HN user
Although those numbers only really apply to London. Average property prices are much lower elsewhere. Average detached house in the north of England is £249,382, Wales is £220,330... (source http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/in_depth/uk_house_pric...)
One thing you should probably watch out for in all this is that you've used your real name and your website is personally identifiable. Depending on the Laws in your jurisdiction, what you've done (getting root on the phpfog server and accessing their twitter account) could be a criminal offence.
Indeed a quick look at Queenslands Cybercrime laws shows up
"The Queensland law introduced in 1997 uses the heading 'computer hacking and misuse' but the offence is defined as the use of a restricted computer without the consent of the computer's controller. A restricted computer is defined as one that requires a 'device, code or sequence of electronic impulses' to gain access. There is a penalty scale of two, five or 10 years maximum term of imprisonment depending on whether (1) an offender simply uses a computer, (2) causes detriment or damage, or gains or intends to gain a benefit, or (3) the detriment, damage or gain is valued at more than $5,000."
I'd agree with you in theory, it's pretty standard demand management, that the public sector picks up the slack when private sector demand is low.
the problem with a lot of governments, including the US, appears to be the other half of the equation, which is that when the private sector is doing well, the public sector should contract, in order to mitigate the effects of inflation.
What seemed to me to have happened in the last decade is that government costs expanded in the "good times" causing a deficit, and meaning that when the bad times came with the financial crash it's a lot more difficult for them to expand spending.
The other problem (although it doesn't apply as much to the US as other countries) is sovereign debt risk. Countries like the republic of Ireland absolutely have to cut expenditure as otherwise the bond markets see them as a real default risk and hike up the cost of their borrowing, so they have no real choice but to decrease government spending.
From what I've read of FireShepard, it's a really bad countermeasure. Basically as described it's doing a DoS attack on people using FireSheep, probably triggered by a coding error that could be fixed.
Two big problems
1) What if the DoS affects other parts of the infrastructure like the Wireless Access Point. Can't imagine hotspot owners will be too happy if people start doing this all the time.
2) False sense of security. Using FireShepard is unlikely to stop other means of getting access to the data (eg, kismet), it only stops FireSheep (for now).
There have been some interesting cases where fraudsters have hijacked facebook accounts and then used them for targeted phishing attacks.
One example of the attack http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/20/latest-facebook-scam-phishe...
In those cases the fraudsters have stolen the account completely and locked the original user out, but I guess it's that kind of attack + the information leakage aspect that could be a concern..
according to http://www.spotify.com/int/help/faq/availability/country-ava... Spotifys currently available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands
Of course they should probably escape any headers they get from the sites they pull the data from to avoid Cross-Site Scripting :) http://showmetheheaders.com/?q=www.mccune.org.uk