I was with Nildram, and loved them .. then they became Pipex, and the slide started. Fortunately, I bailed before they reached rock bottom in TalkTalk, the packet graveyard; a happy two years with Entanet, then over to a C&W/ex-Bulldog reseller when Entanet fell off BT's "21cn/WBC" cliff.

Now I'm with Virgin. Nice fast downloads, most of the time, decent upload, with staff who can't even spell IP and a few irritating limitations. All my outbound mail goes over port 465 to another country, though, so it doesn't matter what they screw up SMTP-wise!

Tethering

Personally, I jailbreak so I can use tethering - being on Giffgaff with a 'Gigabag', some bizarre three-way blamestorm between Apple, O2 and Giffgaff means the official tethering route doesn't work. (iOS can't tell the difference between Giffgaff and O2's own PAYG service, which is set not to allow tethering.) I'll probably switch networks in another 2-3 months once my current credit's used up; Orange should only be about £1-2/month more expensive for me, and a bit more flexible. (Can't combine goodybags and gigabags on Giffgaff, for some stupid reason.)

I just wish the ASA would shoot down the "fibre" lie that Virgin's copper coax cables are somehow "fibre" because there's fibre as far as the copper conversion point, unlike ADSL which only has fibre as far as the copper conversion point...

The traffic shaping also makes a big difference - though at least the traffic limits seem high enough to be acceptable, and only kneecap you for the rest of the day instead of costing you a fortune or wrecking the rest of the month.

I remember work rolling out a new management system (an optional part of our existing mail server suite) for non-BlackBerry handsets a while ago. The upshot was that everything could connect to either BES or the non-BB equivalent - the big difference being that the BES cost money over and above the mail server, making BB handsets more expensive for the same job.

Now mail is outsourced, non-BB handsets can all connect natively, BB kit still needs its dedicated babysitter in the middle at extra cost. It's a big enough, diverse enough workforce there are people around who know each major platform well anyway, so BYOD shouldn't entail any extra costs anyway.

Besides, most non-enterprisey kit is designed and supported by the manufacturer/vendor for self-sufficient use. For email, feed in your IMAP/SMTP/ActiveSync credentials and away you go. Virtually all our BB support issues amounted to the BES having fouled the nest anyway...

Mainframe/PC deja vu

It's deja vu all over again - I can see exactly the same arguments a few decades back, that nobody would advocate replacing the million dollar three-phase monster with the six figure IBM support contract with mere 'personal computers', it would be career suicide ... meanwhile, the bean-counters were discovering they could get the answers they needed faster on a PC in 123 than from the mainframe. Suddenly, somebody notices the mainframe's not actually being used any more: the PCs have taken over.

At work, we had a six figure SAN with a team of acolytes tending to its every whim, sacrificing goats as ordered in an attempt to keep the clunky 80s email system grunting along. Chucked now, even Microsoft can do a far better job of email than that fiasco, for a tiny fraction of the cost.

Yes, a giant SaaS provider needs to address ... actually, exactly the same problems any other very large outfit would do, which makes it ironic they are capturing the smaller users first.

To a small business, it's often a choice between an SaaS provider's clustered, replicated servers or an elderly Dell out of warranty. Of course the SaaS provider can be much, much more reliable! In a big company, they probably run to multiple servers, some load balancing or failover, decent backups - but 24 hour staffing? We don't, with nine figure turnover and an IT dept headcount well in double figures: it would cost too much. End result is that almost any commercial service is likely to deliver lower downtime, just because problems have to wait until 9-5 M-F to be fixed.

In related news, Sony have given Betamax an exciting new facelift! New shiny buttons to press!

They really do have the same problem Betamax did against VHS, but with the handicap of being late to the party. DVDs had an uphill struggle to unseat VHS, for exactly that reason: why switch, when VHS is so entrenched? In the DVD's case, of course, there were a string of real advantages: better picture quality, no rewinding, more reliable media, more physically compact - so it actually worked. To unseat Facebook, G+ will have to become not just as good, not just better, but so much better than Facebook that people actually switch - and that's exactly what Buzz tried and failed to do with Twitter.

Do the Wonkas really believe they've bet their ad company's future on out-Facebooking Facebook, or will G+ go the way of Buzz, Wave and the others in a year or so?

(Of course, Facebook could park their tanks on Google's lawn, starting to do serious well-targeted ads on third-party sites like AdWords - probably Google's big long term fear, but do Facebook want to go that route?)

The current asynchronous system, of employers paying and deducting semi-random amounts each month, occasionally being told by HMRC to deduct different random amounts from that point on, then trying to balance it all up afterwards for each tax year, is stupid. "Tax codes"? WTF does HMRC have to invent new gibberish like "D0", "BR", "L8500"? The new system sounds like a huge improvement: they say "we are paying Fred (NI#AB12345C) £1500 this month", HMRC say "OK, pay us £700, pay him the other £1000" (because they like to pretend part of the tax comes from the employer), that should be the end of it.

No doubt they'll screw the pooch horribly, blowing billions on a system to get the answers wrong then billions more to fix it, but it's a nice idea.

Trademark should never have been granted for that

If I start selling pre-arranged rockeries for gardens under the name Stonehenge, do I get to sue Google any time someone else calls their rockery Stonehenge? That's nuts. They aren't even the first people to use that name *for that class of product*, let alone first to use it at all!

Weak argument

I don't like Sun/Oracle's "field of use" restrictions - surely, if I want to play Pong on a Cray or shoehorn Ubuntu onto an old 386, that's my problem, whether it works or not?

Having said that, "it's freely available so you can't enforce copyright" is a really, really dumb argument. Will they be redistributing modified copies of the Windows 8 preview release? That's free, too, but I suspect Microsoft might just get all lawyered up about that idea! Even open-source/free-software doesn't mean you can do what you like regardless of licence - the FSF of all people should be on board with that distinction.

I hate the idea of software patents and of trying to restrict use of a protocol or interface (look at the Linux kernel fiasco with BitKeeper?) - but it does look as if (a) the room wasn't quite 'clean' after all (Sun stuff slipping in) and (b) Sun/Oracle have patents which cover things Android does, at which point no clone, clean-room or not, is safe.

With hindsight, and given their love of Java, maybe Google should have bought Sun themselves...

Vested interests feeling "threatened"

No surprise there - remember where the term "Luddite" actually comes from? In related news, Tube "drivers" are also strongly opposed to being replaced by machines...

If they really don't work reliably, and can't be made to do so, that's different - as it stands, we have a story about turkeys not liking the smell of stuffing or the wrapping of presents.

The "same playing field as the rest of us" from a rival and Microsoft's "like thousands of other partners and utilizing our standing pricing and licensing terms" seem to indicate the real issue: OnLive is NOT just another startup doing VDI, it's one with close ties to MS.

Microsoft's dilemma is that if they admit to giving OnLive a nice special licence exception for VDI, all their other customers/partners will either demand the same, or cry foul - and I'm sure the last time that happened is still etched in minds throughout Redmond as something to be avoided like the plague. We'll probably see them buying OnLive and rebranding the service as their own - but as a new service like this, an agile "startup" environment probably works better than being one small part of a giant corporation. The thousand-strong army of lawyers to check whether the shape of the letter T on the boot logo complies with Pakistan's calligraphy regulations is fine for billion-dollar product launches like Windows 7 - not so good for delivering a new web service...

They could and should introduce a bar on 0800 calls being any more expensive than any geographic call - i.e. your unlimited or 250 landline minutes must include 0800 calls too. There's no excuse for any telco charging more for an 0800 call than a landline one - particularly since the recipient pays them for it too.

I'd like to see revenue sharing banned outright except on 09 numbers; 0871 and 0844 were mistakes all round. Yes, I know some people have set up nice little earners screwing people through the phone bill - that's no excuse for letting them continue. The AC with 275 different 0845 numbers is obviously doing something very weird, but there's no reason it couldn't be done on 03xx numbers instead.

On premium rate numbers, Ofcom have actually proposed something very sensible (and long overdue): that calls be priced in terms of the surcharge on top of your regular call price. Instead of the current "calls to this number cost 95p/min from BT lines, but random multiples of transcendental numbers on other operators", just "this call is 90p/min plus your normal call charge". Nice and simple, and of course already in place for SMS.

The AC has the right idea - and the CDMA systems Verizon and Sprint use do that already. Make the identify a public key certificate - maybe injected over USB/Bluetooth. Order a new handset from O2, they ship it with your certificate preloaded; buy an unlocked phone and sign up for a "non-SIM only" plan, they email you a file to copy over USB/Bluetooth. Particularly with micro-USB being the new standard for charging, all it needs is to have the data pins connected to something with a kilobyte or so of non-volatile storage.

Apple already proposed almost exactly that, but certain companies replied "waaaah, we demand SIMs". Maybe something to do with having patents which get them royalties from anyone making or using SIMs?

Overvaluing football

"nobody can compete with the kind of prices Sky will pay for that "best content"."

Surely the whole problem there was that OnDigital could and did outbid Sky - by paying more than the football was actually worth? Ultimately, Sky doesn't pay for the football, Sky Sports customers do, via Sky. As long as I don't have to pay for it, I don't care: Sports viewers can pay whatever the price may be for sports, or not. Too expensive, nobody will pay, so no income; too cheap, not enough income, so the sports clubs have to cut spending or change something else. That's business, between them and their customers.

Ads don't bother me - paying through the nose for a channel or two does. My subscription to Virgin gets me a dozen channels that actually have stuff I watch - and yes, the ads make it a lot cheaper than it would be otherwise; the BBC, on the other hand, charge me far, far more per channel and produce less content that I actually watch. Delete them from my channel lineup, would I even notice?

I felt for a while that it could either be cut down to a simple enough service to be profitable from ads alone, building volume that way - the hosting requirements, done properly, should be trivial - or ... bolt on massive amounts of shiny tat in the hope eventually someone will buy it for more than you paid? It worked once, with ITV, but I can't see it happening again.

Having said that, DCT were only interested in the Genes Reunited bit anyway - the rest wasn't much more than baggage along for the ride. A shame they didn't try spinning it back off as an independent little startup to cut overheads and experiment some more; this approach looks rather like a Frankenstein job, trying to bolt the leftovers they have lying around from other commercial work to make FR bigger and shinier - the last thing it needs.

Having the BB10 handset looming will probably slash BB7 handset sales for the next six months, and I can't see Playbook sales exploding any time soon either.

I've always been impressed by the customer loyalty they've enjoyed - even after the massive outages - but the last surveys I've seen indicated huge numbers of current customers planning to switch brands next time they upgrade; at work, even when the choice was between a work-paid BB or paying for your own iPhone, a lot went for the latter, and work funds both now anyway.

As the AC says, they've grabbed a surprising market share in the teenage-texter market here, and seem to have a surge in places like South America and Africa. The trouble is, that'll be a lot more fickle - much less lock-in than when your corporation has bought into BIS and mandates BBs company-wide. For the heavy texting aspect, there are other companies doing Android handsets with very similar keyboards - which just leaves BBM, really?

Having seen both sides...

I've seen the good and bad on both sides. I've been in the central bit when a complacent little department discovers that actually, the £10/month we charged to back up a departmental server over the network wasn't such a bad deal after all, as they pay for me salvaging a dead NetWare file system - but I've also been out in the revenue-generating departments, chafing at paying 900% markups on domain registrations (£10 reg fee plus £90 overhead!), choking under 30 Mb quotas because the building full of giant plasma screens apparently can't afford storage any more.

If the central IT provision kept up with commercial levels of service, there would be little or no need for what the article calls "shadow" IT (and I'd prefer a less judgemental term, like 'devolved' or 'distributed' - particularly in an environment where departments generally have their own IT staff).

Give us slow and unreliable 30 megabyte home directories, with extra storage in units of 300 Gb at £5000 each, of course Dropbox gets new users instead. Blow six figures propping up a half-dead dog-slow Groupwise installation with 50 Mb quotas, of course users will end up forwarding to a Gmail account. (To be fair, that particular turkey finally got a late Christmas when we upgraded to Hotmail.) For far too long now, central IT departments have grown accustomed to delivering minimal service at stupid prices. "Shadow IT" is one way of delivering much better results; if "central IT" can't match it, maybe it's time to reconsider their existence?

I wouldn't be surprised if most of the power went to the screen/backlight in the iPad 2 as well. At 43 Whr with a battery life of 10 hours, that's a 4.3 W power drain: 2 W of backlight, 1 W for the comms chipset and another for the processor/RAM/storage, about half on each of those for the previous model, with the lower-res screen and humbler graphics and network connection?

It'll be interesting to see how the WiFi-only model compares, since that'll exclude the LTE chipset/radio but keep everything else the same. If it gets much the same battery life, we know the screen is the culprit; if it's better, with the same battery, we know it's the LTE chipset draining all that power.

Most of the time all the LTE bits should be idle anyway, though, so it shouldn't make a major difference anyway.

If the pattern smears form a loop - for example a rectangle - it could start at any of the four corners, or indeed potentially part-way along an edge, although that might be visible in the smear pattern.

Opening the case and hooking the flash storage up to an external reader should hold up in court - it's essentially what they've been doing for years with regular computers - but the storage may well be encrypted, as it is with the iPhone 3gs and later (though any computer it syncs with will happen to have a copy of the key, which could be handy): I presume Androids will do the same, which is why a little help is needed. (Part of the spec for connecting to MS Exchange using ActiveSync, isn't it?)

"Most of these folk would have been watching catch-up services, such as BBC iPlayer, on their mobile devices. Catch-up viewing accounted for 9.2 per cent of all viewing in 2011, up from 7.1 per cent in 2010."

That must be the bit which scares the ... out of them: they can only collect tax on real-time broadcast viewing, on-demand content is beyond their remit. I could easily swap my current 32" LCD TV (already hooked up to a computer anyway) for a second-hand 30" and stick to downloaded/streamed content: no more TV tax needed, so the savings alone would just about cover the monitor price...

The company running the actual network is MBNL (Mobile Broadband Network Limited) though - a joint venture of Three and EE! I'm not quite sure how that works in terms of the two sets of "separate" frequency licenses, with transparent roaming already in place, but it wouldn't surprise me to see Three grabbing a chunk of this lower spectrum for MBNL to use while EE contribute the huge higher frequency bands.

Personally I'd give the 3 bands to O2, Vodafone and Three respectively - in exchange for coverage commitments. I'd rather have a better network for everyone to use than squeeze more cash into the treasury - but then, I'm not in charge of spending the contents of it...

App?

Is it really an "iP{hone,ad}" app as such? Presenting this stuff sounds more like a job for an intranet web page/site. Of course, since those can have icons just like native iOS apps now, distinguishing between them may be splitting hairs.

Besides, the App Store doesn't go up to £20,000...

They do seem to be lagging depressingly far behind, except on claimed raw peak bandwidth for their modems. A string of buggy "super hub" releases which still had key features missing, set top boxes which crash and have a power saving "feature" you can't disable or adjust to be less obstructive (at least once a week I get told I can't pause a channel yet because it's gone to an unwanted low-power mode without asking or even telling me) ... I think it's about time I jumped ship back to Sky for TV service at least.

The phone service works OK, at least, though still charges for 0845 and 0870 calls unlike BT. I remember BT introduced a web access facility to CallMinder, too, though discontinued it for unknown reasons (too useful to customers?) - Virgin should, but don't.

I haven't seen much competition on this level ... Rackspace? Maybe Azure, at a stretch? I suppose that's the effect they're hoping for, though: other companies to look at their prices, crunch the numbers and go "nope, we can't beat those, next business plan please".

I've very happy with my Linode and Joyent virtual machines for regular hosting, although spinning up an EC2 machine or ten to test something quickly or handle a flash crowd might be nice.

It's CloudFront and S3 that I really like, though. If my site suddenly gets Slashdotted (it did make Digg once) it's just a crazy-looking spike on the graph and an extra few $ on the month's bill - not downtime or a service suspension. Likewise the image storage I do for another web application: I don't need gigabytes of space lying unused 'just in case' - I just stick it in S3.

Now, if they could just bring their SimpleDB pricing structure to RDS: full-blown SQL, but pay-as-you-go instead of fixed machine sizes... I seem to remember there is a company doing something similar on top of EC2 themselves already, somewhere?

In related news, I can run faster than Bolt ... when he's walking round the supermarket with a trolley, if I take performance enhancing drugs. iPad sales are pretty much on hold right now because everyone knows the next version comes out this month - only an idiot or someone in a hurry would buy an iPad 2 right now - and Playbook has the home-field advantage, as well as being less than half the price.

RIM have already eaten a nine figure loss on their tablet attempt, and only just managed to give it an email client - which still lacks support for their own proprietary email service! So much for their one and only "selling point" of vendor lockin.

The multi-day outage ruled out ever using a BB myself; the absurd straw man about "better to route encrypted traffic through RIM servers than unencrypted" (when we can all use encrypted email anyway: it's not the 90s any more!) doesn't exactly boost confidence in those people's opinion about BB's claimed security. Remote wipe, wipe on password failure, encrypted storage and network traffic, password complexity rules - I'm not seeing anything that's exclusive to RIM's offering there.

Since you'd be going from one solar system to another with this kind of drive, just fly towards their sun - no need to worry about frying inhabitants in it, and another burst of radiation chucked into a colossal fusion explosion is hardly going to matter. Then use plain old impulse drive or whatever to 'taxi' the last few light-minutes to the planet you were aiming for.

As betas go, it's pretty poor. As for a commercial release and putting it in the hands of regular users, someone clearly jumped the gun quite badly. Sometimes the word mangling is beyond parody; trying to set an alarm for 11, I received replies which included "unable to give directions in Rwanda" and "calling Mohamed".

Having said that, it's a nice *idea*, and I'm sure the next version will improve it greatly. The next version after that might even be usable! (Come to think of it, the original iPhone had neither 3g data nor downloadable apps - but look at iPhones now...)

It looks like the "slut" epithet came from her claim that she couldn't afford $1000 per month in contraception and so needed her ($23,000 per term) Catholic university to bundle it in with the education. Needless to say, $1000 buys a hell of a lot of contraception - some people have calculated how many condoms it would cover, which worked out at 5 or more per day. With 'The Pill' actually about $20/month commercially, and available free from a lot of places thanks in part to existing government funding (Public Law 91-572, passed under Nixon) her tale doesn't ring true anyway. From other accounts, it seems she's an activist with an axe to grind about insurance plans which don't bundle 'free' contraception - maybe that's driven by this ovary tale, or maybe she just made it up to get headlines.

It also seems to be all over the news now that Limbaugh has apologised for his comments, which is good I've never actually listened to his show, but it does sound as if he's pretty much a radio troll with his over-the-top wording. If he'd just pointed out that maybe someone coughing up over $70,000 per year in tuition shouldn't let her "friend" lose a body part for want of $20/month or a lift to the nearest Planned Parenthood to get it free, he'd have had a point - but then I suppose he wouldn't have the massive audience and all the headlines ...

The business model needs to consist of carrying data for a fair price. No more "free" this (but we'll screw you until you bleed on X, Y and Z to make up for it): when calling mobile->landline costs ten times more than landline->mobile, someone is taking the Mickey.

I'm sick of seeing £500 handsets and calls in one direction "free", while calls in the other direction and "line rental" get charged at stupid prices to make up for it all. Ban the handset subsidies - or at least, require they be unbundled - and make termination charges reciprocal: if Vodafone want to charge BT 2p/min for calls to mobiles, they should have to pay BT 2p/min for calls from their mobiles too.

Pipe me a river

"If carriers move to the "Pipe" model, then there will be less investment and a lower level of service. Carriers won't keep up service levels if no one can see the difference."

Nonsense. I am paying for the use of a pipe. If the pipe provider is so stupid or greedy they ignore maintenance and upkeep of the pipe, I will switch to a less stupid pipe provider with a better quality pipe. If you fold because your business model relied on trying to screw people for the pointless add-ons you bolt to your pipe - tough.

How exactly do you distort the meaning of "service levels" into "no one can see the difference"?! The bandwidth, latency and reliability delivered are all very obvious to users - and indeed are the basis on which I and presumably others choose my pipe provider, for both home and mobile connectivity. A company which is putting resources into non-pipe services is not one I'd want to buy from, in the same way I don't want to buy my mobile phone service from British Airways or FedEx: they are focussed on the wrong thing to deliver that service. Whether in denial or not, O2, Vodafone and co are in the business of selling pipes and re-selling other people's hardware to use the pipes with, nothing more.

Ramazan has a point that SMS uses infrastructure the other services don't - which is why they are more efficient and cheaper. So what? Steam engines cost money too, but very few people whine about them being misunderstood - we just get on and use the diesel or electric replacements. Most of the plant you list is not SMS-specific though: the actual cost of an SMS should be a tiny fraction of the 6p I would pay right now in the unlikely event I decided to send one, and much closer to the price I'd pay for sending those 140 bytes over the data connection instead.

Fine-grained

"Strange, it must be impossible to sign only yearly contracts."

I don't think yearly contracts are what he's after - rather, an example of what he wants to escape. He cites Amazon, who provide bandwidth and storage based on exactly what you use: if I shave 10% off the size of my web content, I pay Amazon 10% less for it. If I need a dozen big Windows servers for a day to test something, I get charged for 288 machine-hours, not for buying a dozen Windows licenses. If I tune it a bit to finish an hour sooner, that's a direct financial saving.

"I could bankrupt an entire office by spamming their email with Word and Excel docs that would require a nickle each to Microsoft to open."

Or they could save that fortune (and dodge the virus risk too, with malicious attachments) by opening all the attachments in Google Apps or OpenOffice instead of paying anything at all to Microsoft. Instead of $100/yr for an Office license they use 0.01% of the time, pay ten cents an hour for the hundred hours they actually need Excel - and put the other $90 to something more useful.

With annual contracts, you pay for it whether you use it or not. This way, you only pay IF you actually use it - a huge improvement, as long as the PAYG rates aren't stupidly high.

"The absolute worst we could do is wipe out a sizeable chunk of the current plant and animal species, along with ourselves."

As worst-case scenarios go, that's actually pretty bad. Maybe I'm biased here, but I do have a fairly strong preference for NOT getting wiped out, with or without other species...

A falling population would probably be a good thing in several respects - not via genocide of course, but birthrates are already below replacement in bits of Europe, meaning the population would already be dropping there but for immigration from other regions. Dropping back to the one billion mark by 2100 would be nice.

What will it take to consign this bonkers anachronism to the dustbin of history, actual deaths?

It's hard to see which is more stupid here: the 999 call handling system losing dozens of calls because of a very dumb bug, or the government ordering us all to shuffle the numbers around the clock twice a year as if labelling sunlight hours as being 9am to 3pm up here in the frozen north instead of 8am to 2pm is an improvement in anything.

"Dear politician: if you want to 'save daylight', please use a solar panel, rechargeable battery and torch. F**k off and quit tampering with my clock, even a politician should be able to grasp that it doesn't actually control daylight!"

An iPad version of Office would no doubt sell quite well - just like the Mac version of Office - but also negate the big selling point of a Windows 8 tablet against iPad. "It's like an iPad, but instead of all those popular apps you can run Office" might just hold water; "it's like an iPad, you can still run Office but not all the other popular apps" sounds doomed.

I'm sure it's been a dilemma for MS before - preserve Office's ubiquity by supporting non-Windows platforms, or use Office as leverage to support Windows? They've mostly come down on the first side of that - though dropping macros in Office 2008 no doubt pushed business users back towards Windows a bit to use Office 2007 instead.

Office for iPad would sell well, but quite possibly kill off Windows 8 as a tablet platform. On the other hand, if tablets succeed without Office, that could propagate back to a desktop without Office as well...

Horses for courses

It's possible you'd get a much bigger variation between CDNs in some cases - CloudFront offers great performance in Europe and North America, from what I've seen, but falls down quite badly in Australia (most CDNs do: apparently certain very big ISPs there don't believe in peering) - so using Akamai rather than CloudFront could make a huge difference there - not 25ms, but "same continent" as opposed to "another hemisphere". (Maybe Singapore, which might not be so terrible for performance, but still quite a distance compared to being at a big in-country peering point.)

For corner cases like that, it might even make sense to go non-CDN - colocate your own machine down under, route your Australian traffic to it instead of CloudFront. (Akamai have servers everywhere - but won't talk to small customers, and even terminated the reseller they caught selling to small businesses; Rackspace are using Akamai bandwidth for their Cloud Files CDN, but only enabling the most basic static-content subset of features.)

This always seemed the obvious downside to Oracle buying Sun. As a standalone RDBMS vendor, they had the strategic weakness: you'd have to use it alongside an OS from IBM, HP/DEC/Compaq, Sun, Microsoft or some form of Linux. In almost every case they'd be going up against an RDBMS with "home field advantage" - I remember specific API changes slipped into a Windows 2000 Service Pack to boost SQL Server's performance at the time, for example, no doubt each platform has more recent equivalents - so I'm sure the Sun/IBM sales guy would have kept slipping into conversation "yes, we'd be happy to stick in an extra 128 Gb of RAM to make Oracle keep up ... did I mention we've got a special price on $OTHER_DBMS?"

I've always been impressed - or depressed - by the effectiveness of Oracle's brand-marketing to non-technical management types; I once spent at least an hour explaining why actually, Oracle *wouldn't* be the best way to store the 100k of text we had in an XML file. It was really important data, y'see, so surely it needed really Enterprisey(TM) storage around it...

So, they complain about a seatbelt that snaps in SOME crashes ... and replace it with a pre-snapped one guaranteed to have failed already regardless? *headdesk*

Catching the use of a revoked certificate is good. Even if it sometimes fails, it's better than nothing! I'm wondering if Google have an ulterior motive of sorts here, given their recent obsession with speeding up HTTPS and SPDY, including taking interesting shortcuts in SSL?

Maybe their system is wonderful - but I'd still rather have my browser check for revocation than not. Defence in depth.

It does seem bizarre to me: the .apk file itself can be distributed OK, signed with a key which enables it to work on other systems - why does it matter if the key that signed it is the same one that signed other binaries on the system? Presumably in order to connect to Verizon, there is a check "is phone .apk signed by Verizon?" What does it matter if other binaries are signed with Google's key, my key or a key from a random shady character in Moscow?

If Android only lets you have one key in use for signing everything on the handset, that's dumb and should be fixable without any effect on anything else - unless it's some sort of TPM DRM, so only code signed with "the key" can be used and changing that to a non-Verizon key means no more Verizon access?

Not so fine

Fine Tesco a million pounds, it hurts them, they'll make an effort to avoid it happening again - ultimately, that cuts into profits, which hits bonuses, raises; with a less profitable company it could even mean job losses, so as a punishment it obviously works.

Fining a tax-funded outfit, though - what's the point? Ultimately, that just gets squeezed out of taxpayers' pockets one way or another - either council tax or other council charges will go up next year to pay it, or it'll be diverted away from something the taxpayers wanted, like car parks, road maintenance etc.

For this, where "the organisation" has *broken the law* and needs to be punished, surely fining the individuals - the prat who sent information to the wrong people, the manager who is supposed to be in charge of that mess, maybe the councillors themselves - would work much better? At £28k per incident, I'm sure fining the social worker, their line manager and the head of department £2.8k each would make very sure they don't do it again. Company directors can be held personally liable if a company breaks the law, so why not councillors?

Cross-border crimes

It's certainly *easier* to commit crimes across borders, but it's not new legally - mail fraud, abusive phone calls, sending someone death threats...

Across a land border, it's possible to have a more obvious crime: quite easy to imagine shooting somebody on the far side of a border, such as that between England and Wales. Apparently it isn't clear cut either way: they'd look at the circumstances (if it was part of the getaway from a bank robbery in Wales, for example, it makes more sense to bring all the charges there), location of witnesses, things like that.

From the charges, it seems McKinnon took out the Domain Controllers in a big NT domain, probably trying to cover his tracks.

Jack of Kent's analysis was very thorough and even-handed, I felt, as well as informative: anyone who hasn't already done so should go and read it through to the final conclusion before commenting.