Diploma mills sell degrees. Universities provide an education and examine degrees. The service they provide is for a much wider community than the students. Even in the US many universities are heavily subsidized by tax payers, and the base of stake holders much wider. The service they provide includes the preservation, creation and transmission of knowledge and these are vital but to the economy and the culture of a country. They also provide a service to employers of producing graduates with some indications in their transcript and references of their suitability for certain types of employment.

Transportation? Sending criminals to penal colonies? Do they really do that in games? That would be a serious waste of time in games. All I did was nicked a sheep and then I had to spend the next 20 years of my game playing time in a prison camp in Australia.

A lemon is one of the three generic singularities of a symmetric tensor field in the plane. The others are Stars and Monstars (a sort combination of a lemon and and a star). I suppose you can have two lemons back to back but there must be some Morse Theory like restriction on which singularities you can have.

The only hardware reason I have had to shut down my intel linux box was a faulty fan.

It was about 1997 and it was the tenth time Windows had crashed while I was trying to write a ten page mathematical paper in Word. The equation editor had created an embedded formula of infinite size so I could not save the file. I did n't know which equation it was so I had to save bits of the file at the time. My colleague Eddie Wilson helped me install Red Hat 4.2 and I vowed only to write in LaTeX and not to use Windows from then onwards.

I think its great that there are companies formed to take on piracy, but I'd say in general it is a job for national navies rather than private enterprise.

Anyway why are they getting distracted by issues about copyright infringement when there are murdering pirate to be caught?

I thought immediately of a Somali pirate on the "I'm a PC" Microsoft advert. Perhaps they are using Windows software for navigation so they can find their prey. Would chart plotting software work on Windows 7?

Seriously. it annoys me that the entertainment and software industry tries to elevate software copying to be on a par with murder and armed theft. Worse still when slashdotters fall for it and parrot their rhetoric by using the same terminology.

Birthplace of the modern (ie stored program digital) computer. Decent CS programme in a fairly large department. Disclaimer: I work in the School of Maths there, as did Alan Turing.

I had a series of Psion 3s and 4s series palmtops and at the time they were vastly superior to anything else on the market. Full qwerty keyboard, more than adequate word processing and spreadsheet programs, and a nice little built in language, and a multi threaded, multi tasking Os with a decent scheduler. I just wished they had carried on being commercially successful and had driven out the badly designed OSs we had to put up with on small machines. My Psions never crashed. It was Microsoft remember that introduced the computer using public to the idea that it was acceptable for the OS to crash rather than application programs. So if Psion can make any money by suing netbook imitators for trademark infringement and use the money to get going again then Go Psion!