This is an interesting point, and hardly limited to the UK. In the US concern over crime in schools has led to numerous "zero tolerance" laws which cast far too wide a net often "catching" people for whom the law was never intended.

Or, another but no less harmful side-effect (IMHO), is throwing the book at an at-risk kid who would be better served by more attentive staff and counseling. I realize fully it's easy to make such statements when schools are often overwhelmed and often underfunded (although I *WAS* surprised to learn many bay-area teachers make ~$100K) and have no ability to provide such services.

Still, when funds are available I think some kind of intervention program would be more beneficial than "zero-tolerance" or being hassled by police as described by the parent post. Yes, there will be cases where an individual is incorrigible, but I think too many good apples are thrown out with the bad.

Really? How in the world did you find a Sprint plan costing more that AT&T using the iPhone? Especially when the Sprint "everything" plan is $99/month? That's quite a feat...

You can say Sprint's customer service sucks, and yes, lots of folks had issues there. But as far as cost of plans go, I'm by NO means on the high end AT&T plan, and I'm nowhere near my Sprint bills...

My service was always good on them as well. The issue came when I was laid off and when I started contracting I needed my own smart phone and coincidentally my personal phone died. At the time I was less than impressed with Sprint's offerings (about 1.5 years ago). And this is a personal thing - I hate Blackberry's...

Anyway, I bit the bullet and bought an iPhone. In the Financial District in downtown SF I couldn't make a call consistently much less anything else! I was livid.

To make matters worse, my work gave me a Blackberry. A SPRINT Blackberry, and it had better coverage in SF, Denver, and DC. sigh...Unreal.

I still can't believe I pay MORE to AT&T for this honor...

This is an interesting point. It IS open source and can be forked. How much work in improving the DB occurs within Sun (and soon Oracle) presently? Aside from ignoring new features which are introduced to the open source version, how much damage will ignoring the code base really cause?

I would assume (possibly dangerous) that most MySQL users are savvy enough to use a different flavor of the MySQL code base if the one they're currently on gets stale. I don't see Oracle introducing iterative improvements for MySQL and certainly little or nothing which will be under an open license. I CAN see them layering other features on top which don't become a part of the code base. Not sure why they would pursue such a path unless they want to poke at SQL Server some...

But I think your second point is most important - they tried. Assuming (hoping?) they really are reading feedback we can hope they will adjust their filters accordingly. being vague on questions such as roles and responsibilities between government agencies will only create a general sense on unease in the general population.

Furthermore, we should remember as a group of large agencies, there's bound to be politicking and may not be the level or coordination desired. Of some of this vague area may reflect reality, they don't really know where lines actually exist...

I have been desperately hoping that this is exactly what they do. One would no longer have any need to maintain continuity with forty years of plots, many of which (at least in TOS) were never really intended to be consistent. There would be an essentially blank slate. I think the huge amount of existing material that needs to be accounted for is one thing that's holding Star Trek back --- if you're inconsistent with any minor detail of Trek canon, you get a million hardcore fans screaming at you and ignoring whatever good points your work happened to contain. The writers are practically afraid to try anything really new. What better way to take Star Trek back to its roots than to break the timeline and leave us with a very much uncertain future where anything could happen?

Installing the ML 2006 on this MB is quite eventless. It works. Watching DVDs works fine (i.e. it`s not too slow for this task) out of the box. Haven't tried the divX yet. No idea how much faster the SP8000 will be when I re-compile the Xorg, but "out of the box" the 3D stuff is deadly slow.

I added the plf and contrib as urpmi sources, and installed the pre-copiled ivtv and myth* rpms. Also seems to work OK, but m still missing the fb device associated with PVR350. Now I'm stuck on trying to get a frequencies list for Austria. :-(

In the meantime I tried recompiling the kernel, which just proved what we already know: this machine shouldn't be used for CPU intensive tasks.

BTW, the machine needs ca. 40W, and runs withouth any fans. Its getting somewhat warm, but seems to be stable for now. Let's see hw long will it survive. .-)