@DannyAston - except you can't put it on your CV

One of the problems of a job in the intelligence services is that you can't put it on your CV - at best you can put some sort of generic "Government employee" title (not even sure if you can mention it was in IT).

Always wondered how that works, but of course no-one who actually knows is going to tell me :) I only know the latter as a friend did some contract work that was covered under the Official Secrets Act and was bemoaning that it was useless on his CV as he couldn't talk about the client or the work.

$4m out of $33bn is the equivalent of someone who has $33k losing $4. Pretty sure he's not losing any sleep over it.

A different angle to the dangle...

The story is spun as "man denied medical care by US healthcare system", but he could have surgery under Medicaid (free healthcare for poor people) - he just wants to go private as the expensive cutting-edge techniques have more chance of saving his reproductive functions.

Same as would happen in the UK - if you don't want the NHS option, you have to pay.

@Elmer Phud

"there isn't a bloody advert on telly that doesn't have a companies Facebook page to visit."

I hear from a mate with links to big ad firms that Facebook lobbies (pays?) ad firms to use Facebook URLs instead of website URLs. Clever strategy. Reminds me of "AOL keyword: blah" at the end of half the ads in the 90s.

Whole thing reminds me of AOL and look how well that turned out. Fickle hordes will move onto something else soon enough, that'll probably require a DNA sample and photocopy of your driving license to sign up to...

The least intelligent 20% are unintelligent.

We needed a study to say that at least 20% of the human race is not very sharp in the head?

Would be interested to see suggestions for what to do about it - whether it's systemic (better education) or just in terms of selling more stuff to morons (bigger writing, more obvious pricing and labelling, free shiny object?).

lost productivity costs estimated at $200,000

..."lost productivity costs estimated at $200,000" so they missed out on selling half a dozen handbags and a pair of shoes, then?

Competitors running ad campaigns about this

Got an e-mail from Namecheap with an offer for discounted domain transfers with a donation to "Save the Elephants" included.

@Mark65

Yes. You pay for incoming calls too. US mobile is 3-5 years behind Europe, which is 3-5 years behind Japan...

Bye bye Sprint

Sprint is already having issues competing with the big two (AT&T/Verizon) and has recently tried to rebrand themselves with a focus on always-on data ("The Now Network"). Surely charging a big surcharge for data completely undermines that?

Also, for a country as technologically advanced as it is, cellphone service and adoption here is years behind Europe/UK. Seems to be a combination of monopolistic practices (CDMA is a crappy, proprietary technology that the rest of the world ignores), calls that were already cheap so no incentive for the masses to start buying mobiles and texting, and the logistics of building the infrastructure over a much larger area. Whatever caused it, the US is a bit backwards in cell tech.

Default to allow

This is more exciting than just another acronym being implemented... RSS benefited greatly from being switched on by default in WordPress as it was no longer something that only techie types went to the trouble to enable. RDFa by default in a major CMS platform is a huge step forward for the semantic web.

Weird study metrics

Are the UK and China really below Somalia, North Korea, etc? Or is there some "...amongst some countries" footnote that is missing either from this report or Ofcom? Same with "super fast broadband" - is that "anything above modem speed", or "anything above 10MBit"?

UK needs more competition in fixed telecoms - we lead in mobile because there's plenty of providers and networks to choose from. Fixed is still dominated by that old dinosaur BT who are still confused at why people aren't happy with paying 10p/min to make voice calls over 30 year old copper...

We're all self-perpetuating media nodes, now?

Nathan Barley was more prophetic than we thought...

Hosted CMS' not for Enterprises?

Are you sure about Gardens, Squarespace, other SaaS CMS' being enterprise-oriented? Seems to me that they are more aimed at small(er) businesses who don't have the resources or staff to manage complex websites in-house.

The larger enterprises I've worked with have in-house teams and a strong desire to keep everything hosted internally.

Joomla is awful for non-trivial projects (ie. anything that's not a brochure site or small social network). Drupal isn't all that great either but they're moving in the right direction, and it's far faster to build a solid content-driven application in Drupal than in a lower level framework like Zend.

@The BigYin

Yup, it's that simple. If you control the router, the answer is as simple as turning on WPA encryption. I manage a few small public wifi networks (cafes, hotels, that kind of thing) and gave them a simple key (the SSID, or "internet" or similar). No more Firesheep.

No need to highlight "jargon"

The target audience of this site is fully aware of what a "superuser" is, no need to put it in the "scary technical term" quotes.

Incidentally, are we talking root access or privilege escalation?

More jargon please!

Big deal for PHP developers too - Eclipse, Aptana, Netbeans...

Eclipse, Aptana, Netbeans, etc are all Java-based. This is a big deal for PHP developers.

Everything's just peachy?

Is the lack of energy because, by and large, the Internet is currently working pretty well and the IGF's job is, for the moment, mostly complete?

All relative?

Bogle: In other words, 50% of people are less happy than average...

I wonder if this is relative? If $50k is the median and $75k is what it takes to make you happy in the US, is it also true that in places where the median income is $365 (the famous third-world $1/day stat), are you happiest in those societies when you're earning $547?

Is the happiness dependent on the income of others around you? If you earn $75k and hang out with millionaires all day, are you more miserable than someone earning $75k who moves in circles where the income is $25-50k?

Context is important

All well and good, I'll certainly use 12 characters for my online banking. However, I wish newspapers, blogs, etc. would use less strict passwords - used one the other day that needed 8+ characters with numbers and mixed case, for a site with no useful data that I'd probably only log into a handful of times.

Backwards-compatibility is overrated...

Changing the API for new versions and providing legacy support (5.x is still officially supported) is acceptable practice for a young product. Perhaps when they have 10% of the Internet and are 10 or 11 releases in then it will not make sense.

There is a trade-off between backwards compatibility and innovation. Drupal is really only in it's fourth major release (versions <4 were essentially a bunch of scripts used by Dries to run personal websites). To retain 100% backwards compatibility is a lot of work that is better directed towards innovating and removing issues that are holding back innovation.

Look at what happened to DOS/Windows - 25 years on and we're only just getting free from poor decisions made at the beginning.

Industrial design

I kind of like the design, looks industrial and solid. Apple's minimalist chic is getting old, and looks like a poor rip-off when other companies do it. I like equipment that wouldn't look out of place in a 1970s NASA control room :)

Also, the cost is because of the limited market for these things - mostly businesses who would prefer to pay $400 for something that just works (and can be returned under warranty if it breaks) than a cobbled together $200 Linux PC that only one staff member understands.

Hiring bonus?

So basically, the founders got hired for a day-job at Facebook, and FB bought their startup for a nominal fee as a hiring bonus?

Isn't this how open platforms are supposed to work?

Surely rapid iteration and deployment is a good thing, and the resulting compatibility chaos is a natural side effect of a vibrant and active market developing around the platform?

Early adopters are used to half-baked ideas and fast obsolescence, and Android is definitely an early-adopter's platform still.

It's one of the more annoying aspects of open source, but eventually things settle down and the technology moves into the mainstream. Hopefully it can achieve some stability by then as mainstream consumers won't put up with it.

@Fraser

The million-dollar recording artist is an anomaly in the history of music which lasted for a few decades in the 20th Century.

The money didn't even come from the music, it came from the packaging and distribution of recordings (as you can see from the artists who're making the most money from music now, manufactured pop acts and aging rockers living off decades old re-issues).

Now packaging and distribution is heading towards obsolescence it appears the age of the rock star is dying out. I'm sure we will all miss a world without future Britneys and Bonos...

Low prices != binge drinking

Here in the US you can buy a six pack of cheap lager for under $4, vodka for $10/750ml. Bars will sell you a pint of generic lager for $1-$3.

Yet people here drink far less than they do in Blighty, and I think I've seen one or two minor scuffles in the 3 years I've been here (compared to seeing serious injuries and near-riots nearly every time I went out in the UK).

Now I am no longer broke after buying a couple of pints I'll often go out for a meal or to watch a movie as part of my evening out, rather than just spending the whole night in the pub.

The whole "cheap booze leads to binge drinking" idea is completely wrong - it just pushes people to extremes. They'll either quit drinking so they can afford to do other things, or stop doing other things so they can afford to drink.

@chris177

You pay to call mobiles here in the US, just as the numbers are mixed in with the local area codes the caller only pays the local rate and the numbers are indistinguishable from other local numbers.

If you are on Pay as You Go or similar then you pay to receive mobile calls, but most US plans these days include free incoming calls.

Other than that the main difference is the expense/lack of good data services compared to Europe, although this can be partially excused by the country being ridiculously vast, so any infrastructure upgrade is considerably more of an undertaking than in small, densely populated European countries.

Apart from that everything's the same - overpriced calls, poor customer service, buggy handsets, etc...

@Michelle Knight

"...the bandwidth that optical links will deliver will already be eaten up and there will be no black fiber left anywhere in the UK network. The cloud as a mass market solution doesn't work; can't work; won't work. End of. And if I'm wrong, I'll buy a hat with the sole purpose of eating it."

Isn't that like saying, in 1900, that there can't possibly be more than 100 cars because they'll use up all the available roads?

Assuming bandwidth follows the same Moore's Law which has held up quite well over the past 50 years, there'll be no Great Bandwidth Shortage any time soon...

Flat version?

Ignoring all puns about batteries going flat, I wonder if there's any reason it has to be rolled up?

If it could still work properly in it's unrolled/flexible state then a larger, but super-thin battery could produce some interesting possibilities for very thin devices - especially if the cost is comparable to a standard AA battery.

Disposable digital paper, anyone?

Economic Migrants rather than Race a Factor?

Surely the key factor here is that people descended from families who have been economic migrants are successful, rather than the fact they're from Europe?

For example, British Pakistani families tend to be successful entrepreneurs, as migrant Jews have been almost everywhere they've settled, despite not being of magical European blood.

This would correlate with research that shows immigrants being responsible for a disproportionate number of startup companies (50%+ in Silicon Valley).

The dull, unmotivated members of a nationality will stay at home while the ambitious upstarts will take themselves to where they see opportunity. Nothing to do with race or ancestry.