The BBC article is light on the details to the point of distorting the issue. There's a better write-up at Paid Content, which also has a link to the complaint. It's not just about ageism; the Jane Doe alleges that IMDb pulled her birthdate from her credit-card information and then published it, ignoring takedown requests.

Speaking as an IT guy, a non-full time intern gets whatever's left on the shelf, unless his department coughs up the money to buy him a real system. No? Then he gets whatever's left. He didn't specify OS, but XP Professional runs much, much better with 1 gig of memory instead of 1/2. I definitely wouldn't do it off my own bat though: the idea of users randomly cracking their cases and field-modifying equipment makes my hair stand on end. It's not the stick of RAM per se, it's the principle of the thing.

Is the question why does the US public "cling" (that's a loaded verb these days) to the system of measurement with which it is happily familiar and uses every day?

...

Probably because no one forced them to change. It's not like the people in other countries rose up spontaneously and demanded the metric system. I could care less myself, and I'm sure that after a period of time I could do metric in my head just as well as Imperial. All that being said I'm doing just fine, thank you.

I notice they mention the resurrecting Cylons from the re-imaged BSG, but fail to mention that plenty of them did die for real under certain circumstances (including just about all of them at the end), and a whole slew of human characters bought the farm.

If you read the opinion itself the court's holding did not rest on this observation, which was made in closing.

Full opinion, from the 9th Circuit, here: http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2011/04/11/08-16745.pdf.

Nice--we do five years at my workplace to just to make them stretch. We also get the monitors so all the equipment matches.

That's not a bad price--what sort of maintenance contract do you get on those?

Link to the actual decision, for those interested: http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/fdocs/docs.fwx?submit=showbr&shofile=09-3379_002.pdf

If he signed a non-compete he waived that right. According to the suit he signed such an agreement.

None that I'm aware of, but having enemies doesn't automatically absolve you of any potential crime. I'm more drawing the parallel that the /. instinctively protects its "own": witness the reaction to Reiser and, for that matter, the deep divisions over Terry Childs. There isn't nearly enough information at this point to make an informed judgement.

Well, the BBC story says "Swedish police have been trying to contact Mr Assange, but have not yet been able to" while Wikileaks says "No-one here has been contacted by Swedish police". Pity you can't serve someone over Twitter. I agree that the timing is suspicious as hell, but after the Reiser fiasco I'm going to wait and see.

In the 1970s there were four schools around the world, and now only a few are left? When you start with four you don't have all that far to drop!

Is there a reliable metric as to which 10% will be needed again at the time the data is written? If not then I don't see what this buys us.