I've never fully understood this concept that you build infrastructure to make money directly. That's crazy. Infrastructure is a sunk cost that has secondary benefits; for example, building HS2 will allow more people to live in places like Manchester & Birmingham instead of the South East, which reduces the pressures on infrastructure in the South East, which means you don't need to invest so heavily in things like transport, housing, water and power in an already densely populated area.

What I don't see is a sane reason to build high speed rail.

Because the ability to move people and goods around very quickly efficiently and with minimal pollution is a good thing?

Take it over to Corby [UK] Stewart and Lloyds, a steel mill [when we still had them] which had an ICL 1901 or 1902 with a huge drum store.

I don't suppose you ever got to play with the LEO II they had there, did you?

I fail to believe the the content of The DailyWTF is sourced entirely from self-taught programmers. From experience, morons will be morons whether or not they have a CS degree.

DRM was never the issue. Streaming media is hard. Real offered products like RealMedia Server, which handled the encoding and streaming for you. They were the only game in town until Microsoft launched their streaming media (ASF) platform. MP3 never hadthe tooling around it that RealMedia did. End of story.

...the BBC have been using RealPlayer streams for radio services almost ever since they started putting shows online.

They did indeed use RealPlayer when they launched on radio streaming (it's Flash based again these days). You know what? I was damn glad they did use RealPlayer, too. Because like it it or not, RealPlayer worked on Linux with Netscape, which meant I could listen to BBC Radio 1. The alternative was Windows Media, which certainly didn't work on Linux (not withstanding some horrible and very unstable hacks or reverse-engineered libraries).

So yes, RealPlayer was the best of a bad bunch, but it was the right decision.

Incidentally I knew the guy who worked at the BBC and created the experimental Ogg Vorbis streams. They seriously considered offering Vorbis streams as an official option, but there really were technical issues with it that meant the idea was dropped. Sadly that was over ten years ago and I can't remember what they were. Ho hum.

If you genuinely believe that Haiku is in a similar state to GNU HURD, you're insane.

News from Haiku is interesting because they're one of the few truly alternative operating systems out there that are actually progressing. That's the sort of thing that Slashdotters used to be interested in. If you're not interested in it, I'm sure there are another hundred "Your Rights Online" posts just waiting to gush out of the Firehose that you can go vote up.

Anyone who went to school in the UK in the 1980s grew up on it.

Nope. I was at school from '84 to '95 and never once saw, let alone used, a RISC OS machine. It was BBC's (Masters & B's) at Primary school and RM Nimbuses with DOS/Windows at Secondary school.

It's incredibly sad, isn't it? I'm not even going to claim US bias here: out of the entire UK user base of Slashdot, you would have hoped that more than 10 or so people would have shown some interest in Sir Bernard and his work.

I'm proud to say I attended the Sir Bernard Lovell School in Oldland Common, where he was born. Sadly I suspect that the majority of students attending these days won't know who Sir Bernard Lovell is or what he did, which is a shame.

For a more in-depth read of the origins and growth of the Internet, I can't recommend the excellent Where Wizards Stay Up Late.

Perhaps I should gift a copy to the Wall Street Journal?

So Ethernet standardised the local interconnect. So what? Prior to that people just built custom interfaces: sites with IMPs built a custom interface between whatever computer(s) they had and the Honeywell 516. It wasn't like it was impossible to connect two computers together before the advent of Ethernet.

No.

That's why you have firewalls and network ACLs between VLANs.