@bitslammer: surely it's fine if it's a synced and online service/technique (e.g. Evernote, Dropbox+your method, etc)

@Steve Jobs: You're voting for something you found terrible????

@GldRush98: The point is this does work because the locks in the real world aren't installed properly. I don't think I've ever seen one that wasn't installed horizontally and slack anywhere. Last time I was in a 5 star hotel it looked exactly like the video above.

@ddillman: plus there's inbuilt error correction.

@Jay Beezy: But likewise you can buy HDMI 1.4 cables for under a tenner. The point is that there's no reason to overspend on cabling no matter what it's for. (e.g. I've bought cables very cheaply to use in probe testing of nanoelectronic devices and had very little signal loss down to femtofarads and picoamps etc).

@Maave: Exactly, can't hurt to do couple of passes to make sure you've completely overwritten, but these people that advocate 15 passes etc are... well it's pointless. The info in the article on bad sectors not being overwritten etc is more important to concentrate on.

@abirdflew: That's not true at all. In the UK the law is similar to mentioned above. As long as you are party to the conversation you neither need permission nor need to even inform the other party/ies that you are recording the conversation. The only legality is what you do with the recording, you cannot divulge it…

@Maave: Just wanted to point out that NOONE has the technology to recover from a multiple pass overwrite. ALL methods of recovery are based on anything not overwritten. If a bit has been written to it's impossible to determine its' previous state despite the urban myth to the contrary.

@rexem: Most of the support of HTML5 against Flash seem to be based on a ten year old perception of Flash anyway (that Flash is just a web media player). Flash is far from perfect but even with a fully implemented HTML5 you can't even accomplish most of what we do at our company. Maybe possibly with combo of AJAX etc…

@chelsel: Even a full implementation of HTML5 can't do a fraction of what's possible with the Flash platform (which includes Flash, Actionscript, Flex, Air, Catalyst, AMF......). People seem to be stuck in the idea that "Flash" is simply a browser plugin. That would be true 5 plus years ago. But we're living in 2010…

@pnikkosis: Completely agree, if it's only using an LCD screen there's no way you can consider to be an e reader or have e reader functionality, any more than calling a monitor or TV an e-reader.

@enine: Never had much problem upgrading from one MS product to another. It's actually been upgrading of things like Firefox and Java that have broken things for me as a software developer and to this day have never been fixed (only solution is to use old versions which is pointless for testing purposes).

@tripplehelix: Believe me if you pack a gun there will be PLENTY of people waiting for you at declarations in any UK airport.

@psychiccheese: Yep, unless you've got a really really unusual surname you're going to be out of luck. I've used firstname@firstnamelastname.co.uk for a very long time now.

@moe52: Don't know about the US but here in the UK bypassing any form of copy protection is illegal. Although ours are such draconian laws even ripping CDs to MP3 is illegal and no kind of personal backup is allowed (unless it's a "computer program" without copy protection).

@Stephen De Rusett: Have to agree with you. I've even got OO installed in addition to MS Office but since Office 2007, Open Office has always seemed a generation behind. Also Open Office is only a small number of apps, whereas MS Office covers much more. Ones I use often are Outlook and Onenote which don't have…

Amazon's Universal Wishlist may be quite good but it's all a bit moot to many people here when it's US only.I've started looking at BoxedUp.com, seems to be best one at present to currently handle UK shopping. Wishpot has better features but those features aren't implemented just yet for UK.

@eien: lol, I remember a colleague telling me he once went to America and someone actually said to him in all seriousness "I didn't know they spoke English in England".

I voted for Wishpot as it seems so far to be the only dedicated wishlist tool committed to regional adaptation. Amazon certainly seem to have completely forgotten the world beyond American borders.

@tlianza: Thanks very much, don't get me wrong I think Wishpot has a lot of promise and I'm not giving up on it yet, especially if you're committed to rolling out the regional support.