Hmm, I haven't been able to connect to TPB for the past hour. The timing seems a tad suspicious.

Open up a bunch of porn sites, and then hand it over to them, but warn them that the keys might be a bit sticky.

No no, that's even worse!

It almost drove me insane when I was doing produce nightfill work at a local supermarket. Even though the store was closed to customers overnight, the managers would leave it running around the clock.

My MP3 player saved my sanity that year.

Given the episode in question, this is more of a blessing than a curse. The Season 4 finale is almost worse than the Season 3 finale.

I'm looking forward to Stephen Moffat taking over from Russel T Davies in 2010. Hopefully he'll be able to bring some intelligence (or just plots that make sense) back to the show.

So, how long will they have to use this thing before global warming causes it to start melting?

It's going live on Christmas Eve? Seriously? What a stupid launch date for something that has potential to inconvenience so many people. I bet nobody in a position to remove sites from the blacklist will even be in their offices between Dec 25th and Jan 2nd.

I had similar problems with Dell Australia recently, and after a month or so of trying to play nice I looked up the location of their Australian office and contacted the Department of Fair Trading in that state to ask them for assistance. They took over from there and within a week I had the Executive Customer Escalation Manager for Dell Australia ringing and emailing me (and leaving me her direct email/phone number), apologising profusely and trying to get everything sorted out.

I don't know if a similar government regulatory body exists in whichever state Dell US are based in, but do a little research and if one does exist, ask them for help. Make sure you let them know eveything you've tried so far, and include any and all documentation to support your claim.

Good luck!

Well aren't you bitter and jaded.

(a) Lojack is routinely used by the police (who, despite your opinion, do actually care about theft).
(b) I wasn't suggesting people track down the thieves and confront them themselves.
(c) I think you'll find the average laptop thief doesn't turn into a murderer as soon as they're confronted by someone about it.
(d) Insurance is good to have, but it's not going to get you your data back.

I would have thought it'd be more sensible to just have some sort of lojack equivilent. It'd be much more useful - you could find & recover your laptop (hopefully with your data still on it) and probably locate the criminal as well.

Additionally, Paramount (who own the rights to Oz and are one of the studios suing iiNet) might sue Slashdot for aiding in the distribution of information about the television series, which in turn could directly lead to people downloading episodes of it.

Well played.

Yeah, it sounds like something I'd read about on Encyclopedia Dramatica. Except with CEOs of huge IT companies instead of creepy obsessive anime fanboys/girls.