Rape & murder story complete with fitting ad:

Chick-Fil-A.

Say it out loud.

Let the games begin

Allowing non-ASCII will set off a few new waves of phishing as fraudsters rush to register "citibаnk.com" (the "a" is Cyrillic -- U+0430), yahоо (Cyrillc "o"s here: U+043E) and so on. First response will be browsers adding a warning box to let you know there are non-ASCII chars in the URL but most people will be completely oblivious to the danger.

Uploading larger files

WinRAR and the upload tool Microsoft offers in conjunction with the site. Beats clicking "Browse" for each of up to four files at a time.

Why not just block the fire exits and do a bit of arson?

Because killing one person and contaminating a couple hundred with radioactivity is considerably scarier than a plain old fire. The object isn't the number of deaths, it's the reaction to it. A fire in a theatre is sad; a little cæsium or polonium out in the Bad Guys' hands is scary as hell, never mind the fact that death due to the former scenario is much more likely and common than that due to the latter.

Honor of the 82nd?

The same division nailed for wanton prisoner abuse at Mercury base near Fallujah feels "dishounoured" because one of their members did something legal with his member. Up is down, black is white.

Hardly the first

I was one of those spotty yoots when I had my Atari 800 back in 1979. In 1980 I took a small piece of malware someone else wrote and turned it into a virus which would remain memory-resident and self-replicate. After formatting any diskette the victim inserted into the drive, it wrote a hidden file to infect any machine the disk was then used on. This was a payback for the people who were getting pirated software free and then turning around to sell it. I'm pretty sure I still have the source code for it somewhere.

German law my arse

What's considered "erotic" in the US and would get a picture tagged as "mature" is on display everywhere here in Krautreich. Naked girls aren't relegated to page three; they grace the front pages of our trashiest tabloid rags (e.g., Bild) and shining beacons of good journalism (Spiegel) alike. Newsagents have more melons on display than do greengrocers. Utter bollox.

Vaseline and solvents?

All it takes is a bit of acetone.

Geothermal? More likely hydro

Martin: in order to use geothermal power, you need sources which are near the users. In the US that only affects some 7 million people in western states (http://geoheat.oit.edu/colres.htm).

The big aluminum smelters are already in Iceland because the electricity's cheap, but most of the industrial juice isn't coming from geothermal but rather from hydro, and that requires massive dam projects, very unpopular with most folk there (see http://www.savingiceland.org/) since projects flood huge tracts of pristine land.

While the anti-<globalisation/industiralisation/capitalism> weenies will scream and shout and protest (by banging on makeshift drums and hippie-dancing), if Iceland starts getting server farms Net access would get a lot better, cheaper and more reliable, allowing a whole new service industry to grow.

Hardly altruistic

It's not just the propaganda value the Japanese don't want to give Greenpeace. If the whaler accepts Greenpeace's offer, Greenpeace can hand them a whopping bill as soon as they reach port for a "high seas rescue". The whaler would have no choice but to pay according to international maritime law.

The East Germans learned this the hard way in the 1970s when the West German "Hanseat" (which had been friendly with them for weeks while fishing near Greenland) offered to tow the East German "Brandenburg" to port after its nets got caught up in the screw. Once in port the friendly West German captain handed them a bill for 100,000 DM (West) for the "high seas rescue". (source: "Fänger & Gefangene", ©1983, 1987 Landolf Scherzer)

Restarting explorer.exe

Yes, killing the Explorer process and restarting it will work, but non-service icons in the System Tray will be gone and only re-appear after either restarting the machine or killing each program and restarting it. Some service icons may also not re-appear until the service is bounced.

I agree with the overall sentiment of the article. Programmers in general have a pretty cavalier and arrogant attitude about others' computers.