No government involved. Unlike most US airports, Heathrow is a purely private company. Slots are sold to airlines as a purely commercial transaction, with a long waiting list. (And, no, they wouldn't be auctioned off in some sort of unregulated capitalist environment: every company has to build a relationship with its customers if it wants to keep them as customers, so taking slots away from airlines, or trying to charge them more for slots would drive airlines to competitor airports, such as Gatwick. We assume Heathrow has worked out the highest price it can charge which airlines which make them a lot of money in other fees are willing to pay).

Heathrow doesn't want slots owned but no plane using them (because they make money from aircraft actually using the airport) so airlines which own slots are highly incentivised to make sure they are used, even if they are making no money from the flight.

Left/Right is an orthogonal axis from Authoritarian/Libertarian (with the latter meant in its true sense, not the US right-wing political faction of that name).

There are plenty of authoritarians in the Left and the Right. Here in the UK it includes both May and Blair. Fortunately there are also libertarians in both Left and Right including most of the LibDems and the Greens.

https://www.politicalcompass.o... has a good description of this.

A lot longer ago than that. I started my kernel mode software development career in 1981, writing kernel code for RSX and VMS. The user/kernel space dichotomy had existed for many years before that! And the Mach microkernel was invented in about 1985.

This is exactly the behaviour we need to allow us to request the Library of Congress to create an exception to allow us to break Adobe's DRM so we don't have to use the Digital Editions spyware to read our legitimately purchased books. In the UK we can make a similar request to the Secretary of State.

And it still wants a date of birth and a gender (to create an account). If I am using an alias I am not going to provide either of those (the persona that I just created doesn't have a DOB or a gender).

So, it is still useless and I won't be signing up.

Most people commenting on this (particularly in the US) are confused. No sites are being taken down because of this ruling. No pages are even being removed from Google's index -- they can all still be found through Google.

What Google is being forced to do is to remove them from the search results when the search is for a particular person's name. The reason is nothing to do with a "right to be forgotten" (that is a separate issue altogether). The reason is because a search based on someone's name is regarded as the equivalent of researching and publishing a dossier on that person (like a credit report, or an employment history would be). Credit reference agencies have strict rules on what data they can keep, and for how long (at least in Europe), and so does any other entity who handles personal data. The reasoning is "why should Google be allowed to publish dossiers at virtually no cost to them, which flout the laws about such things, when everyone else who is in the personal data business has to spend a lot of money to do careful research and follow legal restrictions?"

You can argue about how close a search result is to a dossier, and whether Google should have to follow the personal data rules in these cases, but do not confuse this with the "right to be forgotten", which is about deleting information.

So, to follow on from PRISM and the decision this week that all data stored in a cloud run by a US company is available to anyone in US law enforcement, Congress wants to complete the task of throwing the US IT industry under a bus? No US company can be sued for giving any information they have to the government without permission? What are they thinking of?

Of course. The whole premise of the article is wrong: it is NOT more convenient for most people to stream. DVDs are much more convenient.

It is probably true if you are singleton, or in your twenties with no kids, living in a city centre flat, with high speed unlimited internet and toys like iPads.

However, for most ordinary people, with families, living in fairly large houses in suburbs, DVDs are much more practical. They work in any room in the house (DVD players are cheap to put next to all the TVs in the house), they work in the car or the bus or the train, all the kids can work a DVD player from a young age (without an account or a password), they don't rely on the home WiFi or the internet connection working well, they don't require putting a PC in the living room connected to the TV, they don't require interfering with the kids usage of the main family PC (or games console), etc, etc. DVDs are just so much more practical if you are over the age of 30. That is the market for the rent-by-mail services: harassed parents who want easily available family entertainment.

It will change, as today's young adults become parents and as technology moves on (chromecast is part of that). But for now, DVDs are much more important than streaming.

It isn't about whether you have anything to hide. Even if you don't, there are many people you respect and value who do have important information to hide. Take your pick: your lawyer, your priest (who knows a lot of people's private problems), your doctor, your political representative, your schoolteacher, your favourite investigative journalist, your daughter's sexual health clinic, your local policeman, ...

No so-called guardian of public morals or safety should be able to get access to any of that information without a properly constituted, and specifically targetted, warrant with a legal process. Whatever the suspected crime.

If you ever visit Germany, visit one of their Stasi museums -- and then think about what they achieved with 1980's technology. And then think about what an over-authoritarion local police chief, or regional FBI/CIA chief could achieve with today's technology.

I am amazed to see that post on Slashdot. I cannot believe there is anyone with a Slashdot account who stores passwords in a spreadsheet and prints them out!

Google "Password Safe" and go from there. You can even pay money for iPad apps that do the same thing if you like. And you can store your passwords securely, in the cloud, accessible from your phone and your PC.

And the train companies explicitly do it: if I try to buy a return ticket to London from my local station they will sell me a return to a suburb on the other side of London which is cheaper, and tell me to just use it to and from London. This is the train company telling me to do this and, of course it is perfectly valid under the UK conditions of carriage.

I disagree. Many of the marketing people in the B2B side of tech industries are former coders. They may not be current developers, but they have the background and experience to talk knowledgeably while also being marketing professionals.

There are plenty of people with the crossover of coding experience and good PR and interaction skills. Why aren't they being used in these projects?

I still use my N900 as my everyday phone. But it clearly can't last forever. I have bought a Jolla to replace it. It is definitely a work-in-progress, really only just usable (because of not-yet-implemented features, not poor UX) but the definite successor to the N900. It has a good team working on it, with updates adding new features all the time, and is building a community.

If you want to support a non-Apple, non-Android alternative and prefer as much openness as you can get, I recommend getting a Jolla.

My theory on this is that MS realise the future profits will come from phones and other devices (tablets, glasses, watches, TVs, fridges, etc.). Unfortunately, they are (still) NOWHERE in the phone business. The reason is apps -- they don't have any, so no one will use devices running MS software, so no one develops apps for the MS appstore. To fix this they HAVE TO force software developers to switch to apps in their app store, instead of desktop programs.

They can't kill desktop programs on mainstream PCs, yet -- no one would upgrade. But they can make sure that you can't run desktop programs on any new platforms. That is why they are so determined that Windows RT won't run ordinary programs. They see it is a question of corporate survival.

They tried this on the desktop with Win8 and the metro interface -- they got burnt and have had to pull back a bit in Win8.1 but I am sure it still remains their goal to make it really hard for new software to be deployed except as an app in their appstore even on the desktop.

My email is very dull and boring. But there are people I respect who's email is NOT dull and boring. Campaigners, activists, even lawyers and policiticans. Unless I protest nosily, and adopt privacy tools myself, the government can get away with recording the correspondence of people for whom it does matter. In fact, they can even spot the ones to watch because they are the ones using encryption and privacy tools.

Remind yourself of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came...