One of the few benefits of having a cold is the pleasure of passing it on to cow-orkers, don't take that away from me.

How "the vast majority of people" define theft is irrelevant to a court and equally irrelevant to a discussion on the law of copyright. Insisting on your populist definition in these inappropriate contexts makes it look like you are an ignorant fool.

True but easily worked around - the prosecution can only make a point of what you failed to say "under questioning". That doesn't mean when an officer asks you questions on the street - it means when you're in a custody suite being recorded.

If you ask for legal counsel they are not allowed to ask you any questions until you've spoken to a lawyer. If the first thing you do is ask for a lawyer they can't ask you questions and what you DON'T tell them cannot be used against you.

When you do see a lawyer you only have to get them to agree to some vague statement like "should I try not to say more than I have too". Then you can answer any questions with "On legal advice I decline to answer".

What is the prosecutor then going to do:

Prosecutor: "So Mr Sixpack, why did you fail to mention this to the police when you were questioned?"

Mr Sixpack: "My lawyer told me not to say anything".

Prosecutor: " . . . "

Providing an internet connection which a user then misuses does not make you a criminal. Otherwise ISPs could not function.

True to a point. There is criminal copyright infringement if a sufficient financial value is involved. That law was originally meant to deal with (for example) criminals making thousands of copies of cd's to sell in pubs, but unfortunately the wording means it also applies to transferring files to other people (ie bittorrent) if the number of distributed copies can be equated to enough money.

bread and circus

I never liked that translation, "bread and games" or "food and entertainment" would both be better translations. "Circus" has a specific meaning in modern English that's nothing like the meaning intended here why not translate it along with the rest of the phrase?

both BT and Virgin's offerings are capped, throttled, very expensive, or some combination of the above

Exactly, I've got Virgin Broadband at home and they throttle the hell out of me (I'm a torrenter). I went to stay with a friend for a month recently and BT told him he was going to exceed their "fair use policy" on a supposedly "unlimited" deal.

So why pay for the extra bandwidth if you're not allowed to use it.

If you think those substitutions make any difference to the morality of the situations then you are a perfect example of how corrupting religious belief can be. People who haven't been twisted by religion don't consider child sacrifice morally acceptable under any circumstances. I pity you.

No we're definitely not past natural selection nor will we ever be. Currently natural selection is selecting people who live on welfare and do nothing but shag all day.

It's important we make arrangements to protect people with this sort of sensitivity from the radio transmissions which make them ill. We should declare Bouvet Island radio transmission free for 500 miles in every direction and encourage them to move there. We could provide a surface ship to supply provisions and carry mail - perhaps it could be scheduled to call once every six or twelve months. I'd be pleased to chip in towards the costs of providing such a supply ship.

Maybe it's got more to do with MS's long history of duplicity, lack of ethics and illegal business practices. Anybody who believes MS has suddenly become genuinely OS friendly is hopelessly naive. There's a long list of companies and individuals who've learnt the hard way - you can't trust MS - they screw over their business partners every time.

Really, can they seriously believe they're going to get useful feedback from Slashdot for an IDE that only works in Visual Studio? Take your crapware and shove it up your a**.

Yes we do - at least in theory, the US basically got it's legal system from England (sorry about that).

The rotors would add gyroscopic stability to the thing in the same way as the wheels on a bicycle make it easier to keep upright when moving. It could well be enough stabilisation to make riding this no more difficult of a balancing act than cycling - depending of course on the weight of the rotors, etc.

You can't get 100% but you can take your laptop down to Starbucks and spoof the MAC to cooe close.