I'm not sure I agree with your implication that this is intentional on the part of Italy - after all America is like a shining beacon to the world of how to have a broken legal system.

But... if you are correct, Google stopping linking to Italian businesses won't help, most likely Businesses will sue about that, and it will only speed up the process of investigating Google for anti-trust issues in Europe. (obviously America is already ahead of us on this front too!)

I rebooted a Dell office linux fileserver once, just to ensure my new fstab entry mounted ok on startup. It didn't mount okay because I made an error in the fstab startup options. Although that turned out to be a more minor issue with the reboot, the much larger problem was that after rebooting the server it would no longer recognize any USB keyboard (I tried 5 different ones) - on any USB port - or via a plugin PCI card, and I couldn't work out any other way to give keyboard input without first having a normal working keyboard. I tried reseting the CMOS but that just resulted in the machine asking for an F-key to get pressed on startup.

After talking to Dell technical support for some time it was apparent they had no way to work around the issue either (short of replacing the motherboard) and we ended up throwing out the whole server and moving the disks to a new one.

That was a late night, and one server i really regretted rebooting!

PS We had a leaky roof and an umbrella over the server for some time, the server had got wet previously and still had drip marks all over it, so I wouldn't really *blame* dell. ..

It's "not made legal" by that small print.

Only a UK court could rule whether or not the change in contract is permissible under consumer protection laws.

I would guess that if challenged legally, it would be deemed that it is not legal to enforce this contract change on existing customers, or existing customers would have the right to leave the network.

There are many terms that one can put in a contract that are automatically overruled by consumer protection laws, so the enforcement of such a term might be illegal.

No one is forcing you to click on the porn links, it's already opt-in!
This is more like taking page 3 behind the counter and having to ask the shopkeeper for the "boobies newspaper".

Don't forget H.264 is a proprietary, patent encumbered video codec and Microsoft directly profits from this as a member of the MPEGLA licensing pool.
One should view this in the perspective of a larger effort by key MPEGLA members (notably, Apple and Microsoft) attempting to stop the adoption of an open and relatively patent free video codec becoming a web standard in HTML5. Many measures are being applied including the usual FUD about any competing open codecs.

Competing browsers manufacturers / platforms are trying to avoid patent problems and proprietary technology and keep the web open (Mozilla, Opera) whilst Microsoft and Apple are trying to extend HTML with Patent encumbered formats (in which they have a financial interest!) which if they get heavily adopted will mean their browser/platforms will have a commercial advantage over competitors that are sticking to the open and patent free standards.

Of course it's in Microsoft's interests to push easy playback of the proprietary H.264 format on it's Desktop computer monopoly! Microsoft directly profit from H.264 becoming the HTML5 default format as they are still charging licensing fees related to aspects of the H.264 ecosystem *and* they get more lock-in to the windows platform making it harder for competitors to break the monopoly.

I wish it was just a matter of wanting to get rid of flash but the codec issue really bothers me as it's a clear conflict of interest on Apples part and I feel it rather weakens Apple's position in terms of who holds the high ground.

Jobs is shouting about how flash is proprietary and non-open and how he's all about HTML5 which is a standard and open.
Which makes people think he's really great and all about the standards and open-ness but actually he's been trying to push H.264 which is patent encumbered with a number of charges and restrictions and which apple profits from as a member of MPEGLA, whilst at the same time trying to prevent the adoption of and spreading vague FUD about other potential options for video codecs.

Not that I like Flash, it totally sucks, but at least Adobe aren't trying to screw up the HTML5 spec with patent encumbered codecs they profit from!

Reflect on a few facts:

* The most popular method of adding concurrency to a language is to add threaded/shared-memory style concurrency, which is really really really hard to use without introducing subtle bugs, race-conditions and deadlock - even if you are an expert programmer.

* Most people writing Javascript are not expert programmers, many are not even that familiar with Javascript.

* With flash disabled, it is currently hard for a web page to max out more than 1 CPU core per page by accident.

Think about those facts long and hard - and then be thankful for the delay in introducing concurrency to Javascript.

It's true flash is a lot more stable these days, particularly with the release of flash 10.1

Just the odd browser issue here and there:
Like it causes IE to crash very frequently on some computers
http://forums.adobe.com/message/2925919?tstart=0
and Firefox to crash very frequently on some computers
http://forums.adobe.com/message/2962506#2962506
http://forums.adobe.com/message/2920257#2920257
and then of course there was the Safari crashing problems
http://fairerplatform.com/2010/08/flash-10-1-crashes-safari-how-to-remove/
and it crashes some computers with hardware acceleration enabled (the default setting)
and it causes all browsers to crash on some computers when you try to activate a webcam
http://forums.adobe.com/message/3031253#3031253
and of course it crashes chrome a lot too on some computers (also remember the Adobe flash uninstaller doesn't work on chrome now, so need to uninstall in two ways)
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=461f66d507a8d884&hl=en

But I'm sure your right, I haven't for instance seen anyone complain of flash crashing safari on the iPhone. oh wait....

The BBC is probably just pissed off that they weren't allowed to create a BBC iPhone app, so are getting their revenge on the government by exposing all the pointless apps they've came up with.

Err, way more than 30% of the stuff on the app store is already crap!

That's what ratings and rankings are for.