In Plain Sight

For Sale: The Details of 25 Million UK Child Benefit Claimants

I have two CD's that contain the personal details of 25 Million UK child benefit claimants.

The details include the personal information of 7.25 million claimants, 15.5 million children, including some who no longer qualify but whose family is claiming for a younger child, 2.25 million 'alternative payees' such as partners or carers, 3,000 'appointees' who claim the benefit under court instructions, 12,500 agents who claim the benefit on behalf of a third party.

I'm open to offers. How much are you prepared to pay?

Leopard Mail Bug

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New Leopard Bug - Sleep Mode

I want you to know first that Apple have really impressed me this year. Tiger has been the most robust implementation of Unix that I may have worked with in my entire career. This is what makes Leopard so much more disappointing.

Over the past year I have used sleep mode with good effect. When I have to move I simply shut the screen and relocate - sometimes leaving my Mac Book Pro in standby, on battery, in my bag, for many hours, confident that I would have a reasonable charge left when I reopened. Weeks have gone by without a need to reboot. This is very impressive.

But woe Leopard. Shut your laptop and it seems to crash while in sleep mode. Restart it by holding down the power key and after the Apple boot the screen goes black and there is high disk activity. I discovered that the black screen is simply that Leopard has dimmed the brightness right down to make the screen black. So Leopard may not actually has crashed after all. The white standby light doesn't appear to work either. Next time this happens to me I'll try just turning up the brightness and let you know.