I see it now

Government claims to be building a "thriving digital economy" and uses said argument to shift public services to the web.

Government builds system whereby web services can negotiate agreements with ISPs to allow access, presumably with a fee or reciprocal arrangement involved, probably along the lines of "implement this government approved blacklist".

Government tells citizens that if they want to access any public services whatsoever they need to use an ISP on their approved list of Phorm-subscribing overpriced "unlimited*" ISPs.

I'm only as paranoid as Jacqui wants me to be

08 numbers

I'm sure I remember that some time in the distant past when all of the numbers were reorganised that the 09 prefix was added for calls charged at above the national rate and 08 limited to national rate or below, hence the demise of the 0898 prefix.

080 free

084 local rate

087 national rate

I'd operated under that assumption from land lines only to discover that those principles were quietly ditched somewhere...

warnings from GLaDOS

The aperture science high energy pellet has been known to cause permanent physical disabilities such as vapourization.

Missing a Raptor

Where's the inclusion of the Battlestar Galactica Raptors on your chart? They may be larger than both the WD drives and indeed the Cretaceous namesake but I dare say they're a lot more evolved than a hard disk drive...

less of the senseless MS bashing please

If the Automatic Updates service is switched off, or configured never to check for updates then it won't. The issue here is the paranoid crowd flying off the handle because the Automatic Updates service silently updates itself (and nothing else) without user interaction. Am I the only one who thinks that people are grossly overreacting? Let's be honest, if the auto-update service prompted you that it needed to be updated before you could check for other updates it'd just serve as another barrier to people keeping their computers updated, and consequently we'd have even more vulnerable computers ready to start accepting commands from botnet controllers.

I'm hardly a big fan of their business practices but they're damned if they do and damned if they don't here. Either the generic home user turns off "all those annoying update options" because they don't understand what it's doing, or the DON'T TOUCH MY COMPUTER!!!!11111 crowd go mental.

IIS 5.1

Given that IIS 5.1 only exists on Windows XP (Windows 2000 uses IIS 5.0 and Windows Server 2003 IIS 6.0) you can see why perhaps this is perhaps much less of an issue than the article makes out, and indeed why Microsoft took their time issuing a fix. Probably because they're fixing problems that could have real implications, such as those with core components of the OS that are installed by default.

IIS 5.1 is never going to be used for anything more than a little hobbyist hosting and IT department utilities; I have an FTP server that I turn on when I need to reinstall the Dell utility partition on to a replacement disk for instance.

It's roughly the equivalent of saying "there's a security issue with running Exchange 2003 on XP Professional". No-one would be doing it in a production environment, and anyone who did deserves everything they get frankly.

And yes I know you can't install Exchange 2003 on XP Pro before you get all pedantic, but I'm just trying to illustrate a point.

lies

This is just an excuse to get a research grant to fund their WoW addiction for the next 5 years!

RotM surely?!

Especially in line with today's other RotM story about creating a Machine to Machine Intelligence system, I can see it now. Armies of mechanical brickies all programmed to make the sound of sucking air through their teeth and announcing that "that whole wall's gotta come down, hear that? that's rot that is. yeah it's all gonna have to come out"

Competition between exam boards

I have a theory on why the exams are getting easier (and they are, let's not beat around the bush here).

There are 3 major exam boards. Those exam boards charge a fee based on the numbers of students who sit their exams. They are private companies so it is in their interests to turn a profit, and more students = more profit.

Schools are under immense pressure from league tables. It is in the best interests of the school to have pupils who score highly in exams. The qualification gained is identical regardless of which board sets the papers.

Now, assume that board 1's Physics exam is noticeably easier than boards 2 & 3.

Q1. As a headteacher or a department head, with which board do you choose to enter your pupils?

Q2. As a Director of exam board 2, you notice that significantly more schools enter pupils for Physics through exam board 1. What do you do?

And here endeth the erosion of standards...

Wrong tree with ASA

It's more likely to be a job for Trading Standards than the ASA since the product/service being offered does not match the description

Why PC gaming has suffered

There's a more obvious reason why there's not been much innovation of late in the PC gaming market which you accidentally stumbled upon in your article.

All the designers are addicted to WoW.

Still, some of them have managed to shake the shackles off and come up with some other good stuff, Supreme Commander and Tiberium Wars should bring people back in to the RTS fold for instance.

not quite

Slightly misleading towards the end. What actually happenes under UAC is that a flagged program will prompt you when run to either allow the program to run with administrator rights or not to run at all. An unflagged program will run with user-level rights unless you right-click it and say run as administrator at which point you get the familiar UAC prompt.

With UAC enabled NOTHING that you run can run as administrator without your consent. If it runs silently when you double-click it, it's running with user level rights.

Carbon conspiracy

Perhaps it's the government's way of reducing the number of flights we all take? They daren't anger the air travel lobby and this looks like a positive for them, whereas the real people will spend one flight in cattle class surrounded by people jabbering on their phones and vow never to fly again...