In france, on some highway, if you exit then re-enter the highway in the middle you may pay less. That's because private highway compagnies must, by contract, have some average price. So to make more money, the most used fares are more expensive and the less used ones are less exepensive, and in average, that match the contract they signed with the governement. Threre's a site dedicated to calculate how much you may gain by doing this : http://www.autoroute-eco.fr/

I am personnaly not doing this but i can perfectly understand thoses who do: The first professionaly related website visited by either volume or number of hit is maybe the 30th overall (before there's online shopping, football results, and do on, 1st overall is a second hand sales site), even with intranet set as homepage with gpo. Out of 1500 peoples, 500 peoples signed the paper asking for "internet" access (anything but blacklisted sites, no youtubes or facebook but gmail and online banking is ok) ; because they formulated a professional reason for it. And maybe 10 peoples have "unrestricted acess" to internet (direct request from direction). The others have "restricted access" (only whitelisted sites, no banking and no gmail) which is about 200 sites (universities, google map, wikipedia) . Now i think that s perfectly ok to give internet access to peoples; after all i don t care, except it does a hole in the budget but the direction accept it. We pay a premium for the internet connection , that means we are guaranted to have less than a minute of downtime per year and we are called before that happens. Yet 99% of it is used for non professional stuff. Yes big eye watch and if you pass some data cap; your data will be inspcted,you ll be reported to your manager and your internet connection going to the lower tier. Now maybe a fair comparison of this behavor is data storage. A person storing his "game of thrones season 1" on the network will have it : stored on a 40gb optical fiber 50 spinndles raid5 bay, backuped everyday and archived for 10 years. To enforce the direction rules: peoples should have access to bank accounts but not to stock market, yet banks site who also provide stock marked trades cannot be blocked because it all encrypted and we would also block legitimate users (only solutioon https snooping), plus there are case for https movies download and open proxy facebook access. Yet from previouses sites who switched from non encrypted to encrypted; i can tell stock market users use 100 more ressources than peoples simply checking out their bank account. That comment is already quite long, and that was only the economic side of it; trying to explain security implications would be as long.

Having been badly hit with a worm we did hire a security consultant, and the thing that was tickling me is how comes the worm wasn t hit by on access scan. His response was that as we were infected by a usb key (we re sure of this), there s something specific about usb which makes it so that on it the on access scan won t work, or at least wont work in time, if there s autorun on a computer the worm can be run, go to memory (it bypassed oas), steal some credentials, spread via network, save itself on computer drives with your credentials so it can survive a reboot. From there attach itself to critical windows services that can t be unloaded, attach itself to antiviruses so they don t see it. Spread some more.....

At first patents seems like a good idea, you do research, you don't want to get it stolen, you patent it to protect yourself and make sure you get some revenue from this in case somone want to use your idea. Now imagine i need to go from one side of my house to the other one, i find the shortest path, great. Then i learn that somehow another person has the same house, also had the same problem than me and patented this path thought his house. Would it seems even fair that because someone patented this path you couldn't use it anymore (without paying), after all you found it by yourself and didn't stole his idea, it just happen that for the same problem that many person may have there can be a single best solution. IT stuff is just about the same

If you live in France you get a my favorite ISP, (don t have any commercial relation but be one of his customer), free (appears at fbx.proxad.net on irc )who has what they call a freebox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebox), which is one of the inventor as what we know now as triple pay for internet, phone, and video, and they offer as a small but good geek bonus an option like a sip account, wifi, and redirections of your phone line linked to your adsl account to that sip account you own. now if you have a phone on which the sip works (bought a n85 a week ago), then you can do what as you want, have a single device. However note that peoples still have 2 numbers to contact you and you still have 2 outgoing choices for phone calls. They got other bonuses like tivo like recoder with HD channels, about 180 channels, and phone to landline to 60 countries for 30â, good news server retention, usualy, 6MB adsl, ipv6, Gb sized mail with zimbra and web account with apache mysql. (note that they had to inovate and redo the dslam infrastructure to do that), hoo too much goodies. I even like their geeky tv ads, and i mean by anyway , long time ago in france when isp were charging us for internet access on top of the phone comunication fee (which was way higher than now), and free was the first to have no charge on top of the phone fees, and that's where they got their name and then their infrastructure and budget to do what they do now. Now also be prepaired to wait for 3 months to get your dsl line, because the historic operator always make a few errors when switching the connecting to their lines.

just to get the easy achievement

The original article says than: "second generation XO, which it claims will cost $75 " "To anticipate them costing $20 each is not out of the question." That's not a 12$ laptop, but then i guess the article submiter didnt read properly this part: "that can be the difference between earning $1 an hour instead of $1 a day." I guess that s where the 12$ comes from , but it s not the laptop price, but rather the eventual buyer's income for 12h of work at 1$/h