So the plan is to charge the British consumer £5 billion over ten years in order to pay the entertainment industry £1.7 billion?

Either madness or bad statistics. Or maybe both.

(Note the comparison of a yearly figure of costs against a ten-year figure of industry "rewards" to hide the huge discrepancy. And the claimed £500 million sounds about right - the Office for National Statistics lists 18.3 million households, times £25 per year = £475 million. Allow for new subscribers and you get the £500 *per year*.)

Google currently has 21,200 references to the search "windows 7" "installation problems", but only 802 references to "ubuntu 9.10" "installation problems". [And altering the quotes or giving alternative strings also has Win7 outnumbering Ubuntu every time.]

Does this prove Windows 7 is harder to install than Ubuntu 9.10? Probably not, you really need to know the number of people trying to install either system.

But it does strongly suggest that the article is poorly researched and biased.

.. from Palo Alto research centre, who are not using it right now.

Which would be a much more meaningful name. Or don't people believe in "name follows function" any more?

Quite so. But that's not what Adam did, he made a *copy* and changed the data in the *copy*.

As John Lettice points out at the end of http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/09/id_cards_nir_tory_lib_plans/, the chip is intended to help detect tampering with the information printed on the card.

If you can make good forgeries of the card, then Adam's cloning lets you make the chip data match. But the reported Home Office statement is still factually correct, just not what it appears at first reading.

Anton Chuvakin makes a good point in http://chuvakin.blogspot.com/2009/07/more-on-kindlegate.html :-

"As a result, I suspect that the more stuff like "KindleGate" happens, the more the following perception (whether true or not!) will grow, strengthen and develop:

When you "BUY" digital content, you don't really BUY it - it is not really a PURCHASE.

THEREFORE

When you STEAL digital content, you don't really STEAL it - it is not really a CRIME.

Back in 1992, trials of the "112" number led to many false alarms, see http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13518280.400-cut-lines-led-to-phantom-calls.html.

"111" would be even more susceptible to line faults pulse-dialling the number.

(Badgers, as their setts could break the cables.)

From current information, doesn't ChromeOS look more like a competitor to instant-on Splashtop http://www.splashtop.com/ rather than Windows or Ubuntu NBR?

If there really is a tax or other protection on copyrighted work, it would seem reasonable to apply this to all copyrighted works. Working out how to divvy up the spoils could be "interesting". Surely that 700 MB download of Ubuntu must be worth at least 175 times that 4 MB MP3?

Has anyone tested extended use of a flatter keyboard for Repetitive Strain Injury? Still, I suppose the future court claim is one way to get your money back!

Try googling for "filetype:docx" (15,400 pages) and "filetype:odt" (45,000 pages).

Similarly "filetype:xlsx" gives 3340 pages and "filetype:ods" gives 9670 pages.

So ODF has about three times as many documents and spreadsheets as OOXML at present. Both are dwarfed by .doc (21,900,000 pages) and .xls (4,420,000 pages). As for the macro-enabled OOXML .docm and .xlsm there are less than 600 together.

Network Solutions *doesn't* protect the customer that was interested in the name. Anyone else can buy the domain name, but only from Network Solutions. So the only beneficiary is themselves.

They also put an "under construction" site on the domain. Great if you want to start a rumour - see http://microsoft-ubuntu.com for example. (And if you want to buy that, be Network Solution's guest.)