I keep hearing astonishment at how so much web traffic can be stored with relative ease.

Sure, it's going to be a lot of data, but a whole lot of that data is duplication, and where there is duplication there can be compression. And where it's not, even at level 6/7 you can identify significant commonality (facebook user home page) and simply store the delta.

It's not like they're storing every byte sent and received by every Internet user at all.

Put some fuel back in do you think it would start?

...if anyone could get the new Gmail compose to work.

You can't automate the production of everything otherwise you would have no customers.

I think Henry Ford put it better.

4000 unproductive people?

Or is this just another 4000 people to go over the next 25 years taking into account the usual number of people who leave over 25 years if you don't hire anyone else?

He should know.

Just as the concentration of computer processing power cycles between the client and the server (could/network) so to does the length of time that consequences of your actions stay with you.

This is despite most developed countries having a concept along the lines of the UK's "rehabilitation of offenders" - the right to put your wrongs behind you and start again. We have now entered a cycle where that is not possible, because your wrongs are documented forever on the Internet.

And that will continue, until such time as we can travel faster than information.

Yes it has its flaws, yes you sometimes don't know whether you're looking for needles in haystacks or haystacks in needles, but it's not like they're not aware of that, and it's not really a big deal either in these days of syntax and function aware editors and instant online reference, and it has provided me and i'm sure many thousands of other people with a career not just in contract coding but also in being used almost exclusively on our own websites.

Thanks guys!

Got to be a CERN insider in for a quick $$$

...I'm sorry, but I would just HAVE to try and start it.

...but I haven't hit it yet.

You could have a 1.5Pbs (peta* bits per second) connection to your ISP, but when the rest of the Internet sucks, at what point does how big your pipe to your ISP become irrelevant.

I know that the big UK ISPs are all peered with the BBC so things like iPlayer don't even touch "the Internet" so it could be good from an IPTV point of view with established players, but that's only a transient benefit.

From a wider point of view, would I notice much difference between my current 8MB (give or take) ADLS and 1.5Gb fibre?

* lots of

Surely the validity of any evidence citing party x having IP address a.b.c.d at time t comes down the accuracy of the clock on the server that logged the IP address allocation.

How do you prove in court that clock on a logging server was correct.

I don't think you can.

It's a long time since I had any involvement in corporate IT networks; and I realise that a lot is easier said than done, but if I were designing one from scratch today; I wouldn't treat any physical internal employee work location (ethernet at the desk or office-wide WiFi) as being any different to the wider Internet.

This would enable an infrastructure to be set-up where protection was focussed around the core services and the communications channel between them and the accessing client rather than having to worry about what is actually going on at the employee's desktop; because even if you do restrict external Internet access your employees are just going use dongles or their mobile phones.