Yep, it would be much more accurate to say they're leapfrogging past copper - which is a Good Thing. But fibre isn't optional, not even with O3B's MEO satellites in the picture. If you look at the submarine cable map, you can pretty much see at a glance which countries are more aggressive about internet and technology in general, and which ones are being left behind. Fibre is going to be needed in most urban areas, even if it doesn't ultimately consist of FTTH.

Sure, fine, but good communication and coordination are necessary elements of law and order, from developing a cultural intolerance for corruption right down to the cop on his beat and emergency numbers.

The moral of the story is, nothing comes 'first' before communications technology, because everything you do benefits from better comms capability, whether it's knowing the market price of the grain you grow, or finding job opportunities in your city, or organising a community protest, or just using plain old wikipedia to supplement your need for basic facts.

A program?!? Nuh-uh, just put them in the same room with Triangle Man. Everybody knows Triangle Man beats Particle Man.

... And, uh, let's keep Universe Man in the wings just in case Triangle Man gets outta hand....

I'm probably going to get shat on by kids who don't know any better, but....

Use Perl. If a complex set of regular expressions is taking 15 seconds per email, then there's clearly something wrong with the implementation. I suspect you're doing too much backtracking. I've been guilty of the same in the past. In one case, simply anchoring my regular expressions to the start and end of the string reduced running time literally by two orders of magnitude. Just glom the whole message into a string and go nuts.

And before someone makes a 'write-only' joke about Perl regular expressions, I'd suggest you take a look at Perl 6 regex grammars, which provide you with the ability to lay out complex rulesets with ease - and makes them vastly easier to read.

As with any programming issue, it's horses for courses, and when it comes to parsing text with regular expressions, Perl is still at the head of its class.

I'd still love to know what fixes that "Kerberos 5 refuses you" thing you sometimes see in the Console when a user logs in.

It's survived an OS reinstall and rebuilt user account.

Heh, shyeah it is. It's where the Indonapolis 500 is run.

Fuh, had me almost tricked there....

Besides, they haven't even begun development on space sharks, and without space sharks, what good is a frickin' space laser?

I've never seen GIMP used in a production environment. It's just not really there yet.

(Disclaimer: I've worked for a fair number of TV networks and on several features you've probably seen.)

If your intent is to move into professional production, learn Avid, FCP and Premiere - in that order. Though, truth be told, Premiere comes in a distant third. It's been gaining ground since the FCP X disaster, but doesn't quite have the same market penetration.

Honestly, almost no one is going to care about the content of your student projects. But they will care that you used them to learn how to work with different editing platforms.

Because they want to get the stuff that's bound for your Good Friend [sic] France, and because they're not 'setting up shop', they've been there since the early 19th Century. This is just a continuation of their strategic look-in on the canal and the global traffic that passes through it. Oh, and Gibraltar's not in the Middle East. :-)

... But none of this is to say they don't have similar facilities in Gibraltar.

No, it's Egypt.

They're not spying on the Middle East; they're spying in the Middle East... on all the data traffic running through the Suez canal. And that's basically everything between Asia and Europe.

Britain have had a watch on all traffic going through the canal pretty much from day one of its existence. And they've probably had communications taps in since the very first telegraph cables were installed.

Er, the UK is home to one of the most important financial centres on the planet. It's got a huge (commercial and strategic) incentive to know what other countries are doing. And it's not just spying on the Middle East - it's spying in the Middle East on all the Europe-Asia traffic that passes through the Suez Canal. Which is pretty much all of the Europe-Asia traffic there is (Russia excepted).

And you can rest assured that at least some of the US$100 million that the NSA gives GCHQ is being used to maintain these facilities. Draw what conclusions you like.

For the more visually inclined, a graphical map.

And based on that, I'll give dollars to doughnuts that it's Egypt. Virtually all traffic between Europe and Asia transits through the Suez canal.

This.

It annoys me to no end when people respond to those critiquing the nuclear power industry with childish replies like "OMG ATOMS!!!!" and the like.

I trust the science, but I sure as hell don't trust the public or private institutions involved.

How many times have we heard "Oh yeah, this terrible thing happened, and it nearly became this horrific thing, but it got covered-up"?

Why did you have to bring gay people into this, you insensitive clod?!?