Actually, much of the BT set-up makes a whole lot of sense.

There *is* a natural monopoly in putting copper (or glass) in the ground or on poles, and the part of BT that does this is a distinct entity.

The parts of BT that sell everything from residential phone lines to corporate GigE circuits have to buy from the infrastructure part of BT on *exactly* the same terms as any other telecoms service provider. It's about as much of a level playing field as you're ever going to get...

The issue isn't around choosing a brand rather than generic "building blocks". The issue is that the plural of "Lego" is "Lego".

"LegOS" is an operating system for Lego Mindstorms.

May as well ask why you keep getting corrected when you insist on talking about multiple sheeps, gooses, or datas.

Many nouns referring to a group of individuals are plural in English where they are singular in American, for example band names. English is always "BandOfYourChoice *are* playing at...", never "is".

"The BBC" is debatable, I think - is it the singular Corporation, or the collection of people who make it up? I'd tend towards the latter, in the same way I'd expect (in English) to see "Apple are launching the new iThing 47 next week". I'd only really expect it to be singular when it's the object of the sentence - "the BBC was formed by SomeActOfParliament in XXXX..."

You're aware of this idea where you can have separate user accounts, even on the same computer, right?

Forget targetted ads - I don't want the same wallpaper as anyone else who uses the computer, I don't want the same icons, I don't want them in the same places, I don't want the same applications preferences.

We both use computers enough these days that I wouldn't want to share the hardware any more. Sharing the settings was rubbish in Windows 3.1 in 1993, let alone nearly 20 years later.

No, it isn't. It's easy. *Everything* is a /64 unless you have a really good reason why not. You should get at least a /56 for each site, for anything remotely "business-grade" a /48. You really don't have to care about numbers of hosts at all - start thinking in terms of what *networks* you need, how many of them, what your *subnet* addressing plan should look like...

It's not just more bits, it's a mindset-shift in how you design networks.

I like RPGs, platformers, etc and hate FPSes (brown or otherwise) and sports games, but I also *already* have far more unplayed games than I have time to play. Keeping a game I've finished to play again at some unspecified future time is a non-starter for me.

I have a Sky subscription. I already pay for Sky Atlantic (which shows Game of Thrones and a bunch of other HBO stuff).

If I've missed something because of a clash on the DVR (can only record two channels simultaneously), or fat-fingered deleting the episode I've just watched *and* the next one, or simply didn't know I wanted to watch a series until a few episodes in, or ran out of space on the DVR, damn right I'll torrent it.

As far as I'm concerned, morally if not legally, anything that's previously been broadcast to me, on a channel I have an active, paid subscription for is fair game. It's effectively getting someone else to do my time-shifting for me.

My bugbear with GURPS was that I could never find any advice on how to provide appropriate challenges for the players. I could see how to gauage the difficulty of a particular skill check for a known group of characters, but extrapolating from that to designing an adventure was beyond me, particularly if there was going to be any combat involved. It's a shame, it seemed a nice system...

Where are you getting cash from to "keep around" if not from an ATM? Life is far too short to waste any of it trying to get to a bank in the hours they condescend to open and then queue to withdraw cash...

In what way is paying for your own domain and hosting your own email not a good answer? Why is an "other than" needed?

FPS games are dull, so it's not an issue. Thankfully, some interesting games are still made for consoles as well.

At least, you do Japanese first (easy, Nintendo's native). Then you do English(/French) for North America (maybe Spanish as well). Then you pick either Europe and do the other languages, or Asia and its languages.

Where this really, really tends to suck is in the UK. We have to wait for the European release to be ready, due to localisation issues, but when we do finally get it, the game is still in American rather than English :(

I'm inclined to believe that's typically an "or" rather than an "and". Although Internet porn spam might make you believe otherwise...

Right, and if you don't, they can ask you to leave or have you removed for trespassing if you refuse.

What they can't do is hold you down and force a shirt onto you.

I don't know about enforcement, but when I registered my primary domain, I had to submit a form, by email, justifying why I should be granted that domain.

I think by that point they were rubber-stamping them, but it was read and approved by a human.

I definitely saw rejected applications a couple of years prior to that, for both GTLDs from Network Solutions, and for .uk from the UK Naming Committee.