That's actually quite a cunning plan - I hadn't thought of doing that before, but will give it a try next time I have to do something that's pulling content from external systems.

So very true, my fiance suffers from manic depression, with occasional paranoia, and it's terrifying when it happens. Obviously not enough to stop me marrying her, but still very scary.

Usually she's absolutely fine, and you wouldn't be able to tell if you didn't know, but every now and then something completely off the wall will happen. Recently I was going to sleep, when I noticed that she was sitting at the end of the bed crying. Turns out she was trying not to go to sleep, because she needed to stand guard in case anything happened in the night. Thankfully it's very rare, and usually there are other things which trigger it (in this case that we've just moved into a new house), but I'm still incredibly happy to see some progress being made to treating it more effectively.

The best way to deal with this sort of thing is to do regular checks as to how long hitting the address that's going to be loaded takes, in a cron job or whatever, and if it goes over a certain threshold, turn off that provider.

Sure, you'll lose a bit of ad revenue, but you won't have pissed off users who think your site is broken.

Yes, that would also be nice, but Mario is a platform game.

The whole principle of that type of game is to give you awkward bits that require a precise combination of movements to get through them.

If this was an RTS, or FPS game, then I'd be less happy about them slapping a band-aid on it.

If you want a challenge, don't use it.

Personally, while I enjoy a challenge, I don't enjoy playing the same level for hours on end, and never getting any further. I'll be using the "I'm bored, please let me play the next bit" button sometimes.

It's times like this I wish I had mod-points.

Sadly though, I doubt the record companies will see things quite the same way when they bust you for using the evil bittorrent.

you get the Queen's birthday off

Which one?

Yes, just imagine.

It would be just like we had a copy of Apache installed on our laptop, but without having to lug a server around with us.

Oh... wait... hang on a minute.

Good ones love it - they know that if helpdesk know how to do whatever needs doing, they don't have to get woken up at 2am to do it themselves.

That, and most geeks love to talk about the latest toys they're playing with.

Maybe they're planning to get them all stolen at some point, claim for the gold on insurance, and then sell it anyway.

It's the only way I can see them making any money on this.

I'd think the line

probably answers that question.

I feel I need to put some of that in perspective - BT aren't saints, but they're not as bad as you're making out. This is from experience working for a UK ISP (not BT, one of the other ones).

These are the same guys that were holding back broadband in the UK a couple of years (all the while broadband adoption in the rest of Europe was taking of like crazy) ago until laws were passed forcing them to allow other ISPs to use their lines. Even now, they will still make it extra hard to use ISPs other than themselves.

That was indeed the case, but is not nearly as bad now. BT Broadband (the ISP), and BT OpenReach (the infrastructure operator) are required by law to be separate entities, and can not give each other preferential treatment. In my experience that's also the case, with it being no more hassle to get a line setup regardless of who you're subscribing to.

They currently censor their customers connection using the list from the Internet Watch Foundation (a state controlled quango) - the same guys that were blocking Wikipedia some months ago

So does every other major ISP in the country. There's an agreement in place since the government essentially said "do this voluntarily, on your terms, or we'll make it a legal requirement". Believe me, the terms written up by a bunch of network engineers are far better - the original request included logging anyone who hit something on the list, which was thrown out early on due to the possibility of false positives.

and will voluntarily give contact data for an IP address to any "content owner" who asks for it.

I'll concede that. It's a terrible move to screw over your own customers like that.

These guys are not the good guys and they haven't been so for many years now.

Of course they aren't, they're a large company. Large companies are never the good guys.

Have you seen the video?

That's what it does. Exactly.

You can split the thread into further sub-threads at any point, and also limit certain threads to a specific group of people.

I'd suggest using the button which turns it off.

I hate to say it, seeing as how for anything other then playing games I use Linux, but I did a Windows 7 install this weekend and it did indeed install NVidia drivers with DirectX 10 support.