Really? No one ever asked me, which is why I don't regard the laws of my country as binding on me and make my own decisions about what's moral or not.

But there's some solace to be found in the fact that the whole point of all this encryption is so that Dotcom can prove in a court of law that there's no way he could have any idea what files were being stored. So why would he cheat and put himself in legal jeopardy?

No because they have to return the file encrypted with the users key . . . and they don't have the users key.

Not only that, to address a lookup table with 2^65536 elements you'd need an 8K index, or in other words exactly as much storage to store the addresses as the original data.

You can make nitric acid out of air and water.

Nothing's changed and this policy is meaningless until the Cabinet Office releases the guidelines for applying for an exemption. Every dept purchasing an IT system will trump up some half assed excuse and apply unless there are some serious restrictions imposed by the Cabinet Office.

I learned this working for the uk government - everything we wrote could be released under the FOIA and as a result we were careful about what we wrote. I'm glad I had that experience - I don't put anything in an email (or any other written communication) that I would be bothered by having published on the web, read by MI5 or my employer, or even plastered over the tabloids. It doesn't hamper my ability to discuss things with friends or colleagues it just means I'm a little more aware of what I'm writing and think before I do.

If you work for a publicly funded institution that's the situation you're in and for good reasons. If you don't like it get someone else to pay for your research.

ack, I mean <assert.h>

You shouldn't #define assertion anyway. It's really much better to #include "assert.h".

Oh please, Jobs was a salesman and made a mint out of putting standard hardware in a fancy box and selling it at a massive mark-up to fools who didn't know any better.

Technically under UK law (and probably US law) it's not possible to own a human body - alive or dead, even your own.

You say dismissing the claim that Microsoft lead innovation is silly prejudice but when asked for an example of Microsoft innovation the best example you can come up with is squiggly lines under spelling errors?

You're not convincing me.

What does how innovative Apple is (or isn't) have to do with it.

LMFAO

It can't be libel to send an individual a letter accusing them of a crime - you'd have to release it to a third party for it too be libelous. That's the nature of libel