Posts by Wayland Sothcott

Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users

ISPs should sell bandwidth

There should be a bandwidth charge, flat rate, no matter if it's download or upload. Based on bytes not protocol.

By shaping some types of traffic more than others Virgin are saying that they prefer traffic which they make money from. For example Internet telly might make them or their supporters money but Bit Torrent does not.

Going further they are saying, "we don't like our customers doing their own thing online, we want them to look at specific content like approved TV channels."

Bit Torrent is a way to do your own thing and that is what the Internet was built on. It's a lot our own faults for not buying a better connection for big bandwidth stuff. However it's their fault for saying unlimited bandwidth when that was not sustainable.

Going too far with approved content might be having a white list of approved sites. Everything else is relegated to the default channel along with all the Bit Torrent and freetards and spam. BBC comes us super fast with content cached at the ISP and super fast private networks linking servers. Anyone not big enough to buy into the super net will be stuck on the clogged up backroads of the old internet. Effectively killing the spirit of the Internet where anyone could put up a website and making just like TV, Radio, Music, Film, Newspapers, all controlled by 6 people.

Paris because she's approved content.

Aussie protests over Great Firewall

Telstra not getting $15billion

Telstra has not been invited to tender for the $15billion project to upgrade the AZ Internet. I wonder why? It seems they will not agree to the Filter.

Atari promises it won't suck this time

@Martin Lyne blow up spaceships

It sounds like what you need is real life. What about getting a job at NASA, working on something mundane like O-rings or tile grouting?

Top UK cybercop dreams of PC breathalysers

The police need help..

...seriously.

The problem is that they tend to offend the very people who could help. They are unable to arrest the real crooks so they look for easy arrests. I feel sorry for them. Their lack of ability and lack of friends is saddening.

Aussie convicted over Simpsons sex pics

@schoolgirl Porn

"shouldn't this be treated in the same way as "schoolgirl porn", where the actresses portraying schoolgirls are clearly over the legal age?"

No, it's the other way round, schoolgirl porn will be next. If you have a copy of Britney Spires video of her in the school uniform and especially if you have been watching cirtain bits of it then you have had lustful thoughts about schoolgirls. It is your thoughts that make it porn. Or even just what other peoples dirty minds can imagine you imagining when you look at the material.

That would surely make the prosecutors as guilty as you but it does not work like that since then you would not get prosecuted. Also the makers of the Britney Spires video would not get prosecuted because they are successfull.

It's all a bit crazy and has potential to get a lot more crazy.

BTW, I am obviously guilty of looking at Britney in a pervey way.

Aussie government to rig filter testing

Thank god!

It's not being accepted. The technical issue looks insurmountable.

Obviously there is a drastic and very simple solution. A whitelist of 10,000 sites.

Did speaker's statement show he doesn't know what day IT is?

@RIPA everywhere

"Encryption wouldn't work. You're forgetting that, in the UK, refusal to hand over encryption keys is itself a criminal offense."

Your point is that you can't refuse to hand over encryption keys because you will go to prison?

I think you will find that you CAN with hold the keys and the data on your hard drive. Yes you may go to prison, the price of freedom in our free country.

Armed anti-paedophile cops swoop on video site uploader

@RRRoamer not just USA

and UK but OZ as well. How can you find this heartening?

I know an old chap who is useless on the Internet yet he can see the UK turning into a police state. He says I should watch myself. He says if he were my age he would moce to the USA or OZ. I tried to explain that it was happening there too, possibly worse.

We are witnessing the gradual distruction of our free society, a little bit at a time. No one likes paedos (except possibly other paedos) but this is not a case of child abuse. It's abuse of bad laws to persecute ordinary people.

TUX because at least we still have some freedoms.

UK.gov says extreme porn isn't illegal if you delete it...

Licence to invent laws

As I understand it Parlement invents laws but these are not fully formed. They have to be tested in court and case law then properly defines them.

Hopefully this will fix all the many problems and contradictions.

If not, then the government has basically made a law that can be interpreted any way it wants. We will all be breaking the law but it won't matter unless someone wants us punished for something.

What if computers went back to the '70s too?

TI/99 Ooohhh!

So the little TI/99 toy computer was really a world beating computer that had a ton of development behind it. A proper 16 bit CPU when all around were squeezing their 8-bit CPUs. Facinating, I mean it.

Brits decline to 'think outside the box'

Leverage the rubicon paradime

I know these phrases do leveage blue sky out of box thinking. I had a business partner who used to talk in nothing but buffle, he still does and I was taken in by it.

UK's Watchkeeper drone in first autonomous flight

What's the matter with you people (above three posts)

Can't we have a British Technology success story without everyone complaining these things will be spying on us 24x7?

Well yeah I know they will be used to spy on us, and blimps and helecopters, but I just thought we could pretend it's npt happening.

Dark chopper for obvious reasons.

The mobile operators' Three Ring Trick

3G and HSDPA

I bought a 3 dongle and £15 of credit that would give me 3GB traffic.

I found that when it worked it was pretty handy. However having found places it worked it does not always work there. Consequently I have not used it much. No where near the 3GB that I bought. So when I came to use it after a month I discovered that my credit had expired.

These people expect me to give them £15 every month even if I never use their service.

I would say that at lease two of their rings are broken meaning that the 3rd ring is broken by default.

Unofficial fix issued for Vista networking flaw

I must have Vista

I am forced to use Vista as all my important applications won't run on XP.

No hang on, I mean I chose to use XP since some things I do are still a bit tricky on Linux and Vista.

Unless Microsoft can break XP then people will still keep using it.

How about they change the look of XP and call it Vista XP. You can re-skin your website using CSS so why not reskin XP?

Government data review grants more data sharing power

Secretary of State Dictates

Any law can be overturned by Secretary of State if it gets in the way of data sharing?

So the laws that came into place by debate in parlement by our elected representitives can simply be changed without debate and voting?

It's pretty obvious that the PMs will not vote for this, it could be the last vote they ever made.

China slams Guns N' Roses album

They miss the point of the spear

China believes they run a democracy. The word democracy literally means people rule. They have elections and voting so people get a choice of candidate except they are all in the same party.

Now you might take exception to that and say that we have three viable partys we could chose from. To that I say "Oh really!?"

Now you get the point, all our parties are the same. There is no choice because although we can chose between methods of delivery of rule, the actual rulers are behind the seans and self appointed.

Chinese democracy is the same as western democracy, we get to chose from the choices presented to us.

UK.gov tells domain industry to get its house in order

ltd.uk

We have a regulatory system in Companies House. If people have limited companies then they are entitled to a ltd.uk domain name which are regulated. The names of the directors are available online.

It's the perception of the Internet by the general public that's the problem. When I first got onto Compuserve everything I saw came from Compuserve. We not entirely, it was it's members that posted things and Compuserve ran it. When I discovered that I could get on the Internet via Compuserve I was amazed that Compuserve could provide all this. It dawned on me that the Internet connected thousands (in those days) of servers provided by different people for their own reasons.

The Internet is unlike anything else we experience in the world. Not so much in it's technology since the phone system, Newspapers, TV and Radio and postal service serve perfectly well for carrying information. No, it's the Freedom the Internet has provided which is the bit that people can't fathom.

Surely this much freedom can't be for real? Surely I can't do my own website or write a message on a blog that can be seen by anyone and everyone? Well we can for a while but of course people will want it regulated just like the banks, the railways and the TV. Once that happens it will be just like them.

Happy Birthday, Turing's universal machine

Computer Emulation

Turin simplified the computer down to a one bit machine that travels up and down miles of ticker tape reading and writing dots.

He proved that any computer can emulate any other computer given enough time and enough memory and the correct software. All the I/O would just be memory so you would have to imagine the VGA screen if the real computer did not have one.

With the current generation of computers we are making practical use of this with virtulaization.

Perhaps the most startling thing is to see that a computer is just a simple binary logic machine with loads of memory and loads of software. No matter how smart the software the computer can only do stuff that binary logic can do. This means that artificial intelegence using binary computers is a huge waste of time no matter how big the computer is.

AI needs a computer that does not resolve down to a simple Turing machine.

French record labels sue, um, SourceForge

Corporate political partnership

@The Flood Is Come...

It's like they want the technology 'un-invented'. The world has changed. It was techology that created the recording industry. They were fortunate that making decent recordings was hard. Now it's a lot easier. First we copy their works, then we make our own. They can see this coming...

@Boggle

Just because you are breaking the law does not mean you WILL be arrested and gaoled. It just means you CAN be arrested and gaoled. Selective enforcement. Phorm and BT can break the law but some folk will be arrested. It all depends on who's side you're on.

@why not block the servers?

They probably will. But making P2P illegal except for corporations who pay a licence fee may offer the authorities some sort of control over the Internet. Most people's idea of freedom is free porn and free movie downloads. However an effective ban on that will have the desired effect of banning free speech. After all they are trying to get the brewers to close pubs or at least turn them into clubs where you are recorded when you enter and the music is too loud to talk. All communication needs to be monitored and we make it easy for them by doing it electronically.

Tens of thousands of kids need to be protected from ContactPoint users

Re: And the original point was ... ?

"...to set up a database to protect children, but the government have now screwed the whole thing so badly that the only children *visible* on the database will be the vast majority that (so far as the government are aware) don't need protecting.

Are they taking the piss? How is this helpful?"

Firstly the government are NOT incompetant. Second they KNOW what the consequencies would be of this database. Therefore they are doing this deliberatly to have the effects that we know will happen. Taking the piss? They are screwing this up on purpose.

In order to get into government you need to be pretty hard working and smart. It's time we stopped letting these people pretend they are incompetant. See EVERYTHING they do as deliberate and you might start getting the true picture.

Texas cop tasers himself

Taser funny but Glock hillarious

Well he was asking for it. You treat all guns as loaded. Syaing "This is an unloaded glock .40, see" is going to get you shot by pure sods law of guns.

The class was very calm until his assistant brought out an unloaded rifle. I think the mention of the word 'unloaded' is what unnerved them, what was the stupid fool going to do to prove this one was not loaded?

UK's 'secure' child protection database will be open to one million

Do authorities hurt children?

I knew someone who said she was abused in her childrens home by staff. So yes they do. (Not exactly statistically accurate but I trust that more than gov stats)

Until recently it looked like the authrities had been torturing children to death in a dungen under a Jersey childrens home. Fortunately two years of investigatins into this and all the human remains found are all rubish and no children were tortured to death so it's all OK.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/jersey/7723860.stm

PS, there are a few very evil people in the world and we seem to be giving them the tools to go on to greater attrocities.

*Gravestone for the gaves of the missing Jersey children.

US stocks up on semi-automatic rifles

@"serious threat to Second Amendment liberties".

"Which in a civilised world, is a bad thing how...??"

David Cornes

Well when I went to America it was mostly civilised but not entirely. They believe in Freedom in a big way over there. Naturally this does allow for quite a lot of crime and therefore the need for ordinary people to have guns. There are also a lot of very visible police.

Contrast this with Dubi, no crime, no swearing or drinking. Every one drives a brand new mercedes and leaves the keys in the ignition. However no Freedom.

If you ban guns then the only people likely to have them are the bad guys. It's true that if bad guys don't need guns then they are less likely to carry them but they are more likely to get away with crimes. The fact that people can break into my home without getting shot is a concern to me.

Guns are not just for sport. You may need one for real one day.

If children have some shooting lessons it's unlikely they will have accidents with guns. Same as with driving lessons, they drive much better when they are allowed to than when they borrow your car without asking.

I have probably got some cartridges in this pocket.

Microsoft: Windows 7 ready for Christmas 2009

Vista is perfectly good enough

For ages we have come to trust and love Vista. Why now that all the bugs are out of Vista and it works so well do we need to replace it with a bloated buggy new Operating System? We will all have to buy new hardware.

Doormen's database boss goes

Why should they be licenced?

Why should they be giving special powers to cirtain people? Why should somene with a bow tie and a thick neck be granted a licence to do stuff that I am not allowed to do? Especially on a comercial basis.

Everytime an activity becomes one in which you require a licence that's one less thing the ordinary person can do. Oh sure I could go and train for the licence, but that's a big step, a barrior to doing something I could have done on the spur of the moment.

This raises the status of the person with the licence and lowers the status of those without. In return the licenced person indirectly carries out the bidding ot the body issuing the licence (the government).

Preventive policing? Don't even think about it

Pubs struggling

The pubs doing a great trade are the city centre ones with happy hours and loads of boozie idiots getting into fights. The ones the police are 'randomly' targeting. BTW random in this instance means without reasonable suspcion rather than being a mathmatical thing.

Couple this with the smoking ban and the stupidly strict drink driving laws it's clearly an attack on the whole principle of pubs. The principle of a pub is that any adult can just walk in and buy a drink and talk to people. A club is not the same since you have to show ID and they can choose not to let you in.

They need to monitor cafe's but as yet I can't see the pretext. Probably not a big problem since there is no alcohol to loosen peoples tongues.

I think it's clear where this is all leading. Peoples interaction with other people is to be regulated and monitored.

I better make sure I have no tools in my coat pockets.

@Country Needs Sorting

We are being backed into a corner. If we go along with it then we don't get too much trouble as long as we have nothing to hide. In fact it may even make us safer. But it will get worse and worse until we are just a flock of scared sheeple who will do anything anyone in authority asks. If we resist then we are targeted as clearly we have something to hide.

@@just say no

"Now here is a twist . If they can do this to grown folks then why are they not arresting little pukes that cause hell ?"

Problem, reaction, solution as Alex Jones says.

Don't arrest the little pukes and you get a problem, grown folks then react and say Something Must Be Done, solution stop grown folks going into pubs and see if they have knives or drugs. The perpose of which is to trane us to behave like sheep, not to stop knife crime. The police on the ground grumble but don't know they are being used like this. They are like Robocop when he had a load of daft Directives.

Smith's airport ID card plans cut back to small pilot scheme

Where will terrorists strike next?

Airports are targets because of the large concentrations of people. However terror strikes could be more subtle. What if you could contaminate the food supply. That would hit a lot of people. But surely any poisonous food would be removed from the shelves after the first person keeled over. The trick is not to have it so poisonous that it's obvious. Have it so that statistically people will die. It could then go on for years before anyone noticed. Even when it was noticed then people would argue for ages whether it was actually harmfull or not.

If you did this over several decades with several types of poison then it would become normal. A sort of trend. You could kill 20% of the earths population and a few scientists would fret, a few conspiricy nuts would spot it, but as I said in an earlier post they are wrong by definition. The cancer cure Doctors would be delighted with all the yonger people getting cancer since they have a higher recovery rate.

Everyone is happy, except for the terrorists since their work has gone un-noticed.

It's a good job that something like that can't happen because it's a conspiricy theory I just made up.

Bombproof TV rolling-news eco bins target the City

@ Thomas Baker T.W.O.T

"To be honest the very fact that no-one has been blown up for quite some time is proof positive that the terrorist threat in this country has been massively exaggerated, if not completely fabricated..."

You sound like a conspiricy nut and as we know all conspiricy theorys are wrong because they are conspiricy theories put forward by people who believe in conspiricy theorys whach as we stated earlier are wrong because..... Surely a much more logical explaination is the The War On Terror (TWOT) is working and if it had been a fabricated event the BBC would have said so.... but that would be a conspiricy theory which as we know is wrong because the people who put forward conspiricy theorys must be wrong and the BBC could never say that because then they would be wrong and would be sacked like with all that David Kelly, 45 mins stuff.

I tell you what though. With all that armour and electronics, the bins would make a great place for the government to hide bombs. Bomb sniffing dogs would never be believed, their handlers would assume that dogs always snif bins.

Bomb proof solution

A plan is forming....

These bins with the telescreens pumping out London properganda are blast proof. So you could put a small bomb inside that will disable the telescreen without hurting pedestrians? Would a fire be a safer option?

How do we solve the camera problem and the congestion charge?

Will 'wi-fi on steroids' give you spots, baldness and liver damage?

Ultra wideband

Is this some type of ultra-wideband technology? Where the spectrum is used in a random spread spectrum way. Traditional radio services use a tuned circuit which picks up a carrier at a cirtain frequency and the audio (or whatever data) is filtered off using a simple diode or capacitor or something more fancy.

The original radio broadcasts did not use a carrier just a great fat spark and the idea was to get a smaller spark at the reciever. I believe Ultra-wideband does not use a carrier as such, the signal is directly modulated in a way analogus to a speaker modulating sound waves. I believe that ADSL has dispenced with the carrier, or at least it does not confine itself to a single frequency.

I think that more creative use of the spectrum is possible but if there are problems then they are going to be hard to figure out, just as with WiFi on 2.4GHz in built up areas. With out an actual carrier signal it's going to be hard for the regulators to identify what they are regulating.

Porn breath tests for PCs heralds 'stop and scan'

Internet Cach'e

The most likely place to find porn is in the web browsers cache directory. Pretty easy to clean if you plan on crossing any borders. The other place is whereever you maually stash your porn, which ofcourse might not even be on your laptop.

I think the main purpose of this is to frighten the ordinary person. the police will believe they have a tool that can find any porn so empowering them. The traveler will try not to get searched because the chances are someone looked at some porn websites on the laptop at some stage. If the police do find some porn then they can harrass the traveller further.

This all creates a climate of fear, allowing anyone with a bit of authority to lord it over those who feel they might be guilty of something.

Encrypting your hard drive will make you look guilty. What will you say if they insist you have to open it? You really recon you will say 'no' when the alternative is you don't travel and your company has just wasted their time and money sending you on the trip?

The DNA database and you

Will you still be innocent tomorrow?

Many people can't understand why cars are not machanically governed to not go over 70mph. Many people think that if you have done nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide, yet regard those who have been questioned by police as being guilty. No smoke without fire.

They could put the whole country in the DNA database if it was linked to organ doner registration and the ID card. I used to think the solution to the lack of organ doners was a system where you had to opt out otherwise they take your kidneys.

So who should be in the DNA database?

1. People suspected of the crime.

2. People who's DNA needs to be elimiated from the crime.

3. People being charged with the crime.

People who should not be in the DNA database.

1. People who have served time for the crime (no longer suspects).

2. People who are in prison (good alibi).

3. Innocent people.

I am assuming people are innocent until proven guilty. So should everyone be a suspect of some past or future crime? If they are not a suspect in a crime being investigated then they should not be in the database.

The only way this database can be fair is to include everyone as potential suspects. Anyone could be guilty of something. If the database only includes those under direct suspicion of a particular crime then it's hardly a database, just a case file. So to actually have a fair database it must include EVERYONE. I do think that is the plan they are following.

Barack Obama will be president

Americas first Kenyan-American President

They used to not let Africans or Austrians be President even if they spend a lot of time in the USA. This is a real breakthrough for Kenyan-Americans and maybe all African-Americans and possibly in future Austrian-Americans (Arni) and British-Americans (Tony?)

This will be a government for the people by the people with a very popular leader. The people worship him at huge rallies. Next thing we know he will have a Obama-Youth movement.

I for one welcome our new global facist overlord.

Is the internet going down down under?

Extrordinary freedom

You have gotta admit that the Internet is unusual. You don't get to write what you like in a newspaper, unless you own it. Or put stuff on TV even if you own the station. As for transmitting your own radio signal, the DTI will come round and steal your gear.

On the Internet you can run your own website and post messages on others. You can look at anything anyone puts online. This is mindbogglingly amazing!! In 1993 I could hardly get my boggling mind round this fact. When I did I knew it could never last.

However Internet freedom seems to not only have lasted but the freedom seems to be infecting other parts of life. The monitored and filtered media seem to be suffering under the competition from the Internet.

The Internet was the biggest mistake 'they' ever made. It should have been made expensive and kept slow. Now they will have to switch every router in the world to some sort of IP.V6 filtering and only packets carrying a governent licence key will be approved for transit.

Anyone caught sending a non-approved data packet will be tracked down and arrested for terror crimes.

I think the freedom will continue but it will be illegal because criminals, terrorists and drug deallers will be associated with having freedom.

The Jolly Roger is our new symbol of freedom.

The True Confessions of an Election Official

OUTSTANDING!

Totally amazing article.

Another 180 'hover & stare' ducted fan bots for US forces

PULL!

Whooorrrrrr....

BANG....

BANG.... {got it with the second barrol}

PULL

Rackable does cookie sheet servers

Vertical boards

If you mount a PCB vertically it will shed heat faster due to convection. Heat rises. If the board is horizontal then the heat can get trapped in the casing or in a board that's stacked above it.

Try mouting your ADSL router or Freeview box vertically and see if it runs cooler.

Police collar kid for Wi-Fi pinching

On every street in the UK

In any built up area you can see between 3 to 15 access points. There are usually two or three open. It seems that when you have very few access points the owners leave them open feeling the risk is low. When there are a lot then owners tend to secure them because they feel the risk is higher. Oddly this tends to leave two or three open in any area.

I sold a Vista laptop and connected it to the customers existing router. However Vista always seemed to prefer hooking into the unsecured connection of a neighbour. This was not really a problem for the customer until they bought a networked printer. Once I managed to lock it onto their own AP they were pleased with the increased speed. I showed them how to check that they are on their own AP.

This is typical Microsoft, they try to dumb it down and make it easy for dumb people to get online. As a result they make it almost impossible for smart people to be sure that they have set it up securely.

I regard an open access point as an invitation to borrow the Internet. Not to slow it to a crawl or to snoop. I expect this lad had no idea how full of holes Vista is. His computer is probably full of viruses since Norton runs out after 3 months. And that's another thing, Norton is like a target to viruses saying Hack Me.

Manuelgate's goth vampire stripper fades from MySpace

Oooooohhh, now I geddit!

The news gets taken over by something that Ross and Brand did but no one was really saying what it was about. So it takes the reg to shine a light on it!

Gates looks a bit satanic.

Student charged after alerting principal to server hack

He did the right thing

Getting punished for doing the right thing should not deter people. The way the world is at the moment if you are not getting punished then you are probably on the side of the baddies.

Mandelson's dept mulls UK internet power grab

.co.uk is a national resource

.co.uk is a national resource important to the UK as a whole and to millions of individuals. It's right that the government should make sure it's not bought up by some foriegners. Electricity companies suffered this fate, EDF stands for Energy De France! They let the equipment get old and broken then it explodes killing british workers.

However this government is probably not ones who you would want in charge of the Internet. If my domains get censured on .co.uk then I will move them to another registra. If all the DNS servers get censured then I will set up my own DNS. If everything gets censured then I and others will set up an underground tunneling Internet, same as the origional only over VPN.

Savvie people will want to join the Underground Internet which will grow and grow whilst the Official Internet it just full of Joss and Bland making sexual jokes.

Paris represents what the Internet will contain if the Government and Virgin and BT get their way.

MoD's London brass resist job cuts

The navy has almost two admirals for every frigate

I thought the captian ran the ship and the admiral ran the fleet. That over staffing sounds crazy. It means each captain is bossed about by two admirals. I am a ssuming a ship has one captain.

UK confirms e-voting death

we won? Nah, it's a ploy

Now we think we have won, the government will sneek it in.

No2ID shakes fist at plod print scanner plan

They won't get me to put my finger in that

Or you could use the fag lighter to burn your fingertip.

Man threatens lawsuit after negative eBay feedback

98.7% sounds good but is not

Most people leave positive feedback where really the transaction should be neutral. If you get what you expect then that's neutral. If you get better than you expect then that's positive and if you get worse than you expect then that's negative. Their should be no shame in the occasional negative, things go wrong and people are expressing their disapointment that they did not get what they wanted.

Ebays insistance that buyers give positive feedback or else PayPal won't pay the seller is a corrupting factor. They sell this idea to the buyers as "protection". The relentlessly positive nature of ebay is very american 'have a nice day' {cunt}. Ebay having built a huge exclusive market for themselves using the efforts of their members are now squeezing that market. Their recent policys are becoming increasingly unpopular and buyer centric but they know it remains the best place to sell.

Sellers really do feel the squeeze from ebay and will do anything for positive feedback. I experienced a seller who's performance on our transaction was poor, so I gave him neutral. As had other buyers. He pressurized a couple of them into changing it to positive feedback but I stuck with neutral.

I think it's up to us to strt using alternative online selling and buying if we don't like how ebay operates.

Fancy nipping for a quick two-thirds of a pint?

Will beer have to get even stronger?

Beer used to be 3.8% to 4.2% now it's 5% so a pint is more than it used to be. So if a 2/3 pint brings 5% beer down to about 3.3% per glass then will they have to make beer 7.5% to have the same kick as a 5% pint?

Where's my coat, going down the pub for a bit of fresh air.

Oz watchdogs howl over 'Cyber-Safety' net filter

re: tunneling out of Oz?

Yes, exactly, where in the Free World?

It's no joke.

If you view these proposals in isolation then each can be defeated. If you have noticed the global nature of what is happening you will see that there will be no free world. True that each country would implement filtering in their own unique way, but the policy of tackling porn and extremizm and piracy etc seems to be universal.

Yes making China the bad boy of filtering keeps our minds off of the real issue.

The Internet seemed to come togther without regard to the usual contraints of a communication system. First it connects any point with any point at no cost to the user unlike a telephone call. Second you can send anything you can get into a computer. Third, anone is allowed to do it, HTML is easy enough for anyone to put something online (some need a little help).

This was so different from what normally happens, you can't run your own Newspaper, TV, Radio or Telephone service. The Internet says you can.

If they take the Internet away from us we will simply rebuild it the way we want it. Probably via tunneling and wireless networks and our own DNS servers. If we build it, then people will come since it will contain all the things that people go online for whilst the filtered Internet will lack those things.

The net is dead, long live the net.

NASA: Google Gulfstreams not science experiments

You can hang things on the wings

http://www.aerospaceweb.org/aircraft/attack/alphajet/

Look, you can hang six things on the wings of this plane. Each one could be an experiment. It's also got two seats so you can have a pilot from NASA and one of the Wonkas can ride in the other seat. It looks like fun.

Ruling makes it easier to get software patents in the UK

Software IS a machine

Software is mechanical in my opinion and is therefore patentable. However these are patents on ideas, which is basically thought. So if I think of something and take a lot of time working it out, I am not allowed to take advantage of my efforts without paying some other b@stard who stuck a flag in his idea and say he owns it.

Worse than that, it basically puts the big companies in charge of all thought since I can't afford the tax on thought.

I writing a program or solving any problem I have to think about stuff. Now I have to pay a fee!