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Actually the latest polling on Scotland gives more like 38-40% in the "yes" block.

I would like to see evidence for your claim that Ukraine is not really a divided country and that's all Putin's propaganda. Everything else I've seen suggests that Ukraine really is a highly divided country with a large population of people who would prefer to be a part of Russia than the EU. I'm not convinced this is something Putin is just making up.

The problem here is that the west has already decided it doesn't matter what the outcome of the Crimean referendum is - if Russia wins, that must be because of foul play, intimidation or excessive "propaganda" (as if western elections are not also filled with propaganda). In fact, I don't see any way the people living there could ever actually decide they prefer to be aligned with Russia without western powers decrying it as the work of the dastardly Putin.

Here's an idea. Why don't you go compare American propaganda (Obama's comments) vs Russian propaganda (Putin's comments). In particular note that Obama doesn't even bother taking press questions any more, whereas Putin takes lots of very aggressive and straightforward ones.

The whole diatribe about racist assholes is just verbatim Russian propaganda.

Let me relay some of that propaganda directly from Russia's official propaganda mouthpiece.

  Key players
Search for the following fine people in the article:
Oleh Tyahnybok
Dmytro Yarosh
Oleh Makhnitskyy

Will the Russian population of Crimea be in danger if the far right government succeeds? I'm inclined to believe so. Is Russia doing what's doing for the sole purpose of "protecting the Russian population of Crimea"?, I doubt it. Does Crimea have a right to self-determination?, a worthy discussion when taking into account Crimea's particular history and ethnic composition. Don't be quick to dismiss that discussion because there are numerous examples of regions breaking away from a nation because of the factors above *cough* Texas *cough*

They had a great BBC interview about this and they mentioned how the elephants could tell apart the Maasai and Kamba languages. The online article on the BBC website also mentions how the elephants can tell apart gender by recognizing changes in the pitch and frequency of the voice. http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...

Okay, technically not impossible. But unreasonably impractical to the point that people would simply stop taking public photography. If any public photograph could be taken to court on anybody's say-so, you have an impractical law that would be nearly impossible to enforce.

Again, this would only be applicable if the photograph revealed any parts of the body that a reasonable person would consider private. That would also mean that even somehow photographing a middle-eastern woman's face, when she ordinarily wears a sari, would be violation, unless the photographer has received explicit consent.

And for what it's worth, such a law has actually now been passed, so arguing that such a law is somehow going to be allegedly unenforceable is moot

Being a jerk, you even didn't wasted you precious time doing minimal research on the matter, did you? :-)

Here, inform youself:

Giving unauthorised access to someone other than the account holder, the company [Facebook] said, was against its privacy policy.

The Rashes, who live in Virginia, tried to fight their case in court, but soon found there just wasn't any legislation that covered the management of "digital assets".

The family's tragic battle is just one of many examples in which the internet has been shown to be woefully unprepared for dealing with death.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24380211

UK Laws doesn't apply to USA companies. Apple Computer is a USA company.

I don't know if Apple Cloud Services has offices on UK (the only situation I know that UK Laws would be enforceable), but as it appears, they have not.

I don't know which is more depressing, honestly, that stories like this do make Slashdot, or that stories like Twitch Plays Pokemon, where someone hooked up Pokemon Red to the Twitch chat system and Twitch viewers managed to play through the entire game don't. As the link demonstrates, it made the freaking BBC. It was even on the front page of NPR at one point. But not Slashdot.

This, on the other hand...

For starters, they can come clean. All their press releases have been exercises in trying to say as little as possible, and be as misleading as possible whiile still not literally lying. For example, their non-denial of the $10,000,000 deal with NSA had half the press falsely reporting that RSA claimed there never any $10,000,000 deal.

Dual_EC_DRBG has been documented since 2006/2007 to be an insecure CSPRNG, even without the backdoor. I knew about it for example, and I do not even work in that field. The only way nobody at RSA Security (a huge company specializing in security) could not have heard about it is by putting their hands over their ears and yelling LALALA. And they didn't put 2 and 2 together about why NSA paid them $10,000,000 when the possible backdoor was discussed in the media and the cryptographic community?

I can accept that RSA Security might have been fooled in 2004. But they have not even tried to explain why they kept using Dual_EC_DRBG after 2006/2007. They have been caught with the hand in the cookie jar, and refuse to even try to defend themselves. Why should I try to invent explanations for their innocence for them?

> what evidence could RSA show us that would reinstate our trust

The point is that the circumstantial evidence is so hugely strong. This is not unfair - this is reality.

It is like finding you standing over a corpse in a pool of blood and a knife in your hand, with a $10 million payment to your account from the victims worst enemy. And you refusing to talk about how you got there, or why the victim's worst enemy sent you the $10 million. Do you think I have no right to make assumptions in that case?

I was even required to confiscate nail clippers from airline pilotsâ"the implied logic being that pilots could use the nail clippers to hijack the very planes they were flying

"Ethiopian Airlines co-pilot hijacks plane to seek Geneva asylum" - http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

Of course security theater would still be in effect regardless, considering he didn't even need any weapon. Maybe as 'ongoing efforts to strengthen air transport security', cockpits should have private restrooms ;)

For normal traffic, there's no need to travel at 80 mph. In fact, it reduces gas mileage usually to go significantly above 55 or so, because air resistance increases much more rapidly and you have to fight that at high speeds.

Cite your sources for this often repeated tripe. My own MPG continues to rise until it peaks when my speed exceeds 110 mph. Most any car that I've owned (and none of them were your big honking pointless SUVs or any other sort of passenger truck) continued to increase in performance up to at least 80 mph.

Good lord. Well, this is enough to call your whole post bogus already.

Try a freakin' search engine. The second link that came up for me is a 2009 study from Consumer Reports, with a variety of vehicles.

To the best of my knowledge, the increase in speed limit in TX over the years did not see a significant increase in accidents or fatalities.

That may be the case. There certainly are situations where raising the speed limit has not increased fatalities, but usually in places where (1) people generally already drove significantly over the limit, and (2) people did not actually increase their speeds on average to keep up with the corresponding increase in limit (in other words, if the limit went up 10 mph, the average speed went up only a little).

But this is irrelevant to the GP's point, which was accusing politicians of lowering speed limits for revenue purposes. If that does happen, my guess is it happens around cities, where highway speed limits are often significantly lowered (and also there are more likely to be a greated density of cops around to collect tickets). My point is that often there are other reasons for those lowered limits -- beyond safety, often the desire to prevent traffic problems.

In most modern cars, putting the cruise control on at high speeds will result in people relaxing... it doesn't matter whether you're going 55 or 65 or 80.

Citation please.

Well, there are a number of studies showing decreased attention for people using cruise control, such as this one. It's clear that reaction times are increased, etc. The higher the speed you're traveling, the more problematic these increased reaction times are.

I haven't really done a search for studies, but I've talked to a LOT of people who agree that the "feel" of higher speeds in many newer cars has become a lot smoother in recent years. Lots of car companies even advertise how quiet and smooth their rides now are.

I'm not saying the difference in traveling at 55 vs. 80 is nil, but I don't think it's anywhere near as noticeable in recent cars. Given the inherent additional danger of higher speeds, I think it's on the burden of you and GP to prove that people somehow are alert enough to actually drive "more safely" overall at 80 compared to 55.

You're pretty much street pizza at speeds greater than 60mph. The risk of bodily injury and the mortality rate increase from a speed of 60 mph to 80 mph is such a small number that you can consider it a foregone conclusion that you're not coming home in one piece or at all.

By that logic, why stop at 80 mph? Why not travel at 100 mph? 120 mph? 140 mph? It's already a foregone conclusion that you're going to die in a crash at any speed over 60, so why bother considering safety at all?

Of course that's nonsense. The faster you go, the more reaction time you need to avoid anything or make any changes to what you're doing. Combined with the increased kinetic energy that increases with the square of velocity, driving faster still is more likely to get you killed.

Sure, in certain types of severe collisions, you're going to

BBC has just announced that an alien ship has just landed on Sochi winter olympics site.

http://www.bbc.com/

That fits here quite well actually. There is this bbc article about drugs addition and the 'truth' they always told us that especially hard rugs once used make us addicted. The actual study showed that the rats do not abuse morphine if they are in 'interesting' and nice environment. They do it if they are in their standard research cages which are small and boring.

For not intoxicated worthless rest of the society one can offer a set of sophisticated monitoring systems combined with automatic law enforcement systems like drones discharging electrical potential to the rioting groups or stopping them with weaponized sound systems or automatic ants and some such things. This whole argument is already complicated enough but how do you get there in the first place? I mean I do not want to invoke Marx' ideas but they actually fit here: the capital and means of production and means to control society will be in hands of the few. How are you going to convince them to share? This is a problem inside countries but resources that even such postindustrial society needs are not spread evenly on earth. How do you convince others to share sufficiently - you will need something to barter I mean in modern way. Post-industrial society means you still have economic activity of some sort. I can imagine some nation states failing completely if their with AI combined elites in such situations cannot find anything useful to exchange for fuel to run their infrastructure.

I wonder if I see this happening - after all I am an old fart already and socialist state I live in already promised me that it will not have resources to support me in old age so I guess I starve to death in these 20-25years.

It is not the patent holders responsibility to publicize their patents. It is the responsibility of any inventor to do a patent search first to understand the patent landscape and determine where they have freedom to operate.

Ignorance is not a defense in the eyes of the law.

This argument is absurd because there are simply so many patents - no small company could possibly be able to search through them to make sure they aren't infringing. I don't know if you have seen this article in which they quote an estimate, made by the American Intellectual Property Law Association, of the total cost if each software company employed enough patent lawyers to check through even a year's worth of software patents, spending only 10 minutes on each: $1.5 trillion, nearly 10% of the US GDP. It would also require 50 times more patent lawyers than the total number currently practising in the US. Although there are presumably less patents on 3D printer technology, the point is still clear: the system is broken because it is generally impractical to be fully aware of every possible patent that you might accidentally violate while developing your product.

In fact the real absurdity of the system is that is allows people to claim ownership over an idea, which they can then use to extort honest people developing their own technology entirely independently. I agree that some sort of protection over copying someone's design can make sense, but there should be no protection against people independently developing something that just so happens to resemble your design.

Note the article says ARM *server* processors. In that market, GPUs are totally irrelevant, power usage is secondary to performance, and price of the CPU is a distant third.

The Jaguar supercomputer is being upgraded into the Titan supercomputer, by adding GPUs. Power consumption is one of the main drivers here. A 64-bit ARM could really flourish in that space.

Speaking of Kickstarter, the danger of investing in the projects has has come to light.

Looks like there's only so much people are willing to put up with before they realize they're not getting paid for their work.

And they're perfectly secure.

Ahahahah! Oh man, you must be great in parties!

http://news.softpedia.com/news/JPMorgan-Chase-Bank-Server-Hacked-Tiffany-Employee-Details-Exposed-294557.shtml
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9116933/Report_World_Bank_servers_breached_repeatedly
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/12/bank_server_breached/
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-13711528
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/062612-operation-high-roller-260478.html
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9033999/Bank_of_India_site_hacked_serves_up_22_exploits
http://www.net-security.org/news.php?id=3181

And this was just with a 5m search.

I am a bit more interested in the new Laser Injected method developer in South Korea.

How about laser injection - http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19600706

Above page links through to:
Er:YAG laser pulse for small-dose splashback-free microjet transdermal drug delivery - http://www.opticsinfobase.org/ol/abstract.cfm?uri=ol-37-18-3894

One Steve made a name for himself by opening up computers. His idea that a desktop computer should be a big open platform that anybody can plug into dominates computer design to this very day, and had a lot to do with the explosive growth of computing.

The other Steve wanted to close up smartphones. Come to think of it, he took a control-freak attitude toward every product he ever launched. Ironic, really.

If it were just Samsung getting a little sloppy about Apple's design patents, you'd have a point. But the motivation for this war is the belief that Android itself is one big ripoff of iOS and needs to die. If Apple is allowed to claim ownership of the dominant user interaction paradigm, they will end up being the sole owner of the smart phone marketplace.

You say there are alternatives? These are a few small time platforms that manage to stay outside Apple's claimed IP They will always be too nonstandard to attract significant user or developer mindshare.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19559124

Besides science discoveries, what of any importance is reported by the news?

War. Pestilence. Famine. Death.

The four horsemen of the apocalypse are already abroad in the world. And it matters that you know it. The electoral choices made by American people cast a long shadow - over the Middle East in particular, but over the world as a whole. And yet the US electorate is quite frighteningly ignorant of what happens beyond their borders. OK, I appreciate that part of the reason you don't read the news is that the principal news media available to you are on the whole dishonest, corrupt and trivial. But there are other news media (and news aggregators). The BBC, and many of the UK 'broadsheet' sites (e.g. Guardian, Telegraph) are English language, well informed and honest (note: I did not say 'unbiased' - nothing human is unbiased). Al Jazeera seems to be well informed and honest, too, and provides a usefully different perspective.

If we carry on as we're going, global warming and with provoking conflict, war, famine and pestilence will arrive in the United States in your lifetime. You have a duty to be informed - a duty to yourself, as much as to anyone else.

The headless machine, funded by the Pentagon, reached 28.3mph (45.5km/h) when tested on a treadmill.

Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield, has mixed feelings about the development.

"It's an incredible technical achievement, but it's unfortunate that it's going to be used to kill people," he suggested.
"But of course if it's used for combat, it would be killing civilians as well as it's not going to be able to discriminate between civilians and soldiers."

Obviously it's going to be killing US soldiers too if it won't be able to discriminate between civilians and soldiers; all the things and people that get quoted by bbc no less...

The headless machine, funded by the Pentagon, reached 28.3mph (45.5km/h) when tested on a treadmill.

Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield, has mixed feelings about the development.

"It's an incredible technical achievement, but it's unfortunate that it's going to be used to kill people," he suggested.
"But of course if it's used for combat, it would be killing civilians as well as it's not going to be able to discriminate between civilians and soldiers."

From the jury foreman:

"One of the most decisive pieces of evidence was reading the minutes for myself of a meeting that was held at a very high level between Google executives and Samsung executives.

It was for a tablet and Google was concerned that for the sake of their operating system that the look and feel and the methodology that they [Samsung] were using to create their tablet was getting too close to what Apple was doing.

And in the memo themselves - remember this was minutes - they stated that Google demanded that they back away from that design.

And later there was a follow-up memo among themselves, these executives, and in black and white it says: we elect to not pass this information down to the divisions that were actually involved in the design.

So, from the sake of the engineers they went merrily along continuing their design not given any orders to back away.

They knew nothing of that meeting. To me that kind of raised a light bulb in my head that when I got in the jury room I wanted to read the minutes of that meeting myself.

When we went into deliberation in the jury room we not only had all the physical evidence of everything that was presented, but we also had sealed source code in its entirety from both sides, we actually had the memos that were talked about in the trial... and there was a piece of evidence after a piece of evidence that just clearly stacked up. "

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19425052

I think that's a good example. I don't think swipe to unlock is obvious.

1) No one else used swipe to unlock prior to Apple. Generally they used hitting some sort of button to unlock. 2) There are other methods to unlock on a touch screen. For example MeeGo's double press to unlock.

Yes in retrospect it is obvious. But... there is pretty clear evidence in 2005, 2006 it wasn't obvious based on the fact that other people weren't thinking of it. If Samsung could prove everyone thought of it, they could have invalidated the patent.

Well. I believe "no one" isn't quite accurate: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18709232

Why'd you have to link to the AP article via that (dead) troll Breitbart?

Here are some other sources, thanks Google:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19377261
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444358404577609810658082898.html

I'm sure the AP article can be found via a more... reputable site.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to don a biohazard suit and hide from all the Apple fanboys masturbating wildly to the news.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19253359

Grey's Anatomy has been mothballed? When did that happen?

Admittedly, I read your post's body first and thought you were going to make a good point; e.g. that if the broadcaster (in the case of Grey's, ABC) wanted to make money off of it rather than leave it to the `pirates'` devises they could have made it available for cheap on their site.
But instead you went for something that is demonstrably untrue. D'oh.

Mr Jobs said: "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this." http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-15400984

An interesting point of view. Here's one to counter it. I've been following Robert Fripp's struggles to get UMG to give him a simple accounting of how many King Crimson and related releases have been sold, for several years now. What I'd more, in violation of contract, KC music has got on to online stores like iTunes. Will you support SWAT teams raiding UMG at gunpoint to seize those records, and if not, why not?

Kim Dotcom was on the way to launch Megabox which would flip the ratio of money the artists get versus what is held on to by the labels. Color my cynical but this upcoming service seems to be the only major difference between Mega Upload and the other file storage services. He claims to be planning on still going through with the launch. If so it will cut the labels out of the loop by allowing artists to sell more or less directly to the public. Good riddance I say.

I don't really understand why Slashdot has got the hate towards him.

Um, because he didn't disclose his relationship with Oracle until long after he'd started publishing articles despite his full knowledge of being cited by various mainstream media orgs like the BBC. He came clean in April of this year yet prior to that he is cited numerous times (example) taking an antagonistic position against Android all the while allowing everyone to remain blissfully ignorant of who was really paying his bills. The guy is a snake.

The BBC found the same when testing with a fake company. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18822971

"For the past week, I've been running a very successful small business via Facebook. It is called VirtualBagel and more than 3,000 people from around the world have decided they "like" it - despite the fact that it does, well, absolutely nothing. But in running this non-existent firm I have learned quite a bit about the value of those "likes" prized by so many big brands, and the usefulness of Facebook's advertising".> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18819338

I read about this on BBC News this morning, and two things struck me:

1. "In tests Mr Brocious conducted with Forbes news site, the system did not prove entirely successful - only one of the three doors, at three hotels in New York, opened." So it doesn't work everywhere, but it's a good proof of concept. From the above ExtremeTech article: "Brocious found that he could simply read this 32-bit key out of the lock’s memory. No authentication is required ... By playing this 32-bit code back to the lock ... it opens." While Brocious seems to have taken this only to the demonstration stage, I'm sure others (CIA? MI5?) have made this method more reliable. It just seemed to me that Brocious is assuming this method applies everywhere, and possibly oversold it.

2. He didn't share this with the hotel lock vendor, Onity. While he's certainly not required to share that info with Onity, it seems a bit shady to only release the information publicly at a blackhat conference, and force the vendor to respond to it after the hack is "in the wild." I wonder if he was worried that if he shared the vulnerability with Onity beforehand that it would take away some of the "thunder" from his presentation. Or maybe it's simply less cool to say to a blackhat convention "I shared this with the vendor, and they're working on it."

Raspberry Pi presold sight unseen over 350,000 units while restricted to one-per-customer. They ramped up the factory to 4,000 units a day - a run rate of 1.5 million units a year. They're little bare project boards. We're not even sure what we can do with them yet. Now that the schools they were intended for can order them in the bulk appropriate to the use of entire school districts full of students they may ramp quite a bit. School districts order in the dozens of units for test/dev and for deployment up to tens or hundreds of thousands so in the launch enthusiasm for RPi they were pretty much shut out so far. It doesn't hurt at all that their HDMI video output is standard input for flat panel monitors and TV's these past few years, so displays for them are everywhere and likely to last far longer than the PCs they came with.

If a bunch of hardware OEMs aren't snapping to attention over this they should be. The march of tiny low power ARM platforms seems to not want to stop. Now we have the Android TV dongle, five of these SBCs including the one in the fine article, a Kickstarter for OUYA that raised $5.3 million so far in 11 days from 41,000 backers who have no guarantee the product will ever even be made, on the strength of the reputation of the participants and the description of a product that isn't anticipated even being made until 9 months out - if they succeed in making it at all. That so many would put so much of their own personal money on only the promise of a thing is evidence of immense underlying demand for something.

Of course over in China and India they're making about a thousand different kinds of low-cost Android devices including a 7" tablet that costs $40 and runs Android ICS. Then there's the Nexus 7 tablet which sold out in retail stores around the planet on launch day and the 16GB version is even sold out on the Google Play store until further notice and the 8GB version probably soon will be - most of them were presold before they even hit the shelves. This one alone may move 10 million units the first year or more. Maybe much more. It's a product that may have buyers camped out at retailers awaiting fresh shipments like they were iThings.

The iThings are going great by the way, moving about a 500,000 units a day between iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch - every one a neat little ARM PC. And they just opened up the China market, which is like a whole third of everybody.

At last report little Android ARM PCs that also happen to have cellular phone capability are also doing well, activating 1,000,000 units a day - a run rate of 365,000,000 per year and still growing at a 2.5x pace year over year. And early next year come little ARM SOCs with 75% more processing power and 2x the graphics power for about the same price - and the SBCs that are made from them. Wow, the pace of progress here is stunning. It's like the early '90s again in PC land.

The traditional PC is stagnant. If you have one that's not too old you probably can suffer through another couple years with it, or until it fails completely, and save the money you would have put to a new one on one of these amazing new things. It's not like your laptop isn't already overpowered for what you're using it for. People have a certain budget for neat new gear anyway, and with adequate laptops costing $300 it's not like there's not money left over in the US market even if it is time to update your PC. The traditional PC market isn't going to collapse right away but I think it has peaked, plateaued, and begun its long gradual decline. In time, all things end.

All of these new things work wonderfully together, a

a quarter of a century before any sort of vehicle we have does not require a *licensed* driver to be on-board

Welcome to 2012, esteemed visitor. You will be pleased to know that the Cold War is over and that some of your predictions have come to pass:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17989553

This judgement covers one of the patents that has also been used by Apple in blocking the Galaxy Nexus from sale in the US - http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18705285

As this mentions the 'slide-to-unlock' function as obvious based on existing functions in earlier handests - could this be used in evidence as part of the arguments around the Nexus ban?

Not if the judge is a iFan and will use anything to block competing products.

This judgement covers one of the patents that has also been used by Apple in blocking the Galaxy Nexus from sale in the US - http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18705285

As this mentions the 'slide-to-unlock' function as obvious based on existing functions in earlier handests - could this be used in evidence as part of the arguments around the Nexus ban?

A few months ago the British government decided not to pardon Turing for his "crime" of being gay.

Their reasoning for rejecting the pardon request seems reasonable:

"However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times."

So it seems that's been addressed by the British government recently. Even though full equality may be a few steps away -- and we shouldn't whitewash that fact -- it's also important to acknowledge that there was far more to Turing than his sexuality.

3D printers have not printed kidneys or jawbones, get over it already. They make shapes in a single material that are used as moulds for far more complex processes. Can we PLEASE stop this senseless glorifying of what is nothing more than a process to make molds!??

Sorry but playing all day long World Of Warcraft is not going to help you to stay informed what happens out there in the real world. So stop claiming something that is not true!

3D printers have been used to create jawbones.

As for the EU: I agree with the other poster they'll just pass ACTA later as some other form (probably through the unelected politburo or apparatchiks).

What a bunch of bullshit. If the Netherlands put criteria into their constitutions that prohibit ACTA-like legislations, it will be impossible to introduce it, unless you have a large majority to retract the amendment to the constitution. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-13886440

Look how the EU overruled the French Assembly's banning of GM foods within its juris diction.

That's not what happened. France asked the EU to also apply their ban EU-wide, which was declined, as most other states allow it and there is no evidence was provided that that particular food being harmful. GM is prohibited or restricted in plenty of European countries. In fact, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_the_release_of_genetic_modified_organisms#Europe starts with "The European Union (EU) has possibly the most stringent GMO regulations in the world.", a thorn in the eyes of the US.
If there had been evidence of harm, it would have stood a chance of being prohibited EU-wide.

The EU countries agreed that ACTA was a good idea, now they (or some) realise it isn't, so they have to find a way to retract from their agreement. But if you come together, agree and shake hands, and later change your mind, you better have a process to re-negotiate.

That is true on the one side inside the EU, but also if the EU now finds that they want to decline ACTA, they have to retract their signature they gave to the other countries in the world (again, process needed).

EU countries are doing better than those countries around the world that agreed to ACTA, as they managed to get a discussion going and get momentum of their citizens. It very much looks like ACTA is going to be declined, because our politicians (state and EU level) see and react to what the citizens want.

The 25 nations are not even states anymore. They are EU provinces. They have less power than a US state. Sad, sad times for our European cousins.

Do US states have their own army? Do they have diplomatic relations with foreign countries? Do they sign trade agreements with foreign countries? What happens if one US state doesn't implement or follow the legislation given by the federation?

US states are more like the counties in Germany than countries. EU legislation (actually directives) rarely does more than summarize common laws between countries, and then it is voted for by those countries, not some foreign entity.

Elizabeth Moon, author of an extensive corpus of Science Fiction, opines for the BBC: "If I were empress of the Universe I would insist on every individual having a unique ID permanently attached -- a barcode if you will; an implanted chip to provide an easy, fast inexpensive way to identify individuals. It would be imprinted on everyone at birth. Point the scanner at someone and there it is. ... In war soldiers could easily differentiate legitimate targets in a population from non combatants... Anonymity would be impossible as would mistaken identity making it easier to place responsibility accurately, not only in war but also in non-combat situations far from the war."
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120522-barcode-everyone-at-birth

Google should focus on making their search engine better while thinking up the next big thing. Unfortunately, Google is so engineering-driven that it has a hard time understanding people.

Ironic that you were modded "insightful" when they just rolled out Knowledge Graph today.

And your "Google needs to change its culture so that it places greater emphasis on design and human interaction rather than technical impressiveness" is just downright clueless. Compare Google's search page with Bing or even worse, Yahoo. People don't go to a search engine because the search page is pretty, they go there because they want to look something up. Besides, Bing is flashy and trashy like a rhinestone-studded velvet Elvis painting, while Google's search is simple and elegant (and Yahoo's is a disturbing mess).

You're also discounting Google Doodles.

G+ is as much more aestethically pleasing than Facebook as its search is than Bing's, but it's all about social networking. Facebook will stay on top until, like MySpace, they piss off all their users. Facebook started out as a college-only thing and grew slowly. By the time it was rolled out to the general public, almost everyone knew people with a FB account. It will take a LOT to unseat FB.

If RIM servers don't enter the equation, then how can RIM provide access to customers' data to those governments that have requested such (and were granted)? Also, what about this?

And in his defence, he could claim that he has gone religious at old age, worshiping "Copyism".

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16424659

There is a 1500 electrode bionic eye already in use, or I am missinterpreting something.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120308-will-we-ever-restore-sight

Have they produced a viable OS?

Depends what "viable" means. Reliabe or profitable?
MS definitely gets the other guy to take the fall for any shortcoming in MS software. Here is a recent example, where it looks like Nokia's fault that WP7 has a memory management issue.

There were a lot of companies doing or trying to offer advertising in free computers or free Internet access. If someone has copies of The Computer Paper from Canada from the late 90's and early 2000 there should be ads in there for those kinds of offers.
http://usproxy.bbc.com/2/hi/business/275213.stm

bbc news http://news.bbc.com/ provides its content via the bbc licence fee, I as a UK citizen have to pay my licence fee, and for this I get a quality news site, the bbc news site was rated 7th most used site. For every one outside of the uk they get a free site. I believe a licence fee for tv channels is unique to the uk (not a subscription fee which is different) The tv, radio and web sites are all advert free though

Go to the BBC News site first and get the link from there (it'll be under one of their video clips). Saves wading through all the sales puff for the paid-for player. Does anyone use the paid-for version anyway?

easy navigation is my aim; don't know if i've succeded with this one .

i guess this might be somewhat off topic since my site is nothing compared to high-traffic info-packed sites like www.bbc.com