Most of Europe wanted to make businesses ask permission from consumers before sending them email but our representative Michael Cashman persuaded them that it would be better to make consumers “opt out”. That said, I have looked at what I believe is the relevant document
and I can’t see that anything important has changed. It could be that one of the other documents listed contains the sinister amendment. The reporter says that the information was sourced from Michael Cashman’s office and from EuroISPA, so I guess we’ll just have to see how things pan out.porn made amateurnext porn star hot americassexual degree 2nd assaultamateur homemade mpegs pornanime pics mature 3d sexvideo upload site amateur pornsharing porn amateuranalysis activity hazard Map

A plan to spend £100m ($140m) on producing a kind of digitised storehouse of cultural treasures from across the UK has apparently been shelved. Of course I like the idea of such a dramatic public interest project, but I am stunned that even a hugely ambitious site could possibly cost that much and I hope that the idea will return when the process of digitisation is less expensive and when there are enough people online in the UK to make it worthwhile.

Mathematician humour: “WARNING: Do NOT calculate Pi in binary. It is conjectured that this number is normal, meaning that it contains ALL finite bit strings…

“If you compute it, you will be guilty of:

* Copyright infringement (of all books, all short stories, all
newspapers, all magazines, all web sites, all music, all movies,
and all software, including the complete Windows source code)
…
* Possession of everyone’s SSN, everyone’s credit card numbers,
everyone’s PIN numbers, everyone’s unlisted phone numbers, and
everyone’s passwords
…
Also, your computer will contain all of the nastiest known computer
viruses. In fact, all of the nastiest POSSIBLE computer viruses.”

Wayne Marshall, who has been involved in development work in Africa, writes about his experiences. He has some important lessons to impart about building skills instead of parachuting in equipment and about the need to provide clean water before bandwidth in desperately poor regions.

I have my doubts about his belief that Linux is a suitable operating system to provide to needy Africans, however. It may be “ideologically pure” and, more importantly, useful on low-spec systems, but I imagine that because it is still not fully user-friendly it may be difficult to train non-computer literate (or indeed semi-literate) people to use. I also worry about whether the skills Linux users learn will continue to be useful once they have to inter-operate with the wider world of Windows PCs.

whodoivotefor A good idea badly done – answer questions about your policy views and it will tell you how you “should” vote in the upcoming UK general election, but I don’t feel the questions were well-chosen. Does anyone know a better questionnaire?