet services - I've hosted numerous UK-specific websites on US servers over the last ten years, purely for cost reasons.

My girlfriend has mobile broadband through Vodafone because BT couldn't figure out how to install a line in her property (which didn't stop an engineer claiming he'd done it, and them billing her for most of a year before it all got sorted out - but I digress).

I've been surprised at how good the speed and stability of her connection is, but the traffic cap is crippling. She's a fairly heavy 'net user (she's a freelance web designer, so has to upload new sites and drafts for her clients to see), but she's not a filesharer, and she runs up against her 5GB cap most months. Going over it gets very expensive very quickly.

The worst thing about the cap is that it discourages her from downloading updates for her OS and software... meaning that she's probably more open to virus/worm infections.

http://www.redhat.com/legal/patent_policy.html

Bricolage had a command-line SOAP utility in 2002:

http://viewsvn.bricolage.cc/bricolage/trunk/bin/bric_soap?view=log

This is /. - some people here will argue anything. :)