Lots of people do this with their utility bills.

Fine, if you trust the utility company to never make a mistake. But why on earth should anyone who is using a Paypal account to receive money, allow Paypal the facility to take as much money from them as it chooses? Once you've set up a direct debit, they can clear out your bank account, and there's nothing you can do about it. And why would they ask for this facility, unless they think that, at some time, they are going to take your money without your permission?

They'll be making a loss at that price, though. They'll make their profit from the cost of the calls. You can't do that trick with a computer.

1. No, presumably because they are not actually censoring very much. When a Wikipedia page got onto the list, the performance went to hell.
2. Yes. I believe this has happened.
3. Hard to say. Presumably the cost is that of the filtering hardware, plus the cost of the people who maintain the list. All of it seems to be paid for by the ISPs themselves.
4. It can't be. There can't be many kiddie porn websites, given that they are illegal everywhere, so if there's any real trade in that sort of stuff it will be underground, so unaffected by the censors. My guess is that it's main effect is to allow half-a-dozen or so perverts to spend their working days looking at stuff that secretly turns them on, without any fear of reprisal. And, of course, the filtering hardware is all there ready for the day when the government decides that we shouldn't be allowed to see whatever it is that they are going to ban next.

So how many of his women did he offer to you?

It's just as crazy as paying money for a string of 1s and 0s in an mp3 file.
So maybe these criminals were not thieves at all. They must have been pirates.

I can't see why a domestic user needs that speed.

So that you can exceed your download cap in 5 minutes instead of half an hour?

Boron nitride is not diamond at all, and lonsdaleite is described by Wikipedia as an allotrope of carbon that is found in meteorites and is harder than diamonds. Perhaps these people have just re-discovered something that was already known.

"Did this particular guy "learn from his mistake"?

Well, he claims to have "inadvertently" forgotten what he did. If he forgot about it, he can't have learned much from it.

I don't know about the law in the US, but here in the UK you must NOT tell the police if you come across kiddie porn accidentally like this.

In the UK, possession of this stuff (even cartoons) is a "strict liability" offence. If you've got it, you've broken the law, no matter how you came by it. So, if you tell the police that you've got it, they can (and will) prosecute you.

There are lots of laws like this in the UK, and they are becoming more common: the government likes them because they eliminate any possibility of people successfully defending themselves in court. Of course they leave open the possibility that you can be forced to commit a crime against your will - even by the police - and then punished for it.

You do realize, don't you, that the airlines that say they need "proof of ID" and will only accept a passport, do so because they are being forced to act as unpaid police and immigration agents?

It's a good example of the privatization of law. The government can say "we have abolished the need for passports to travel in Europe" while in fact making state surveillance more, not less, pervasive.

the rule should be a simple one: if you are an EU national you are allowed residency in the UK, otherwise not

Why?
OK, we've got a political treaty with the EU, but if you were starting from scratch, why pick on any one country and give its people more favourable status than any others?

I stayed with them for a few months after their takeover by Thus, until a new ISP installed ADSL+ in our exchange. In that time, the bandwidth I was getting deteriorated enormously, and their customer service changed from an engineer who understood "I can see your pings hitting my firewall" to a call centre worker in India who could only say "reinstall windows". And after I left, they forgot to remove me from their billing system, so they kept sending me letters threatening court action and bailiffs.

That must have been a couple of years ago now, and they were trying to get this e-billing system to work back then. They kept on sending me emails about it, but I could never log in to it. If it's taken them until now to get it working, their competence must be worse than I remember.