I feel that I must respond to your post and apologise for the length of this reply. There is a saying in Thailand that goes something like this "The Northeast elect the Government, Bangkok brings it down". It is no surprise that Thaksin won two successive elections (three if you include the PPP one in March 2007) as he has spent millions of Baht promoting himself and buying in cash the votes of the rural people, particularly in the Northeast. I have personally witnessed the buying of votes with amounts of between THB500 to THB 2000 per person depending on the constituency. When I asked some of these recipients why they accepted the money, they said that it is a long established custom in the giving of and accepting it. I asked if they would vote for Thaksin they said that, in accepting the money, the have an obligation to vote for him. The Thais call this "grengjai" and this in itself is a legacy of the system that slavery left after it was abolished in 1902 or thereabouts. The owner (the phuyai) and the serf mentality is still very strong in the rural areas. Initially, I was a supporter of Thaksin, but having seen his wealth triple during his tenure by highly inflating the cost of large infrastructure projects and then creaming off the difference in actual costs, together with the indiscriminate murder of over 3,000 Thais under the guise of drug suppression, I decided that Thaksin is not the man who he pretends to be. The tripling of his wealth does not include the THB 72 billion that he got from selling his mobile phone empire to the Singapore government. Thaksin is not a democrat. He is in reality a fascist, destroying those who stand in his way, rather like Putin in Russia. In the last election in March this year, the Democrats came within an inch of winning the popular vote, which, as in the US, does not mean winning Government, so the two main parties were neck and neck. The PPP were only able to form a government with the backing of the smaller parties, who have now switched their support to the Democrats. It is in this light that it can be said that the Democrats have come to power through legitimate means. In doing so, it gives Thailand the chance to reconcile the opposing views and to move the country forward into the 21st century. Hope springs eternal!!

I do not agree that this is bullshit. I was going to buy a WD network drive next week but, after reading this article I have changed my mind. If I have my MP3 files on my home network and want to get one onto my laptop when I am away from home, I cannot do so because of this stupid and ridiculous restriction. To clarify, I am not a pirate. I do not share my music with anyone and all of my music has been purchased either from the Apple Store or is on a legitimate CD purchased from a CD retailer. Therefore any restriction that WD put on their products will impact my, and probably many others, decision to decline to purchase ANY of their products, never mind this particular one. WD will never get my business again until they change their restriction policies. For the same reason, restricting my rights, I will not ever again buy a Sony product because of their DRM practices. This includes any Ericsson/Sony product. I hope that many others follow the same principle so that the idiots who make these decisions are fired and that these companies change their policies to a more customer-friendly one.