That's not the one involving bacon, is it?

Kafka did write other things than Metamorphosis, you know...

Peter Garrett is too busy defending uranium mining as the Australian government's Environment minister.

Though Labor and the religiots are committed to forcing through a national censorship infrastructure. If that's in place, expanding what is restricted is a matter of mere administrative fiat, no troublesome democratic debate required.

Thankfully, the firewall plan seems to have trouble getting the numbers in the Senate, and the fiasco of the recent technical trials (deemed a "success" by the government with no actual objective criteria having been cited and scant detail) is unlikely to help. Hearing that Tom Cruise's crazy friends want to use it to stamp out criticism of them probably won't be any more helpful.

A backdoored BIOS is for newbies. The real hardcore hackers use back-doored CPUs or other hardware. All it has to do is look at a packet with a certain byte sequence and its pwned.

Really? They why state governors? They really don't have a lot of access to secret stuff.

Though the state government does communicate with other government agencies in its day-to-day business. Were its infrastructure surreptitiously compromised, it could be a good stepping stone to more interesting agencies; police agencies, perhaps, could be useful, as could any federal agencies involved in infrastructure (even if they don't do anything sensitive, they have a long reach and might know someone who does). And if such a hack could be hidden well enough away, it could slip through where others wouldn't.

What if whoever's sending them isn't just a small-time crook but a foreign intelligence agency with the resources to custom-make chips with built-in back doors. (Such back doors have been demonstrated to be plausible; someone has built a CPU with a circuit which switches off memory protection when it finds a specific sequence on a memory bus, which means that it doesn't matter how secure the software running on it is.)

Why would they target state governors' offices? Well, they'd presumably be easier to pwn than, say, the Department of Defence or the CIA, and a good starting point for setting up pieces.

They are not interoperable with 3-pin sockets (without an adaptor which has the profile of a 3-pin plug, thus defeating the purpose), and are only fitted in bathrooms. They exist solely because British electrical codes prohibit normal sockets (i.e., ones with enough juice to power a hairdryer or heater, or, indeed, anything more powerful than an electric toothbrush) in bathrooms. (Which is another example of British electrical standards' hidebound, risk-averse conservatism; no other place has such restrictions on electrical installations. Either America and Europe have a higher tolerance of acceptable losses due to hairdryer-related electrocution, or Britain is overreacting. But I digress.)

But, in any case, the 2-pin plugs (which one can quite happily go through life in the UK without ever seeing) are useless for actually powering anything but a specialised class of gadgets.

That's not a 2-pin plug, IMHO; it has exactly the same dimensions as 3-pin plugs, and is too bulky and unwieldy for today's age of miniaturised electronics. The European, US and Australian standards, by virtue of not having an earth-pin-triggered safety shutter, quite happily support slim 2-pin plugs, while Britain remains wedded to 1950s assumptions on the size of electrical devices.

BS546 is not in general use, but is still used for lighting in hotels and similar places. I guess it's convenient to keep lighting separate from other uses of electricity.

The Australian plug standard (which is conceptually similar to the US one, with blades fitting into slot-shaped sockets, only at an angle) has undergone a number of revisions, with recent ones mandating plastic sheaths for the pins, so that no metal is exposed when they make contact. This is similar to designs of European and British plug pins. Is there any technical reason why this couldn't be introduced to the US standard?

Of course, that quality does come at a price. Putting a fuse in every plug and mechanical shutters in every socket adds to costs, and the fact that only a handful of countries (mostly recent former British colonies) use it adds costs when making devices. If one wants to sell something across the EU which needs 220-240V of electricity, one is stuck having to provide two types of plugs (European and British; not counting variations if you need earth). And does the continent really have a much higher rate of deaths by electrocution which would justify these expenses?

Furthermore, the bulkiness of the British plug (which has no 2-pin variant; the third pin is needed to open the shutters) was fine when it was just used for electric kettles and the telly, but it fits rather uncomfortably in today's gadget bags. There have been proposals for folding variants, but they have not so far been realised.

In a sensible world, Britain would abandon BS1363 and harmonise with the European standards. Of course, if anyone suggested this, the tabloid newspapers would howl about traitors selling out ancient traditions to the despicable frogs and krauts and there'd be mass public outrage. There is a significant part of the British population who take pride in being symbolically different from Johnny Foreigner (i.e., those across the English Channel), and they write letters to papers and vote, and any politician or regulator not listening to them would have as much luck as an atheist running for governor of Texas.

Whether or not it was possible for her to cause $2m damage to the recording industry is beside the point; the damages are meant to be punitive, to make an example of her and act as a deterrent. Psychologically, for a deterrent to be effective, the severity of the penalty must be exponentially proportional to the likelihood of getting away with it; as such, the sky's the limit.

There's a small trick somebody not habituated to meatspace can easily pick up: if you wear all black, it's dead easy to look good (for some values of good, but still better than not bothering), and easy enough to finetune. Additionally, the goth subculture is particularly friendly to geeks, consisting (in places) largely of geeks.

If you violate copyright, copyright will violate you.

Or, as they said in ancient Rome, "dura lex, sed lex" ("the law is harsh, but it is the law").