I have the Virgin 50/5 cable service and am very happy with it.

OK, I pay well over the standard rate (£44.99 a month - ~$70 USD) but I get a genuine 48Mbit/s down and 4.5Mbit/s up. I've found their technical support to be excellent and when I used to play WoW I'd have a consistent 30-40ms latency. I run my home office via a Cisco IPSec VPN tunnel and use HD video and voice all the time with almost no issues.

When I contrast this to my BT DSL service in my old place, I was lucky to sync in at 1Mbit/s down and 500Kbit/s up. Whole weekends of sparse connectivity weren't a surprise and I got used to having to go in to the office to work on my regular "no internet" days. All over a "super fast ADSL2+ line". My experience isn't unique, anyone living in an area with ancient cables far from the exchange is stuck in this situation.

So for me at least, Virgin can take my money. It works great, I have had almost no issues and when they say 50Mbit/s I'm pretty much getting it. I'm looking at moving house next year and a genuine criteria is decent internet. Virgin cable will be a good sign for me.

The economies of scale exist elsewhere - e.g. Europe where more than half of cars are Diesel I bet.

One of the biggest downers - and the reason I haven't got one - is the noise. First thing on a cold morning they sound just awful.

It's worth noting that IL3 isn't exactly top secret - patient records (such as xray scans) are also classified as IL3.

Really top secret stuff is IL6 which has a very different set of security requirements. Whether this makes it more secure is a different matter, but don't expect diplomatic cables, submarine designs and MI6 café menus on this system.

Exactly this. I have a DAB (Digital) Radio in my car. However, I find myself using FM (or even AM) about 20-30% of the time just to get a good signal.

Problems I've had:

• No graceful degradation of quality. There are three modes - good, awful and "no signal". By 'awful' think a poorly encoded MP3 from a scratched CD downloaded in ASCII mode.
• Semi-frequent drop-outs. I read that most people listen to the radio in their cars these days. However, even sticking to the UK Motorway system, I end up with "No Signal" quite frequently, even along major routes.
• Time lag - DAB lags more than a couple of seconds behind FM, so when I'm using the 'pips' to set my watch it's off by a long way (minor grudge I guess)

In short, I'm someone who went and bought in to the DAB idea and I like some features (e.g. having 5 live and Absolute Radio available in most places not counting the above). However, I think DAB needs some serious re-thinks before it can fully replace FM. Unless you can drive the length of the country and experience the same reception and quality as FM then it shouldn't be replaced.

Any credible organisation wouldn't take too much stock on anonymous information posted on the internet. We run basic checks on potential employees and forum trolling is at the bottom of our cares.

We place too much emphasis on getting places in society. What is the actual benefit of so many people travelling to work every day? A better fix is to give tax incentives for home working and focus on technologies like better broadband, telepresence and so on. Sure, face-to-face contact will never go away and some segments of society will always have to travel to work, but I bet half the commuters on the roads in the mornings could be equally as productive at home.

English is almost entirely made up of foreign meddling - it's a peasants combination of many languages that adapts and changes with time. Very few words (except modern technical terms) have no root in a foreign language.

Agree here - I'm on the 50mbps service and usually see 40-45mbps without many issues.

I think the common interpretation of Computer Science is extremely misleading. It's not about programming stuff, that's more of an IT application of computers. Instead, it's about understanding the science behind computers, for example to understand the mathematical principals of computing, operational effeciency and move it on as a tool for scientific endevour.

To this end, the choice of programming language really doesn't matter - it's a tool that the subject uses either as a proof of concept or a learning point. C is fairly good for this as it exposes a lot of the inner workings of a computer, whilst being high enough level to be more or less consistent across platforms at a university level. However, that doesn't mean that knocking up a quick proof of concept in python or perl is less valid - or even visual basic if it helps understand the science behind the problem.

In other words, I see no real worry here. If they stopped putting mathematics in a CS course or made it in to a programming degree I'd be concerned. If it's about using various tools for the job then I'm all for it. Hell, I wrote a pascal compiler in pascal as part of my degree - it wasn't about the programming language, it was about understanding the fundamentals of compiler design and implementation.

My employer offers a home VPN service whereby I am always connected to our VPN and egress at various points around Europe. They don't particularly monitor this traffic and even provide on-net mirrors to most GNU/Linux distributions and run internal bittorrent trackers for legitimate internal filesharing.

I think I'm going to use that.

It's becoming quite sad when I'll trust my employer more than I will my ISP to keep me safe. Years gone by the idea of letting my connection filter through the corporation was horrifying. Now it's almost liberating.

It's a sad day for the UK.

Why? I think Ultimate is a fair comparison if we're looking at features offered by the two operating systems.

Exchange support, Full Media Centre, Encryption, Unix support, Domain Joining, etc. I'm not seeing many features for Windows Ultimate that aren't in OS X 'normal edition'...

or apple could put in a quick checkbox "I want to see adult content" that you're presented with somewhere. Default it to off even, but give people the damned choice.

That's great. How do you propose we go about it? Just sitting around in a Facebook group bitching won't accomplish anything.

It influenced the Christmas Number 1 in the UK massively.

Nixon was probably the last liberal President. Every one since then has shifted increasingly more conservative.

Another Cisco Mac user here - been using one for more than 4 years. I don't even have a Windows VM any more and make do with the pain that is Entourage.

Cisco is moving its business to not depend on any particular platform and we run community supported Ubuntu, SuSE, CentOS, OS X, Windows 7 and more builds internally, as well as instructional wiki's and mirrors. In addition, you can always fall back to the IT supported Windows XP images.

It works really well and it's incredibly empowering to just run whatever tools you want to get your job done - this isn't an exclusive club either - this is everyone from sales guys, SE's, coders and more. At our frequent tech meetings I'm betting at least a quarter the users are not running Windows in the room (most using OS X these days).

Really, Cisco should be seen as a model for other companies to mirror their (very large scale) IT ideology from. I'm convinced that the productivity and employee satisfaction from being able to use a Mac or a non-IT Windows platform pays for itself tenfold.