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In fairness, there are genuine improvements coming down the line. (Sorry...) These are at least partly driven by a desire not to look like idiots when a few million extra people are around for the Olympics later this year.

New trains with air-conditioning and a walk-through design, as used in underground networks such as those in Paris and Rome, have been rolling out for a year or so. They are replacing one line at a time and due to cover 40% of the network by 2015.

Also, a deal was announced just last week for Virgin Media to provide WiFi access on the London Underground during the 2012 Olympics, though it only covers station areas and not the trains themselves while they are in the tunnels. Its stated goal is to allow travellers to respond more quickly to disruption and avoid the busiest areas (which are almost certainly going to be flooded far beyond capacity at peak times during the Olympics, whatever happens).

The system is still nowhere near the level of, for example, the other European capitals I mentioned, though, and won't get there any time soon.

Treatment of white phosphorus and other chemical burn injuries at one burn center over a 51-year period. Fail.

If you're going to try to claim that White Phosphorous (AKA yellow phosphorous) doesn't burn by thermal action, you are fighting a losing battle.

I've highlighted the parts below that refer to heat producing chemical reactions (burning).

A review of chemical burns

Phosphorous is a waxy and translucent solid that undergoes spontaneous ignition on contact with air. Burns result from contact with either the solid or liquid form.

Spontaneous ignition results in rapid oxidation forming phosphorus pentoxide. This then combines with water to form phosphoric acid www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/wp.htm).

When phosphorus comes into contact with skin the resultant burn causes a painful, necrotic, yellow wound with a garlic-like odour. Particles of phosphorus embedded in the skin continue to
burn as part of an exothermic reaction until the products are removed.

Exothermic reaction

An exothermic reaction is a chemical reaction that releases energy in the form of light or heat.

Q&A: White phosphorus injuries

In its solid form, white phosphorus burns on contact with oxygen and can reach temperatures of 800C.

Your soy burger would be a cinder rather quickly at 800C, wouldn't it? What do you think happens to skin?

A youtube video helpful to understanding: Elementary Productions: White Phosphorus . Pay special attention starting at 1:38.

WP is used in weapons because it spontaneously ignites in air and burns very hot while producing large amounts of smoke.

The writer in the Guardian either doesn't know what he is talking about, or is lying for political purposes.

You seem to think you are fighting me, but you're not. You are fighting chemistry and a treaty with specific meanings. The fact that you and the Guardian don't like what is, doesn't change it.

WP, as used in weapons, causes thermal burns, not chemical burns. It is the difference between: burned by a chemical itself versus being burned by the heat of a chemical on fire. Stick your hand in a bucket of gasoline - are you burned by it? No. Light it on fire - now will you be burned? Yes. Change the bucket to hydrochloric acid. Try to light it on fire. Does it burn? No. Stick your hand in it. Will it burn you? Yes, badly.

Chemical burn

A chemical burn occurs when living tissue is exposed to a corrosive substance such as a strong acid or base. Chemical burns follow standard burn classification and may cause extensive tissue damage. The main types of irritant and/or corrosive products are: acids, bases, oxidizers, solvents, reducing agents and alkylants. Additionally, chemical burns can be caused by some types of chemical weapons e.g. vesicants such as mustard gas and Lewisite, or urticants such as phosgene oxime.

Chemical burns may:
- need no source of heat,
- occur immediately on contact,
- be extremely painful, or
- not be immediately evident or noticeable
- diffuse into tissue and damage structures under skin without immediately apparent damage to skin surface

Note that WP does not appear in the above. Why? Because WP produces thermal burns.

WP is not a chemical weapon as that term is generally understood. It is a chemical being used as a weapon because it burns.

Although you no doubt put great stock in the opinions of writers in the Guardian, the treaty is authoritative.

White phosphorus: weapon on the edge

The CWC is monitored by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, based in The Hague. Its spokesman Peter Kaiser was asked if WP was banned by the CWC and he had this to say:

"No it's not forbidden by the CWC if it is used within the context of a military application which does not require or does not intend to use the toxic properties of white phosphorus. White phosphorus is normally used to produce smoke, to camouflage movement.

"If that is the purpose for which the white phosphorus is used, then that is considered under the Convention legitimate use.

"If on the other hand the toxic properties of white phosphorus, the caustic properties, are specifically intended to be used as a weapon, that of course is prohibited, because the way the Convention is structured or the way it is in fact applied, any chemicals used against humans or animals that cause harm or death through the toxic properties of the chemical are considered chemical weapons."

Chemical warfare

Falklands War

Technically, the reported employment of tear gas by Argentine forces during the 1982 invasion of the Falkland Islands constitutes chemical warfare.[58] However, the tear gas grenades were employed as nonlethal weapons to avoid British casualties. The barrack buildings the weapons were used on proved to be deserted in any case. The British claim that more lethal, but legally-justifiable as they are not considered chemical weapons under the Chemical Weapons Convention, white phosphorus grenades were used.[59]

In summary, WP and Napalm are not chemical weapons as that term is understood. They are incendiary weapons, chemicals used as weapons because they burn (thermally).

Correction, I was able to find the original news reports of the allegations against him being dropped and then reinstated.

Einstein claimed to sleep up to 11 hours a night.

Many petrol (gas) stations in the UK already have these CCTV cameras to catch people driving off without paying.

The interesting part about this story is the mission creep and data unification - once the CCTVs are in place for company reasons, the government creates another application of the data for its own reasons. Not a new story - once the data exists somewhere, the drive to get access to it is much stronger.

This all helps to turn the UK into probably the most surveilled country in the world... see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8159141.stm for stats from 2009.

This petrol station initiative is probably tying into the nationwide UK network of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras in town centrese and virtually all major roads (not just motorways/freeways, but every "A road" too). Usually painted blue and on high poles, these capture and OCR the license plate of every vehicle that goes past. This feeds into a centralised data centre for queries, data mining, and real time alerts, for both criminal and terrorist investigations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police-enforced_ANPR_in_the_UK

There's nothing unreliable about DNA testing. They even employ controls to rule out laboratory contamination.

Of course, these controls are perfect:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-17324912

Note that while this guy was not convicted:
a/ His life was seriously fucked up
b/ The police only queried the test when he repeatedly insisted he had never been to Manchester, where the crime was committed. If he *had* been (innocently) to Manchester at around the 'right' time this would not have occurred.
c/ The lab initially denied there were any issues and insisted the match was correct, and the police proceeded to charge him based on this denial.
d/ the lab *later* confessed to the contamination

If it was not for d/, he would probably be banged up now, because the Jury know that "DNA is 100% reliable".
He was *incredibly* lucky that the lab confessed - they could easily have covered this up, and I believe most organizations would do just that and see an innocent man jailed rather than risk losing lucrative police work.

Also note they are now investigating to see if the same thing has already happened in previous cases and led to false convictions.

ALL DNA testing laws should at the very least require that the crime scene DNA is tested at a seperate lab to the samples taken from possible perpetrators. But that won't happen because it costs money, which outweighs justice any day (certainly in the UK at present).

Come 2013, when the US is mandated to support EMV, card skimming will be a thing of the past. Stick your card wherever you like, nobody can do anything with your bank account

These folks at Cambridge say the system needs an 'entire rewrite' to be secure. Is there data to refute them?

Arguably, the USA already has adopted the Greek model. That is to say, excessive overtime combined with low productivity, and resulting higher unemployment.

Facts, eh?

I suspect that is the actual motivation behind it all. They don't have the cycle infrastructure in place to tempt people off the roads, so they just price you off instead. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the homicidal bus drivers :)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17069235

Wouldn't be so bad if they actually reinvested the money in the infrastructure. Between road licence fund, fuel tax and fines the government collects a hell of a lot of money from the motorists. But the roads are still in a poor state of repair (between the pot-holes, dodgy patching of the blacktop, and speed humps, driving around is pretty unpleasant. I've been informed by garages that they are replacing a lot more suspension components these days. Also, people with back problems can be put in real pain by driving over any of these things). And the provision for cyclists is still terrible. And public transport is still useless (unless I book over 2 weeks in advance, taking the train pretty much anywhere is far more expensive than taking the car, far more time consuming and also leads to problems like how to get to/from the station given that the bus service doesn't run at useful times).

I recently looked at the price of getting from Swansea to Scarborough on train, booking 3 weeks in advance. The round trip was £280 (cattle class) or £630 (first class). It amazes me that anyone would pay that - I could _fly_ there for less! A few years ago I thought that it might be nice to do a weekend ski trip to scotland and looked at the price of catching the sleeper on the friday and sunday nights - it would've been far cheaper to just fly out to the alps.

FWIW, the local bus service runs fairly irregularly (it'd usually be quicker for me to walk to the station from home rather than walk down to the bus stop, wait an hour for the bus, then walk from the middle of the city centre to the station), and not at all on Sunday (and since for weekend trips I'd usually be returning home on Sunday, this makes using public transport pretty downright inconvenient)

In other news, the Kremlin has finally allowed a display of the "degenerate" art of Henry Moore.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17365978

It's the PR Curtain. Putin needs progressive items in the headlines to counterbalance the protests. Russians on the moon and Henry Moore in the Kremlin are hollow trivialities. There is nothing good to actually report to Russians, even with only state-controlled media left standing.

Even the traditionally-safe winter's fair of hosting the Olympics looks like it's going to be a PR fiasco for Putin's clique. So heck yeah, "We're going to the Moon!" has been trotted out. They're desperate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Winter_Olympics#Concerns_and_controversies

GP is taking us off-topic, but to continue in this vein and explain the reference:

Major coach crash in Swizerland on Wednesday night. Many children killed, many more injured.

for details, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17362643

I suspect that is the actual motivation behind it all. They don't have the cycle infrastructure in place to tempt people off the roads, so they just price you off instead. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the homicidal bus drivers :)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17069235

Your post would have been considerably shortened if you had simply summarized it as the US fought Communism around the globe. That is why so many countries are free today. It is a good thing too or else the bloody, oppressive march of communism would have continued. Contrary to what you wrote, Communism was a world wide conspiracy, and a bloody one at that. Sadly I don't have enough time at the moment to correct all of the twisted renderings of facts in your post, as it would be a Herculean task. I think just comparing the history of the Berlin Wall to what you wrote might give a sense of how twisted the history you give is.

More information about: The Berlin Wall

Before the Wall's erection, 3.5 million East Germans circumvented Eastern Bloc emigration restrictions and defected from the GDR, many by crossing over the border from East Berlin into West Berlin, from where they could then travel to West Germany and other Western European countries. Between 1961 and 1989, the wall prevented almost all such emigration. During this period, around 5,000 people attempted to escape over the wall, with estimates of the resulting death toll varying between

And lets provide some background material:

Communism killed ~ 100,000,000 people in the last 100 years.

Why Doesn't Communism Have as Bad a Name as Nazism?

What Were Their Crimes?

Have you ever been late to work?

In the Stalin era, a person who arrived late to work three times could be sent to the Gulag for three years.

Have you ever told a joke about a government official?

In the Stalin era, many were sent to the Gulag for up to 25 years for telling an innocent joke about a Communist Party official.

If your family was starving, would you take a few potatoes left in a field after harvest?

In the Stalin era, a person could be sent to the Gulag for up to ten years for such petty theft.

Living in the Gulag

Some claim that the US is militarist, but it has no custom like the annual military parade through Red Square.
Soviet Military Parade 1984

Stalin World - Lithuania

The KGB Museum - (the Museum of Genocide Victims)

The Soviet Union conquered Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia and annexed them. At the ends of WW2 it took part of Poland as its own territory. The Soviets turned the governments of East Germany, Poland, Romania, Hungary, and the rest of Eastern Europe into not merely client states, but puppet states.

Revelations from the Russian Archives - UKRAINIAN FAMINE

The dreadful famine that engulfed Ukraine, the northern Caucasus, and the lower Volga River area in 1932-1933 was the result of Joseph Stalin's policy of forced collectivization. The heaviest losses occurred in Ukraine, which had been the most productive agricultural area of the Soviet Union. Stalin was determined to crush all vestiges of Ukrainian nationalism. Thus, the famine was accompanied by a devastating purge of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the Ukrainian Communist party itself. The famine broke the peasants' will to resist collectivization and left Ukraine politically, socially, and psychologically traumatized.

The policy of all-out collectivization instituted by Stalin in 1929 to finance industri

OH NOES! IRAN THREATENS US AND UK!!!!

You should probably change the title of your post to, "Iran threatens its neighbors, Europe, the US, and some other country they want to remove from the pages of history." You didn't post anything about how convenient those the US bases in nearby countries make Iranian or Iranian backed attacks against US forces performing missions in those other countries. Also, I notice that Iranian bases and activities aren't depicted on the map - I suppose that would challenge the narrative of "poor little Iran". I will also note that this post is barely skimming the surface of Iran's activities. For instance, it doesn't cover much of anything about Iran's activities in Syria, where it is helping prop up the current regime, or Lebanon, where its proxy Hezbollah is virtually a state within a state, and armed with 50,000 rockets to attack Israel.

Gulf States on Arms Buying Binge to Counter Iran Threat

Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf monarchies are buying huge amounts of advanced arms from the United States and Europe. The weaponry is clearly aimed to counter the growing threat they see coming from Iran.

The United States alone has around $100 billion in potential sales in the pipeline right now. The biggest is a Saudi deal, initiated in 2010 and approved by Congress, totaling around $60 billion. The package includes jets, helicopters, hundreds of Harpoon anti-ship missiles, training, and logistical services. Israel, initially worried about the sale, agreed — after U.S. assurances — to support it in September

Iran Threatens To 'Freeze' Europe for Backing Sanctions - First Publish: 2/28/2010

Brigadier-General Hossein Salami of Iran's Revolutionary Guard warned Sunday that Iran has the power to cut Europe's energy supply. The warning was issued as European leaders prepared to debate sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program.

"Iran sits on 50 percent of the world's energy, and if it wants, Europe will spend the winter in the cold,” Salami told Iranian troops in the city of Kerman. His speech was published by the Iranian Fars news agency.

Iran threatens to block Strait of Hormuz oil route

Iran threatens US Navy over Gulf activity - Warns US aircraft carrier not to return to Gulf waters

Iran Threatens Two More Naval Chokepoints - In addition to the Strait of Hormuz.

Considerable attention is being given to Iranian threats to block the Strait of Hormuz, through which a large proportion of the world’s petroleum sails. The U.S Energy Information Administration estimates that “almost 17 million barrels in 2011, up from between 15.5-16.0 million bbl/d in 2009-2010,” sails past Iranian gun and missile emplacements along the coast, mine-laying ships, and Revolutionary Guard fast boats. In 2011, that amounted to “roughly 35 percent of all seaborne traded oil, or almost 20 percent of oil traded worldwide.”

Yet the recent visit of two Iranian naval vessels to the Saudi Red Sea port of Jeddah should draw attention to two more vital naval chokepoints—the Bab el Mandeb Strait at the southern tip of the Red Sea, and the Suez Canal located between the northern tip of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. (See this map.) More than three million barrels of oil pass through the Bab el Mandeb every day on the way to the Suez Canal and the SUMED (Suez-Mediterranean) pipeline used by tankers that are too big to traverse the Can

On this we strongly agree; would that it were not so. I think we've caused more humans living on this planet to suffer in real terms through our actions.

You are so desperately wrong.

Communism kill 100,000,000 people.

The Gruesome Consequences of a Political Idea

In his introduction, Stephane Courtois himself a former communist, breaks with the postwar taboo on comparing the Gulag with the Holocaust. He notes that the communist body count of more than 100 million exceeds that of the Nazis. He compares the "class genocide" of communism with the "race genocide" of Nazism and states that both were "crimes against humanity."
So controversial was this comparison that two of Mr. Courtois's editor-collaborators--Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin--later distanced themselves from what he wrote. And predictably, the French left lashed itself into a frenzy, denouncing the book's contributors for traducing the noble communist fight against fascism.

Why Doesn't Communism Have as Bad a Name as Nazism?

Q&A: Greek debt crisis

Why is Greece in trouble?

Greece has been living beyond its means since even before it joined the euro. After it adopted the euro, public spending soared and public sector wages practically doubled.

However, while money has flowed out of the government's coffers, its income has been hit by widespread tax evasion.

When the global financial downturn hit, Greece was ill-prepared to cope.

If you're going to haul a metric shitload of dope across the country, make sure all your lights work and stay close to the speed limit!

And make sure you don't get stuck in a tunnel!

.

Wonder if Game Group's problems are related to this. As the UK's biggest high street game retailer the decline in console and PC games on disk can't be doing much for its income.

Wildlife photography is not a new thing, but this is a shitty tool for it.

Brazil already imports Efavirenz from India. Efavirenz is the anti-HIV drug that the Brazilian government compulsorily licensed.

average life expectancy according to an article on the BBC is extended by only 3 months -

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8367614.stm

with results like that, you have to overcharge like hell to get your money cause the patients will only be around three more months than usual if they weren't taking the drug -

but if you're desperate and dying anyways, why not blow 2 months salary on a 120 day supply, right? And yet, I have no sympathy for the drug companies - I wonder why....could it be their way of using lawsuits to keep generics off the market for a few extra years while they re-release a "timed" version of their product?

Drug companies are vultures - and I'd love to see more university/public funding of this research for the public interest and less for the profit motive - especially when lives are at stake

This was my turning point:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-15577818

Why reinvent the wheel? Let's just figure out what Finland is doing right and copy it. We'd be all the better for it.

Even if eventually Google takes PayPal's place as the big, evil payment company? What the hell are you going to do to escape it when the company controlling the entire Internet is evil and now in charge of the payment system too?

How does that have anything to do with anything? They're going to do something extra evil with the payment system because they have a big search engine? Your question boils down to "what will you do when the payment processor is evil." Except that it already is. Paypal is more evil than Google could even pretend to be. I mean for fuck's sake, they're a payment processor that steals users' money at random. How much worse could it possibly get?

On top of that, the amount of public scrutiny Google is under is so far in excess of what Paypal is that they can't get away with doing anything evil. I mean look at the stuff they've been doing lately that isn't even remotely evil but everyone is dumping on them (mostly because of this and this).

And if you did, you'd be foolish, because the way to discover someone's intentions and motivations is not to ask them, but to observe what they actually do. Google is on an evil path.

Do you want to provide some actual examples? Like something more specific than "their marketing sucks" or "Rupert Murdoch's The Wall Street Journal doesn't like their new privacy policy"?

No, you misread what he said. What he actually said was he wants to be able to transfer money from his bank to another bank directly, using a simple plastic card, rather than having to go through every Guido and Ese who wants his cut. In Europe bank to bank transfers are easy and common. In the U.S. it's expensive and a hassle.

That's correct, but the failure is not on the part of Google, it's on the part of U.S. banks.

I think also the thing to keep in mind is that all the major U.S. banks share ownership of Visa and MasterCard. They don't want to cut out the middle man; they are the middle man.

For the large number of people posting here about how this will just turn alcoholics into LSD addicts, read some actual research. This article and the linked to study within is a good place to start: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11660210

Not only is LSD not addictive, it is among the safest recreational drugs known.

I've never tried it, and it isn't entirely without risks (what is?), but there really doesn't seem to be much reason to be scared of it relative to most other drugs. If it really helps with alcoholism, using it for treating that addiction would probably be a great thing both for alcoholics and society.

This paper is as close to marketing as science ever comes. The use of the words 'NP-Hard' and "video games" were chosen specifically because they sound impressive, not because they've shown anything useful. They came up with some way to connect those two words in a paper (by morphing Mario, and defining it in a way that never entered any cartridge. If you have a finite number of paths through Mario in an arbitrarily large map, and some choices make the game impossible to beat because you get stuck, then yes you have an NP-Hard search problem. But there is no Mario level like that, and never will be because it would be boring).

It also fulfills the other requirement of marketing, that it makes me feel dumber after reading. This super-annoying movie comes very close to showing the method used in this proof. It solves a problem that no gamer would ever face, and no level designer would ever face either, unless his method was to randomly drop blocks on the screen, rearrange them into chunks of which some are impossible to pass, and then rearrange those randomly. Can you see how this has absolutely nothing to do with the game we call Super Mario Bros?

In other words, the authors saw the attention people got for using the word "NP-Hard" in relation to Tetris (look! Made it on BBC!), and though "wow, maybe if we use the word NP-Hard in relation to Super Mario Bros, we can get on the BBC too!

There is absolutely nothing novel about this result, and in fact, it might be a homework problem you would give to students in an undergraduate class on computer theory. Given the right introduction, the students could easily do it. It is a blatant attention whore attempt.

And when I say handling I mean holding with bare hands, no gloves, no precautions to protect the document taken. When so-called experts are treating documents of historic importance with such contempt, is it any surprise that we have so few remaining paper documents from any more than 500 years ago? They have to survive sunlight, damp, war, flood, accidental damage, fire, leaks, uprisings and human stupidity. Considering that, it's amazing we have any left, actually.

Of course the key consideration is backup. The standard method of backup of books these days is electronic. The Library at the British Museum has digitized most of its collection now. Slashdot loves to trash google over its scan of thousands of books; whilst the copyright ownership issues leave a lot to be desired, if just one important work is saved because Google scanned it then there will have been an upside.

Then it is now. For that matter, that kind of data rate is going to seriously screw with many existing LAN and cluster fabrics - very few are designed to support that kind of on-the-wire rate. You'd need awe-inspiring hardware filtering and buffering to be able to convert between speeds on one side and speeds on the other. (The value would be that you could build one hell of a "fat tree" network if a single fibre is enough to guarantee that the total bandwidth of 20 downstream nodes is equal to the total upstream bandwidth.)

Combine that with this story - a single channel rate of 400 Gbps (512 Gbps including error-correction) over very long distances. (Wikipedia says 128 channels per fibre is available.)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17271797

That's 50 terabits per second, multiplexed. Since they're using older, clunkier technology to handle the lasers than this chip, the throughput that is technically possible will logically be much greater -- with the system for doing so being smaller and more energy-efficient.

Dr Zheng Cui (Wake Forest University of Medicine in North Carolina) discovered that human innate immune system is very effective at killing a wide range of cancer cells. About 15-40% of human population is naturally cancer resistant. Granulocytes kill 97% of injected cancer cells within 24 hours.
The most important discovery is that such cancer resistance can be transferred via simple blood transfusion. Here are some articles:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7003019.stm
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/12/granulocyte-infusion-therapy-spreading-into-clinics-beyond-the-us.php

Few human patient clinical trials are in progress right now:
http://www.bmscti.org/cancerpatients.htm
http://liftcancertreatmenttrial.com/scientific-background/previous-studies-in-humans
http://www.novacellsinstitute.com/

And there are some exciting news about patients with 'cancer in full remission':
http://www.novacellsinstitute.com/articles/Beating%20Cancer%20-%20New%20Form%20of%20Immune%20Therapy%20is%20Working%20-%20for%20NOVA%20CELLS%20website.pdf

Having tried a lot of different approaches to writing press releases, we've found that what works best for us in the UK is to issue short press releases like this one within moments of news breaking, and to make one short point, that is sensible, moderate, and very difficult to argue with.

This particular release might not go down so well with the slashdot crowd, but it achieved our objective of getting on to the front page of the BBC news site ( see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17270817 ) with a strong, well argued message that doesn't paint us as alarmist, aggressive, or irrational. We did go on to say "Threats to chuck entire households off the web will be bad for the economy, bad for society - and for us as a creative nation too.", (just as you suggest) but we're always at the mercy of editors who, as I think this proves, often cut out most of what we actually say.

At this early stage in the Party's development, getting press coverage is tough, especially because we're don't fit the preconceptions the press have of loony people with eye patches. This particular story gave us a big headache, the verdict was actually on a fairly small portion of the act that referred to ISP costs, and the question of parts of the Act that should have been notified to the European Commission under the Technical Standards Directive and weren't possibly rendering them unenforceable. The full verdict was likely to be several hundred paragraphs of dense legalese, and crucially, there is usually a delay of several hours between the press reporting the yes/no verdict and any of the court's reasoning being available for us to read.

We've found that waiting for the reasoning means we can put out strong, detailed press releases with point-by-point demolitions of our opponents messages... that don't get picked up on by the press. Simlarly, rants full of venom and references to chilling effects don't go down very well either, partly because the UK doesn't have the same constitutional devotion to free speech that the US does, and therefore 'chilling effect? so what' is usually the public's attitude, but mostly because nobody quotes them except for the Register.

Ideally, I'd love to come up with something like HeadOfLegal's analysis (see http://www.headoflegal.com/2012/03/06/bt-talktalk-v-business-secretary/ ) and get it quoted, but realistically, no mainstream journalist is going to read, digest, summarise and quote something like that in the few minutes they have to get the story online. Print journalism is a different matter, as the deadlines are longer, but we've found that if the BBC website quotes us, then we get interview requests where we can go into more detail.

On this particular story, an appeal on a small part of the bill, followups were actually not that likely if the verdict went against the ISPs. There isn't really much in the verdict that's actually interesting to the general public to be honest. We knew that the press coverage would therefore be vague (hence the understandable impression you got that 'we lost the case' because the damage to the public wasn't highlighted, when it was actually two piracy-neutral ISPs that lost a cost-splitting debate over an obscure point of EC procedure), and that on past form the quotes from the copyright lobbyists would be emotional rants with little basis in reality. If you look at the BBC story from the point of view of a neutral observer, we got a much bigger quote than the pro-copyright lobby did, and we come across as more rational and less scare-mongering. For a bunch of unpaid amateurs taking on the might of the copyright lobby, I think we actually did pretty well this time.

I've heard the stories and then saw this BBC show or something about a family that had to live with 80 gadgets, and i was sorta amazed how the the two boys just sat there and figured shit out.

I had the same reaction. Oddly enough, it was the "salesman" teaching the boy a few of the basics of programming that convinced the family to select the BBC Micro over the ZX Spectrum! Later in the episode, the boy brings a friend home from school to play at writing computer programs. (Both kids are eagerly searching the manual!).

That's something we've lost in this modern age. That blinking cursor just invited you to create. Even today, it can spark a child's imagination; the novelty of the home computer in the 80's doesn't seem to enter in to it at all.

For anyone interested, the program was called Electric Dreams and took the family through the 70's 80's and 90's one day at a time. The segment with the micro is from the 80's and can be found on youtube.

'Lulzsec hackers' arrested in international swoop
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17270822

Can't we cite a more respectable source for chrissakes?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17270822
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/03/06/hector-xavier-monsegur-fbi-lulzsec-arrests_n_1323638.html?ref=uk

WAIT! It's a story from Fox News.

BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17270822
Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/06/cyber-arrests-idUSL2E8E62WV20120306

Of course that sort of glosses over the assistance the US provided the UK prior to entering the war as well.

You mean assistance like loaning money, loans that were only paid off a few years ago? Or perhaps assistance like allowing British nuclear physicists to work on the Manhattan Project, and then not allowing them to share any of the results with the UK after the war?

When I wrote "prior to entering the war" I meant "prior to entering the war', so the reference was to the US Lend-Lease act of 1940 and the provision of 50 destroyers to the UK and Canada. That was helpful in preventing the UK from being starved into submission by submarine warfare.

This followed the 1940 Destroyers for Bases Agreement, whereby 50 USN destroyers were transferred to the Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy in exchange for basing rights in the Caribbean. Churchill also granted the US base rights in Bermuda and Newfoundland gratis, allowing British military assets to be redeployed.[13]

A total of $50.1 billion (equivalent to $647 billion today) worth of supplies were shipped: $31.4 billion to Britain, $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union, $3.2 billion to France, and $1.6 billion to China. Reverse Lend-Lease comprised services such as rent on air bases that went to the U.S., and totaled $7.8 billion; of this, $6.8 billion came from the British and the Commonwealth. The terms of the agreement provided that the materiel were to be used until time for their return or destruction. Supplies after the termination date were sold to Britain at a discount for £1.075 billion using long-term loans from the U.S. Canada operated a similar program that sent $4.7 billion in supplies to the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union.[2] The United States did not charge for aid supplied under this legislation.

You are quite wrong about the loans, the terms were quite generous: What's a little debt between friends?

The British Mission

With the resumption of cooperation, the first task was an updating one. The British handed over a pile of reports on the progress of their work, and General Groves supplied a copy of the progress report he had just submitted to the President. The British were amazed by the progress made in America and staggered by the scale of the American effort: the estimate of the total project cost was already in excess of one thousand million dollars compared with the British expenditure in 1943 of only about half a million pounds. Chadwick was in no doubt that the first duty of the British was to assist the Americans with their project and abandon all ideas of a wartime project in England. He concluded that this would best be achieved by sending British scientists to work in the United States. . . .

Whatever the variations in the opinions of the British contributions to the Manhattan Project, there is no dispute that their participation benefited the British considerably. The course of the British nuclear programme in the postwar period would have been very different had it not been for the wartime collaboration. While United States law prohibited international cooperation on nuclear weapon design, the British were able to undertake a successful independent nuclear weapons programme, which, despite its small scale relative to that of the American programme, succeeded in elucidating all the essential principles of both fission and thermonuclear warheads and in producing an operational nuclear weapons capability. When the two countries came together again in 1958, following a critical amendment to the 1954 United States Atomic Energy Act, the developments in nuclear weapons technology over the previous eleven years were found to be remarkably s

It has to be said, assistance that we actually only stopped repaying the US for a couple of years ago - that assistance was most certainly not free, it was infact very costly.

Sorry, but no. The fact is that the terms were quite generous.

What's a little debt between friends?

On 31 December, the UK will make a payment of about $83m (£45.5m) to the US and so discharge the last of its loans from World War II from its transatlantic ally.

It is hard from a modern viewpoint to appreciate the astronomical costs and economic damage caused by this conflict. In 1945, Britain badly needed money to pay for reconstruction and also to import food for a nation worn down after years of rationing.

"In a nutshell, everything we got from America in World War II was free," says economic historian Professor Mark Harrison, of Warwick University.

"The loan was really to help Britain through the consequences of post-war adjustment, rather than the war itself. This position was different from World War I, where money was lent for the war effort itself." . . .

Britain had spent a great deal of money at the beginning of the war, under the US cash-and-carry scheme, which saw straight payments for materiel. There was also trading of territory for equipment on terms that have attracted much criticism in the years since. By 1941, Britain was in a parlous financial state and Lend-Lease was eventually introduced.

The post-war loan was part-driven by the Americans' termination of the scheme. Under the programme, the US had effectively donated equipment for the war effort, but anything left over in Britain at the end of hostilities and still needed would have to be paid for.

But the price would please a bargain hunter - the US only wanted one-tenth of the production cost of the equipment and would lend the money to pay for it. . . . .

But the terms of the loan were extremely generous, with a fixed interest rate of 2% making it considerably less terrifying than a typical mortgage. . . . .

Yet for Dr Tim Leunig, lecturer in economic history at the LSE, it's no surprise that the UK chose to keep this low-interest loan going rather than pay it off early.

"Nobody pays off their student loan early, unless they are a nutter. Even if you've got the money to pay it off early, you should just put it in a bank and pocket the interest."

And if it seems strange to the non-economist that WWII debts are still knocking around after 60 years, there are debts that predate the Napoleonic wars. Dr Leunig says the government is still paying out on these "consol" bonds, because it is better value for taxpayers to keep paying the 2.5% interest than to buy back the bonds.

Germany ends World War One reparations after 92 years with £59m final payment

Not all of Parchin was inspected, specifically not the building alleged to be doing the nuclear research. That part of Parchin was not on the tour. To this day Iran is playing games with inspections of that facility, refusing IAEA and UN inspectors full access. Because parchin has not been inspected fully, you can't possibly claim there has never been any nuclear testing done there.

The solution is simple: use PDFs of public domain textbooks. If you like, order a cheap bound copy of the PDF to be made.

Basic math hasn't changed much in a century, and there are numerous old textbooks out there that are generally proofread better than modern textbooks. I have found the problems are often better structured and designed as well.

This is a perfectly reasonable idea, but it would require massive legislative change to implement it in K-12 education, and that legislative change isn't going to happen because of lobbying by textbook publishers.

As a random example, the California Education Code contains the following:

When adopting instructional materials for use in the schools, governing boards shall include only instructional materials which, in their determination, accurately portray the cultural and racial diversity of our society, including: (a) The contributions of both men and women in all types of roles, including professional, vocational, and executive roles. (b) The role and contributions of Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, European Americans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans, persons with disabilities, and members of other ethnic and cultural groups to the total development of California and the United States.

It doesn't specifically say that pictures of kids in a math textbook have to include pictures of kids in wheelchairs, but it's a specific example of the extremely tight regulatory environment for textbooks. Another good example is that state law allows a school to pay $200 for a textbook, but does not allow it to spend $10 at Kinko's to print out a paper copy of a free digital textbook. When Governor Schwarzenegger started his Free Digital Textbook Initiative, one of the big obstacles was the state bureaucracy involved in textbook selection. They tried to streamline the process, but basically the initiative seems to have been a total failure.

I'm the author of some free online physics textbooks. They're written for the college level, but I have quite a few adoptions from high schools as well. Virtually all of those are from private schools, especially Catholic schools.

It's certainly true that algebra and calculus don't change very much over time. However, the public education system in my state, including both K-12 and the state college and university systems, has general rules that forbid us from using old textbooks. That makes a lot of sense, as a matter of fact, for physics, history, etc. There is no exception written into these requirements for math. In any case, if you look at the catalog in my sig, you'll see that there is not any shortage of high-quality free textbooks for math that are recent. There's no real need to use old public-domain math books rather than modern, free ones.

It could be that key information or steps are missing

Entire exams have been ruined by incorrect questions. Apparently, being a mathematician is not a hard requirement for creating an exam.

FTFY.

It could be that key information or steps are missing

Entire exams have been ruined by incorrect questions. Apparently, reading and writing is not a hard requirement for being a mathematician.

It has alaways been like that. I can remember back in the 70s we were given a previous year's GCE A-level paper for homework. There was one question that we all decided was impossible. The teacher agreed, but we had one genius in the class (who later got a full scholarship to Cambridge) who said "Sir there is a solution in terms of sets using number theory" and then wrote some stuff up that none of us understood.

It could be that key information or steps are missing

Entire exams have been ruined by incorrect questions. Apparently, reading and writing is not a hard requirement for being a mathematician.

Really... How would regulating this be any different than banning steroids in professional sports?

O.K. Apologies for being a little over-dramatic, but there are some parallels I'd like to point out.

1) Who makes the ban. In the case of professional sports, the ban comes from the professional sports organizations themselves and the fans. For your example, it comes from government.

I'm with you, this shouldn't be government business, even though it was very popular with Congress and President Bush recently. A responsible industry should handle it themselves --Spain is a good example.

2) Who is affected. Professional athletes only or everyone who wants to advertise a product or even parody an advertisement of a product.

See above. Professional models --and, as in sports, their impressionable fans/followers.

3) Harm to society. In the former case, athletes are being forced not to engage in a chemical arms race. Small number of people by a private group. Not much harm. In the thin model case, government is trying to change how society thinks and behaves through government force. Huge immediate harm. To be very blunt here, I do not think saving the lives of a few thousand women a year is worth the harm inflicted by this ban.

I think the alleged point of the congressional hearings and media flap on steroids in pro baseball was that it encouraged the acceptance of steroid use by young athletes. It seemed more people were having a "think-of-the-children" moment than displaying genuine concern for the plight of professional ball players.

And I am not surprised that you are unconcerned with the deaths of thousands of women.

4) Precedence. I know some people don't believe in the existence of the slippery slope, but it does remain that private groups imposing behavior restrictions on voluntary members or employees is nothing new. But once we have a ban on certain human behavior and communication due to one disease, that forms a precedent for the government to impose further bans for other tenuous health or public welfare excuses. A ban would also reward the doctors and organizations that advocated for it and empower them. I'd rather they be punished via marginalization for even daring to suggest just a vile scheme.

The political balance between regulation and freedom is tricky --and the first 100 tries usually fail. But if we didn't try, lawful civilization wouldn't exist. The fact we're not all paying over 90% in taxes is a thorough debunking of the slippery slope. The pendulum of human affairs always swings back when it's gone too far.

5) Potential for abuse. In addition to creating a negative precedent on crucial human activities, it also creates a huge avenue of abuse for government to impose its will on businesses and non-profits that advertise. It's an lever for coercion of government whim over a business or charity. It's another means for one business to gain advantage over another through more rigorous enforcement of the ban on the latter.

Again, I think we agree, ideally this should be the business and responsibility of the fashion industry, not government, to stop encouraging (sometimes demanding?) unhealthy behavior.

How would regulating this be any different than banning steroids in professional sports?

Because regulating drugs is rather different than regulating the display of photographs of clothed people based on their body type?

Sure, I'd agree it's significantly different, but at the root of it, it's a public health issue --and that's supposedly why pointy-headed politicians got all bent about steroids in baseball. The welfare of the professional players wasn't as much of a consideration as the message it sent aspiring young athletes. Both problems hinge on behaviors that are heavily influenced by culture.

Can you imagine having to submit every fashion photo to some government committee, which would then argue over whether each model was appropriately non-skinny?

No, nothing that ridiculous, but I can imagine something similar to what already happened with Spain's fashionistas. I don't think it's absurd at all to ask an industry to NOT encourage unhealthy employee behaviors.

. . . like what happened with all those Moon rocks that they "can't find": http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16909592 .

Towards the end of the Apollo 17 mission on 13 December 1972, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt - the last men to have set foot on the Moon - picked up a rock. President Richard Nixon ordered that the brick-sized rock be broken up into fragments and sent to 135 foreign heads of state and the 50 US states. Each "goodwill Moon rock" was encased in a lucite ball and mounted on a wooden plaque with the recipient nations' flag attached. There were 370 pieces gathered for this purpose from the two missions. Two hundred and seventy were given to nations of the world and 100 to the 50 US states. But 184 of these are lost, stolen or unaccounted for - 160 around the world and 24 in the US.

Pretty damn expensive novelty gifts. Couldn't we have given them "Pet Rocks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_rock instead?

Oh, and maybe there is some kind of life in that Mars soil, that we don't understand. So bringing it back, and spreading it around the world would be an absolutely grand idea.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5341202.stm

1 barrel of crude oil makes 19.5 gallons of gas, so 0.016 barrel/day/person consumption rate in the EU = about .36 gallons of gas per day and 0.033 barrels/day/person consumption rate in the USA = about .64 gallons of gas per day. With a Toyota Prius at 50 mpg that makes for a round trip limit of 32 miles in the USA and 16 miles in the EU. If a Prius is hypermiled it can get about 60 mpg. However, the average light duty vehicles in the USA get about 24 mpg so that means if the USA tried to match the EU levels we are all going to be living a lot closer together... I better stock up on body deoderant..

I think that analysis is much too simplistic to be able to draw any conclusions. Not all oil is used for car transportation. Not every person in the country drives (think kids and elderly). And even for those that do drive, not everyone has a solo commute. When my wife and I drive to work, we go together, so we get 60 passenger mpg from our 30mpg car. But when I take the electric train I don't use any oil at all (since my city gets its power from hydroelectric sources, but even if it didn't, it would largely be powered by coal, not oil). But oil is used for lots of non personal transportation needs (i.e. trucking, trains, industrial uses, etc), so it's really hard to turn a "gallons/person" figure into a "commute miles/person".

In the USA, the average commute distance is 14.5 miles one-way . I couldn't find any numbers for Europe, but in the UK, the average is 8.5 miles/day

Yes

Will it work for that lady who got hit with a court order because she was too loud during sex, causing the neighbors to complain. Or does general moaning and screaming get past it?

and corrupt public officials can get away with taking bribes from the media for years http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17173438

The indictment is secret because the U.S. knows that if we expose whatever wildly unsupported bullshit we've indicted him on, it will hurt the extradition case.

... and that, in a nutshell, is pretty much why many UK citizens are unhappy with the extradition deal our bozo government signed us up to, because if we want someone from the US we have to show sufficient evidence to a US court, but the US just has to point and we bend over!

The old geezer who's just been shipped out is a case in point, and I've no idea if he's guilty or not, but surely if you ask for someone to be handed over you should show some evidence first.