Jacqui - gone

She's standing down, according to the beeb : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8079205.stm

Nick L : Windows has an opportunistic encryption module afaik, ships by default with the OS I think.

Oddly enough...

I was bored a few weeks ago and spent some time running various compression tests on about 1TB of images (no - not *those* kind) and found I could get around 15-20% compression on JPG's just using "find ... -exec bzip2". Not as effective as this - but then it's quite a bit cheaper ;-) The spread was around 5% - 30% depending on the image & original compression.

29billion?

With that sort of money you could pay for a couple of decent sized middle-east wars or some more trident-style "toys for the boys". Why spend it on incredibly useful domestic technology instead? Don't these people realise we have banks to bail out and foreign countries to interfere with? The fools.... ;-)

StarOffice/OpenOffice

This also gives Oracle some control over the Star/OpenOffice suite Which might be interesting if they tied it into some of their middleware & back-end products a-la MS-Office/Sharepoint/etc...

A reply from Niki...

Having known Niki for some time, and indeed worked with her - I was quite excited to see the story here and passed her the link ;-) It's not often my photography and geeknews sides cross over ;-) Anyway - she asked me to post this reply :

"Does Niki Flynn really believe that it should always be a criminal offence to possess material that it's illegal to publish under obscenity laws?"

Most certainly not! I think you must have misread the last part. I am completely opposed to censorship in any form. I believe that what consenting adults get up to should be no one's business but theirs and that, as mature adults, we should be allowed to make up our own minds what we choose to watch or not. I think the BBFC is a hopelessly outdated entity and Paul Talbot's comment way up at the top sums it up their obsolete-ness perfectly.

A friend of mine who spent time in Stasi Germany makes the interesting point that it's countries like the UK that have never known life under a totalitarian regime that have so little regard for personal freedom.