I hacked a cheap WinCE-based Satnav and installed ScummVM onto it. Also, I made damn sure I didn't pay for my copy of Monkey Island... but I guess that's the pirate in me.

Yep, I set up a router for someone recently that was configured like this. The owner runs a Guest House so she could give one password for guests and another for her kids.

This obviously has benefits to society but comes at the cost of making your home network less secure - most routers don't separate the internet side of things from the home network side of things, so it's similar to allowing a person to connect their PC to your LAN socket. Any machines on your network are now visible to an attacker.

Science works in the opposite way to religion - skepticism and doubt are at the heart of the scientific method. Science is about coming up with a model or a theory to explain something, and then testing it and trying to prove it wrong. Most religions claim to know some divinely inspired truth which must not be questioned, and doubt and skepticism are seen as the enemies of religion - and quite rightly so. The level of "faith" required to accept a scientific finding is not comparable to the level of faith required to believe in religion. If a team of scientists conducts an experiment and comes up with a result then the experiment is analysed through peer review, and if possible the experiment is run again and again (often by different teams) to see if they get the same results or not.

DRM was never about the consumer. The only people who benefit from DRM are content providers. They use DRM as a way of unfairly controlling what you can do with the content you paid good money for.

Err, I don't like SP2 because I've personally witnessed it fuck up 2 PCs to the extent that they wouldn't even boot.

We had to use System Restore to go back. I don't have the time to find out what it is about the computers SP2 doesn't like. The service pack should just work. If there's something it doesnt like then we should have had a warning saying "Cannot install SP2 until you remove foo/bar"

Secondly, on the many machines I admin which do run SP2 okay, performance is definitely slower with SP2 installed.

As for your other moronic comments:

OSX is a far better OS than Windows (stability, security, ease of use, performance and general overall cleverness). And I don't own, nor have I ever owned, an Apple computer.

Windows 98 is faster and more secure than Windows XP. It's also has fewer features and is more unstable. Oh, and it doesn't look as pretty, if that's your bag. Maybe people are still running 98 because their computers are not fast enough to run XP? Or maybe they just use it because they have it, it works, and they can't afford £250 to buy Windows XP Professional for no good reason.

According to PC World Business here in the UK, a copy of XP Pro will set you back £210+VAT, whereas you can buy a brand new NEC PC, 256mb RAM, 40gig h/d, LAN, keyboard but no monitor WITH a copy of XP Home for £199+VAT.

Does that make any sense to you?

While I'm at it, go and look how much a full retail copy of MS Office costs these days. How does £350 sound?

The latest version of Knoppix runs from CD, and if you burn it to a CDRW you can even save your settings onto CD as you use it. It includes an OS, Open Office 2 Beta (excellent IMO), not to mention shitloads of free apps.

I like Windows and I tolerate MS Office but I do not think they justify the insanely high prices MS charges for them.