I found that the realm transfers and also the cross-realm battlegrounds (and later the LFG tool), did a more subtle damage on our realm - it killed the sense of community.

It quickly went from a world where people knew each other to a world of strangers.

It might be worth taking a look at the Helios Project, (Website: http://www.heliosinitiative.org/ , Blog of bloke running it: http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/ ), as this is exactly what they do, collect together donated PCs and stuff, and provide refurbished PCs with Linux on to people on a charitable basis (predominantly disadvantaged kids I believe). (And they do some training etc as well I think).

Anyway, a lot of the postings on their have been quite interesting over the years, and I think they currently use either Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

While I'm not a fan of the idea, "Mess up that pull? That will be $5 to cover my repair costs please." seems a bit of a kneejerk response.

In one of the FAQs on the subject they discuss "Hardcore mode", which has perma-death, and is blocked from the cash auction house, explicitly because on character death you lose all items, and that could lead to loss of items paid for with cash:

So I think it's reasonable to assume that items are similarly not going to be degraded or devalued in a way that requires futher monetary outlay to restore in the game.

From reading the article, I got the impression that Google did not "make these claims, highly dangerous claims to make about anyone considering what they can do to your reputation or indeed your life", in fact they went out of their way to avoid making that claim, in that their legal folks wouldn't let them the user why his account had been shut down, and it was only after a lot of digging on the user's part that a Google chap was allowed to tell him what had happened and why.

According to my reading of the text of the legislation (IANAL, or a copper or familiar with legal stuff in any way...), probably not different at all.

It merely refers to "protected information" and "key", with no reference as to the manner of the protection or the form of the key, I assume that it applies equally to an encrypted file and a crypto key or to a physical document or object in a secure container and the key or method for opening for the container.

"...are now automatically checked..."

"This will start happening for the release of 6."

Er... well which is it?

... they already can.

(Legally compel you to reveal crypto keys or render the relevant information intelligible that is. Well, you could refuse, but that's an offence obviously. Section 49 of Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIPA)).

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/section/49

The first bit sounds more like a design issue than a problem with network speed, if you're really saturating your uplinks in this way, and heavily utilising the network infrastructure, I suspect you might want something a bit more robust than the setup you have described.

"A 24-port 10/100 with 2 port 10Gb will be a killer product when it emerges, is standardised, and cheap enough. Hell, I could use it NOW."

To be honest, the price difference between a 24x10/100 + 2x10Gb and a 24x10/100/1000 + 2x10Gb would probably be so insignificant that people just wouldn't bother with either making it or buying it. The improvements in the step up from 10/100Mb to 1Gb are far more than just speed - proper standardised negotiation for a start, which is notoriously piss-poor on 10/100Mb. And those products already do exist, bit expensive, like $1.5-2.5k or something probably

"10Gb should be available today"

Er... it is? Heck, 40Gb is available today. Expensive admitedly, but most definitely available.

An interesting comment on this....

Here in the UK, petrol (aka 'gas') is priced in pounds per litre (£/l), but car mileage is in miles per gallon. Enjoy working out your petrol cost per mile there.

Compare with more metric countries in Europe, where the car mileage is in litres per kilometre (l/km), so we just multiply the two together:

fuel cost in £/l x mileage in l/km = fuel cost in £/km

Far more simple, and something that your average consumer would find quite useful!

I believe the requirement of generating an EUI-64 address from the MAC address of the network interface isn't an absolute 'must', but a 'should', i.e. you can generate the last 64 bits of the IPv6 address in a different way if you wish (I think the RFC mentions doing this for privacy reasons?), the major requirement being that it is unique within the /64 subnet.

I think Windows Vista used EUI-64 to generate the last 64 bits of an IPv6 address, but Windows 7 generates it randomly?

Since the original link seems broken:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Alexia Sloane

Also - slightly misleading summary - from the various news articles discussing this, it appears she won a local community "Most Courageous Child" award, and as part of it was given the opportunity to go to Brussels and sit in on and interpret for an environment committee meeting - not quite sure how much of a prize that is!

And also worth adding:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1568009046?page=1

Discussions regarding bittorrent throttling at Rogers affecting Warcraft from mid-December.

This is pretty much old news, this has been seen ever since Cataclysm was released.

http://wow.joystiq.com/2011/01/14/the-lawbringer-net-neutrality-and-mmos/

I believe the issue is mostly that the deep packet inspection kit that the ISPs use to classify and throttle/shape traffic are unable to distingush between Warcraft traffic and Bittorrent traffic since the changes made for Cataclysm, until signatures/filters/etc are updated to classify the traffic correctly, but in many cases they seem to be taking their own sweet time about doing it (or aren't capable of doing it).

Note that I don't really have a huge problem with traffic shaping as done by an ISP, as long as the customer is well informed as to exactly what is going on and why, some ISPs are better at cummunicating this than others.

I know several people who have changed ISP over this issue, but obviously this isn't an option in some areas where there isn't really much competition.

Seconded - works great on my Torch - there were few rough edges in places, but the developer seems quite active and responsive to feedback - they get fixed quickly.