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Oh really?

The Home Office received 95 extradition requests from the US between 1 January 2004 and 31 July 2009; 47 of these have taken place, with 36 ongoing, five withdrawn by the US and seven refused by UK authorities. The UK has made 42 extradition requests to the US during the same period; 27 of these have taken place, with 12 ongoing, three withdrawn by the UK and none refused. The numbers of requests made between the UK and its extradition partners are often unequal – Spain extradited 104 people to us between 2004 and 2008 and received 27 – but this signifies no imbalance in the governing arrangements.

I don't know about the rest of Europe, but that one data point makes me question what orifice that extradition 'fact' came from, no matter how truthy it sounds.

The Home Office received 95 extradition requests from the US between 1 January 2004 and 31 July 2009; 47 of these have taken place, with 36 ongoing, five withdrawn by the US and seven refused by UK authorities. The UK has made 42 extradition requests to the US during the same period; 27 of these have taken place, with 12 ongoing, three withdrawn by the UK and none refused.

- Alan West Home Office minister, House of Lords

So much for the 'no extradition from the US' myth. Too bad you couldn't be bothered to discover the facts, but would rather repeat whatever drivel matches your political sentiments. People like you, who trade emotion for logic, disgust me. You are sub-human and sickening.

Unless Murdoch comes up with an ingenious way of reducing funding for the BBC. Say for example, striking a deal with the opposition politcal party to cover them in a complementary way in their press, in exchange for reduced funding of the BBC when they get into power.

Maybe we should ask Andy Coulson about that one (ex editor of News Of the World - a Murdoch title - and current 'Strategist' for the Conservatives). If he can buy out the UK's free source, he can buy out any other 'not for profit' options.

Sick and dying indeed. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/20/megrahi-health-lockerbie-bomber

Yes, but the keen observer will note that Italy and the UK are different countries.

The US-UK extradition treaty is bilateral, and the UK has refused more extradition requests than the US since it has been in place. So no, it's not a one way street.

The Home Office received 95 extradition requests from the US between 1 January 2004 and 31 July 2009; 47 of these have taken place, with 36 ongoing, five withdrawn by the US and seven refused by UK authorities. The UK has made 42 extradition requests to the US during the same period; 27 of these have taken place, with 12 ongoing, three withdrawn by the UK and none refused.

Shamelessly lifted from the Guardian, one of the UK's better papers, in a column written by Sir Alan West, a minister in the Home Office.

So out of the resolved, non-withdrawn requests, the USA's requests are granted 47/54 times, whilst the UK's are granted 27/27 times.

Can anyone find a US source to verify these numbers?

They never did that for the "Bush chimp" pictures.

They probably didn't it for the Michelle Obama picture either. If you read the FA, it says that they couldn't reach Google for comment.

Meanwhile, this article from yesterday says that the blog which hosted the picture simply removed the it, and that Google subsequently started updating its search index. Hence, it no longer lists that picture among its top results, since no other top-ranked site has that image.

I.o.w.: nothing to see here, move along now.

I wonder if it is possible that search is working as it should.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/25/michelle-obama-google-images-removed

As according to that Guardian article above, the image in question, has been removed from its original linked location.

Similar case in Slovakia:

We have some elections here right now and some people in capital city received "letters" (more like marketing materials) with "printed signature" of our prime minister. Those letters are from a prime minister's party and is about how the prime minister, the party and also some other figures (most notably some mayors of towns and villages) DO support some candidate.

Later on some of those mayors mentioned in the letter said "I do not know about this letter and I do not agree with the letter: I did not, do not and wont support that one candidate" etc.

So, people questioned the prime minister and his party. And the answer? Something like:

It's initiative of a party, it's essentially marketing material and only a "rubber stamp of signature of the prime minister used for marketing purposes" has been used in that letter, prime minister did not wrote nor signed it.

So yes, his party, his people did the letter, his name is used in it, picture of his signature is used in it. It is a lie. Yet it is not a problem and responsibility of a prime minister.

Thankfully there is one thing which can haunt him on that one: he likes to sue journalists if they defame him. So I guess now his own party defamed him by putting his name on letter full of lies. So he should sue them. But he is a populist so I guess he wont.

"three-quarters of young black males, aged 18 to 35, are now on the database"

Those who bear false witness and say the mean world temperature is not rising have one more fact that they seem unable to explain to account for:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/22/east-antarctic-ice-sheet-nasa

If is not getting warmer, why is ice melting everywhere at accelerated rates and bringing local temperatures in various places temporarily down with it?

Indeed - a classic example was this is someone who made a program that does nothing more than display an animated icon. And got nationwide advertising in the media ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8152338.stm , http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jul/14/iphone-purity-pledge-apple ).

I mean, it's ridiculous. I guess this is taking advantage of the hype bandwagon where anything "On The Iphone" gets instant media coverage. God knows why the licence-funded BBC is giving free advertising though, especially to a phone that's a minority player. I rarely see such stories about Nokia, who dominate the market.

Who cares about 100,000 "apps" if they're involve paying money for trivial things that on any other platform would be available for free.

And here are the opposing viewpoints from people not on a biased website:

Climate sceptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientists
Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming'?

As noted by the AC, perhaps all the previous administration knew was that they were sending money. :P

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/mar/20/usa.iraq

Iraq was awash in cash. We played football with bricks of $100 bills.

Here's a related link on The Guardian's front page:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/nov/19/mandelson-copyright-filesharing-murdoch-google

How to sneak something into UK law, easy, you use what's called the "Statutory Instrument". It was beefed up and abused by the current crooked government, and it allows ANY law to be passed without anyone in The House of Commons or House of Lords EVER having seen it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/henryporter/2009/jan/14/statutory-instruments-parliament

If you're looking for an answer to the question - how does Labour make so much law without anyone noticing? - and if you want to know how 3,000 new offences have been created, over a third of which carry prison sentences, then you are half way there. The shocking abuse of secondary legislation, usually referred to by the term "statutory instruments", is one of the scandals of our time.

Statutory instruments - ministerial diktats by any other name - are a way of making sure that little is debated or scrutinised by MPs. With their increasing use, power passes from the chamber of the House of Commons and parliamentary committees to ministers and ultimately to senior civil servants, a naturally undemocratic group who think of the public as an awkward managerial problem.

The provisions, which are inserted in a bill and allow the government to amend or repeal the legislation without debate are known as Henry VIII clauses. With good reason: they were named after Henry VIII's Statute of Proclamation of 1539, which gave him the power to make law by proclamation.

The Guardian would suggest that the met Police e-crime unit were involved in the take down http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/18/zeus-zbot-trojan-virus and the e-crime unit http://www.kable.co.uk/government-ecrime-review-home-office-14jul09 is part of GCHQ http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/25/cyberspace-war-computer-hacking-fraud. So may well be more to this than meets the eye.

The Guardian would suggest that the met Police e-crime unit were involved in the take down http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/18/zeus-zbot-trojan-virus and the e-crime unit http://www.kable.co.uk/government-ecrime-review-home-office-14jul09 is part of GCHQ http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/25/cyberspace-war-computer-hacking-fraud. So may well be more to this than meets the eye.

Reminds me of when Fox News tried to sue The Simpsons, of Fox Enterntainment, who put a fake news crawl across the bottom of the screen because it could confuse the viewers into thinking the items were real news items.

Same thing with Bill O'Reilly who tried to sue Al Franken when Franken used Bill's image on the cover of his book, claiming people might think Bill endorsed the book. Fox also participated because Franken used the words, 'Fair and Balanced' on the cover and, like Bill, claimed people would think Fox had a hand in the book.

Guess it just goes to show the mentality of some groups of people.

I'll believe that when other independent sources (say, BBC) confirm Fox is being bullied.

Would you believe The Guardian?

How about MSNBC?

There are many more. Google is your friend.

As for the BBC, you trust a government owned and run network over free ones? Really? BBC is the NPR and PBS of Britain. Sorry, I think the "Bullshit" is coming from you.

Wikipedia says Psystar is a corporation in Florida. Florida says Psystar is this. The sole listed director in Psystar's corporate filings before Florida pursuant to state law is one Rodolfo Pedraza.

According to The Guardian, Psystar was originally located in a row of suburban houses until sometime in April 2008 according to Psystar's own website at the time (screenshot in the linked article). To confirm this, see my Sunbiz link above, which reveals in Psystar's Articles of Incorporation that its principal place of business is this house or one by it.

It looks like Psystar was just some guy wanting to make some money selling Hackintoshes.

And note that if any of the AoI were forged, it's likely a felony (I don't know Florida law).

...which completely explains why we had to drop two of them before they surrendered.

The Japanese wanted terms that included the preservation of the Emperor's position. The U.S. demanded unconditional surrender -- and then not only granted this term most desired by the Japanese, but engaged in active cover-up up Japanese war crimes on the mainland.

No nation is going to decide to make an unconditional surrender in a matter of days: indeed, the idea that when two expansionist imperial powers get into conflict over colonies (which is the story of the Pacific conflict -- just how do you think the U.S. came to be in Hawaii and in the Philippines?), the losing side should cease to exist as an independent nation was historically unprecedented. From the start, Japan was expecting a WWI style armistice.

We didn't have to drop the second bomb, the political effects of the first were still in motion. But we had one uranium bomb, and one plutonium one...surely we should see the effects of both, after all the time and money spent? And it's not like we were dropping them on white people. We'd planned to use the bomb on the Japanese first -- not the Nazis -- from the start of the Manhattan project.

The bombs were dropped because it was completely clear to all that the japanese of that time were going to dig in as deep as possible and were all willing to fight to the death.

No. That's the myth, point for point, but it's absurd to suppose that an invasion would have been necessary to destroy Japan's ability to make war. We'd already pushed them back to the home islands: set up a blockade, lob a couple of bombs at military targets and ports every so often, and without the resources of the mainland Japan would have been starved of fuel and food in a matter of months. As the wik notes, "By August 1945, the Imperial Japanese Navy effectively ceased to exist".

The greatest military commander of the Allies, Eisenhower, knew that Japan was defeated before the bombs dropped: "...I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives."

But more importantly, it was in fact known that the Japanese were ready to sue for peace.

The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if the terms were hard". Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was "fearful" that the US air force would have Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". He later admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb". His foreign policy colleagues were eager "to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis." The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".

Well, a pretty pessimistic attitude.

Not only can rehabilitation work, as the legions of successfully reformed criminals shows, but I think it shows a level of maturity in a society when rehabilitation is considered as an option over 'lock em up and forget em'.

As an example, look at the civilised way Norway reacted when two children murdered another, compared to the hysterical overreaction in Britain when James Bulger was killed by two children.

Years down the track, I know I would prefer to live next to the Norwegian children, who were treated via rehabilitation, compared to the Bulger killers, who were locked up for long periods before ultimately being released.

I think the death penalty is the signature of a society too stupid to realise that you don't teach people life is sacred by taking it away. If you need any further proof of this, take a look at the homicide rate in countries that have the death penalty, as compared to those that don't. You could also look at homicide rates in the US states with the death penalty, compared to the rate in those that don't.

In Canada the number of people murdered has declined since the death penalty was abolished. In 2007 (the most recent figures I could find), there were 594 homicides in Canada, 159 fewer than in 1975 (one year prior to the abolition of capital punishment), after a long trend downwards.

As for Germany's laws on suppression of criminals' names, I disagree with it because I believe in free speech. Nevertheless, this call to have them killed I think is just barbaric.

Slashdot get for pushing books on topics of which 99% of
Slashdot readers are aware?

A better use of Slashdot would be a discussion of How U.S. Pays Taliban To Protect Its Truck.

Yours In Yaznogorsk,
K. Trout

So please tell me how you can get your public domain works out of 70,000 pages of text.

Use a handheld scanner on the computer display, followed by a bout of OCR on the scans :-)

Then crowdsource the checking of the OCR text

And Charlie Brooker.

Your broken-recordness would not be so annoying if it weren't so misleading:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/oct/29/nintendo-profits-plunge-wii-sales

Yes, they've sold a lot of Wiis in the past. But while Wii sales have gone down lately (despite a $50 price drop), PS3 and 360 sales numbers are flat.

I used to own a Wii. I had such a hard time finding fun games for it I sold it for near what I paid for it and bought a cheaper, more powerful 360 and have been very happy with it since. Lots of great, cheap games for it.

You're right, it is a good idea to separate those things, digital from physical right now.

I'd go a step further and suggest a big problem these days is that people lump under "capital" both imaginary fiat dollars (ration units) and physical things like cement plants. As suggested by another poster, if we want a new cement plant, it takes time to build one. But an endless supply of fiat dollars can be created by the stroke of a pen in Congress. Digitally, there is so much capacity now relative to basic needs like surfing the web that, compared to when one hand to spend a lot of money to buy a few IBM mainframe computing cycles, most computer and network access costs now are too cheap to matter much.

But, still, for a post-scarcity future, consider the resources you mentioned.

* Water. We have oceans full of it. With enough energy (like from wind and solar), it is easy to desalinate it. There are desalinization breakthroughs mentioned on slashdot quite frequently.

* Food. The USA alone can produce enough food to feed something like three billion people. Unfortunately, much of it goes to animal feed:
"The Truth About Land Use in the United States"
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
We've plenty of food for a mostly vegetarian diet for a much bigger population than we have now. And that's even without effectively farming the oceans or people moving off-planet to space habitats.

* Land. See the above link on how much land there is in the USA. We can also build seasteads. And eventually we'll be building space habitats. We can build thousands, even millions, of Earths worth of surface area for materials in the solar system, like Princeton Physicist Gerard K. O'Neill showed how to do.

* Megan Fox. Sure, human relationships will always have a scarcity aspect. Still, digitally there is a vast quantity of Megan Fox around:
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=Megan+Fox&btnG=Search+images
We'll no doubt see virtual actors soon -- there are already all sorts of interactive games with virtual people. And look where this sort of robotic technology is going:
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=2188
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2008/dec/14/aiko-fembot-robot
Also, no doubt there are millions of women who look a lot like Megan Fox, or act like her. So, I question just how scarce Megan Fox as a concept is. But yes, sure, if you want to point to specific people or rocks in the world, yes, there is a scarcity there of that one person or thing. But, then think how scarce and precious everyone on the planet is. Maybe they all deserve a basic income as a human right, to have some claim on the fruits of an abundant industrial commons? Even Megan Fox? Maybe if she had had a guaranteed basic income every year to meet her living expenses for life, she might have had a happier life? And maybe all the people around her would not have been so eager to exploit her, and she could have had a more authentic life?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

Even millionaires like (likely) Megan Fox may be better off with a universal basic income:
"[p2p-research] Basic income from a millionaire's perspective?"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/003949.html

Consider:
"Megan Fox Opens Up About Weight Loss, Depression: "Transformers"

What else do you expect from a man in charge of a company that nearly sued itself over the one show that singlehandedly kept the network from dying an early death?

A disproportionate portion of your body heat is expelled through your head.

Just thought I'd point out that it's an urban myth a large proportion of your body heat is lost through your head, see here.

The Sunday Telegraph here in the UK ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6083234/Health-warning-exercise-makes-you-fat.html ) used pre-publication data from this study that Blundell has stated totally mis-represented its findings (that, amongst other things, only 15% of the study group gained weight, and that they were all ones who ate more than usual during the study period.)

That article also quoted the one of 43 trials reviewed by the Cochrane Library that did not show a significant weight-loss in the participants (it says "some surprising studies in America " when it means "one surprising and possibly unrepresentative study in America". The lead author of that study, Dr Timothy Church of Louisiana University, seems to undermine the validity of his own study, in which the participants were asked not to alter their diet by saying (according to the Telegraph article) "after spending time in the gym, they eat a chocolate muffin, which undoes all of the work they did.”

The Telegraph unaccountably ignored the 42 studies which did not conform to what appears to be their preconception.

For more information see ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/29/telegraph-exercise-fat-bad-science ), or go to Ben Goldacre's own site ( http://www.badscience.net/ ) for a fuller version.

go bust the people who are giving child rapists money.

and what if those people turn out to be victims of credit-card fraud?

you mean grapes. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/jan/12/books.guardianreview5
It would be great if they'd be called Hirabi in the media instead of Jihadists

Looking at the issue of generating power, there are several choices available, and coal is one of those, but so also is nuclear, wind and solar. They're more expensive, and any tiny amount more expensive than oil means they wont be used right now, but they're not *massively* more expensive, its not like ten times or even a hundred times, it's like, well here is one view of coal vs nuclear which evalutes it as 30 dollars per megawatt hour instead of 29.1 ...

Next, you discussed distribution of power, specifically I felt you feel that using coal to generate power means that it's no longer possible to power machinery on farms, or to power transport.

Even today, we have electric powered:

• trains
• subways
• cars
• bicyles
• ... I'm going to stop this list, because it looks like spam ;-)

It seems reasonable to suppose that if we wished to, we could make electrically powered farm machinery too. Sure, there may be issues, like disposing of old batteries, but they are not I feel insurmountable issues, and I feel they are not issues that will push our civilisation back to the dawn of the 1900s are you are proposing...

I guess you did not bother to actually check the search results, right?

Because I can't find any report about a real virus in the wild.

I wonder if you didn't do the same you accuse GP of not doing. The second result for http://images.google.nl/search?q=osx+virus+in+the+wild is Mac users face first OS X virus in the wild. Now anyone who knows what they're doing shouldn't get infected. As New MacOS X trojan/virus alert, mostly a non-event says it takes some clicking and seems to be a "proof of concept". Now Tech Q and A: Are Macs Vulnerable to Virus Attacks? is an interesting read.

Falcon

Ooh, don't get the idea I'm a shill, for MS, Linux, or anybody else and don't like Macs. I'm typing this on my MacBook Pro and of the 7 new computers I've owned it's the best.

Oh, and all these stories are myths. They aren't history.

What's suggested is that they're myths grounded in events that happened at some point in human history. If the sea level rose suddenly, there would, 50 years later, be *lots* of old people telling rapt children "We had a big settlement, but one day there was a great flood, and now that settlement is under the sea".

Over centuries, you'd get embellishments to make the fully formed myths that exist to this day.

I take your point about Plato and Atlantis, although I suspect he'd have been informed by an existing meme.

You can dive to actual pre-deluge settlements: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/oct/16/lost-greek-city-atlantis-myth

While the brain do has the count advantage (approx. 50 billion neurons in the cerebellum), please note the extremely slow speed of each of them.

You already said it (a few hundred times per second) - I just wanted to underline it. We are actually not that far from that computing power.

If we are to make a crude estimation 50 billion neurons with a processing speed of 200 Hz would mean 10 tera processing per second. Some may argue that they are analogous - thus able to handle infinite precision. I challenge that - there is no infinite precision - not even in the brain. So I consider a floating point operation a very equivalent way to compare.

10 Teraflops is not that much, would not even qualify as a super computer these days. We already have 1 teraflops desktops. Soon, even a personal computer will have that power.

Some examples:
4 Teraflops workstation: http://digg.com/hardware/Supermicro_GPU_Workstation_Hits_4_Teraflops
20 Petaflops Sequoia: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/03/fastest-supercomputer-ibm-sequoia

When approaching neural networks, I was never afraid of lack of computing power or storage. A much more demanding task was finding good and enough training data. Can you estimate the amount of "training data" that a human averagely receives through all his senses(sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell) during his entire life? Now THAT is some huge sob!

Us Brits were already aware that Obama follows Bush era policies.

One of the Britons detained in Guantanamo bay, Binyamin Mohamed, was finally released to the UK earlier this year. Since then he's been trying to prove that he was tortured by, or at the behest of British agents. The courts recieved documents from US intelligence that would back his claim, however their release was blocked by our foreign secretary.

Now, our foreign secretary is an idiot, and part of it is ass covering for sure, but the reason he has cited for blocking their release is that the US has threatened to cut intelligence ties with the UK meaning we could be left vulnerable to attack (as could the US) if this data were released. Originally this threat came from the Bush administration, but it seems since then the Obama administration has been asked with the same threats. Journalists and politicians here have contacted the white house to confirm this and have found that the Obama administration does in fact support this policy.

The fact is, the Obama administration has no interest in accountability for it's security services, it knows and has admitted they were complicit in torture, but it seems the extent to which they were is such a problem that they are willing to put the national security of an ally and their own national security at risk to cover this up and keep that evidence secure.

It's not like we're not used to this attitude from the US, as when a US airforce pilot was guilty of strafing British troops in an A10 in a friendly fire incident in Iraq they refused to release the pilots name for questioning and the gun camera videos etc. (which were later leaked anyway) for our enquiry into how it happened. We expected this kind of attitude of coverups from the Bush adminsitration, but the Obama administration? It did come as a suprise I'll admit.

The original story is here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/04/guantanamo-torture

An update is here, the court reversed it's decision and stated the documents can be released pending the outcome of an appeal by the British government. Hopefully they'll lose it and we'll be able to see if Obama really is willing to do as he says and damage security of both countries over it:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-britain-gitmo17-2009oct17,0,2433061.story

Change? Not from what we can see over this side of the Atlantic, the only difference here in Europe is instead of a US president having his leg humped by Tony Blair, we've now got a US president having his leg humped by Sarkozy and Berlusconi instead.

Population rise in some parts of the world, some parts of Europe for example, is actually falling. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/27/population.eu
However there are some groups that are deliberately increasing their populations, Mormons and Moslems come to mind.
I'm not necessarily slamming those groups. Just pointing out that what may sound good to you could greatly change the makeup of the world.

AG

And that assumes it actually WAS set up to be a legal torrent tracker! As others have pointed out, it's called The PIRATE Bay!

This reminds me of a comment I made over at Moonbattery on a post entitled "Guardian Moonbat Calls for "Cull" of Western Children" where the post actually says:

If communism and Nazism could leave tens of millions dead, what will be the death toll if the evil freaks driving the environmentalism movement get the leverage to inflict their anti-Western and antihuman fantasies?

This leaves little doubt as to their interpretation of The Guardian's article. I responded with:

Nowhere in the article is there a call for mass extermination, you're being completely ridiculous in that. They may call for people to have less children, but killing children already here? Are you so deluded that you actually think a major British newspaper could call for such a thing and get away with it?

I quickly got a response:

The word "cull" is used by the author in the piece, and it's definition is the reduction in the size of a herd through killing some members of it. The author may have been unaware of the proper definition, but it is the word he used.

Obviously they must have been calling for genocide! Why else would they say "cull" unless they intended for millions of children to die?

My point is that grabbing a dictionary and harping on forever isn't the best way to ascertain extent. Sometimes people are being satirical. Sometimes people use the wrong word. Trying to say The Pirate Bay must be made to help piracy because it's The Pirate Bay isn't an argument, it's just noise.

The likely view of the Conservative party regarding copyright and other things will certainly align themselves with Rupert Murdoch's views. The parties covet the support of certain parts of the media, especially The Sun.
Expect a hard time for the BBC and anything else which may mean less profit for Sky and News Corporation.

Politician's quest to get themselves elected into power so often seems to mean they lose their perspective (think of the children) and sacrifice any principle they may have had.

The likely view of the Conservative party regarding copyright and other things will certainly align themselves with Rupert Murdoch's views. The parties covet the support of certain parts of the media, especially The Sun.
Expect a hard time for the BBC and anything else which may mean less profit for Sky and News Corporation.

Politician's quest to get themselves elected into power so often seems to mean they lose their perspective (think of the children) and sacrifice any principle they may have had.

"That's a peculiar comment from a country where the official government and the opposition do little for workers rights, while bailing large banks for whatever they ask. In the 70's the unions had too much power, not now."

You're making a common mistake, you're assuming in the 70s all unions were weakened, this is not the case, public sector unions were left largely untouched and as such public sector unions still have the same situation of too much power as in the 70s. The CWU is a remnant of these public sector unions that were never castrated as required.

"As for thinking that a union (a political organisation) has no place commenting on politics, I can't see your logic"

Commenting is fine, bombarding members with propaganda through the post every month like "Don't vote for X, vote for Y" is a step too far.

"RM lost the Amazon contract because they have repeatedly provided bad service. The irony is that RM have consistently moaned about the internet killing their business, while ignoring the boom in home shopping. Maybe it's time for a complete change of management."

No, RM originally gained the contract from Amazon by realising the boom in home shopping was one way to save their business. Amazon only a few weeks ago dropped the contract because of the threat of strikes (after RM strikes caused them harm last year). It was not sustainable for Amazon to use RM if they can't ensure reliability. See the following, I include a selection of sources whether you're right wing, centrist, left wing or whatever, it's fact not political biased propaganda:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/07/royal-mail-amazon-postal-strikes

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/amazon-cancels-royal-mail-contract-over-strike-fears-1799381.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1218937/Amazon-desert-Royal-Mail-strike-fears-leading-Christmas.html

Note also the reference to eBay, many of whose members indeed rely on Royal Mail. Royal Mail management has made strides to support the home shopping revolution- you realise you can even pay for and print of postage barcodes rather than rely on Paypal now right? The problem is all this is useless if it can't guarantee it's workers are going to show up to work to perform the actual deliveries. The Royal Mail has far from moaned about the internet killing their business, it's often been pointed out that it's a problem for them but they've always worked hard to work around the rise of e-mail rather than just moan about it as you seem to be incorrectly suggesting they do.

That's assuming you can do it yourself. Syria is hardly a hotbed of industry and innovation, and most of the Middle East is even worse. E.g. when Libya gave up their "nuclear and biological weapons program", which had been reasonably well funded and resourced over several decades had lead to only one viable weapon, a landmine spiked with human faeces.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/dec/21/politics.libya

Libya's biological weapons programme too has suffered from similar mismanagement and lack of funds, say sources; at best succeeding in producing munitions boobytrapped with human faeces that can be fatal if it enters the blood stream.

So it's not too surprising these sorts of countries decided to buy stuff from the USSR instead. Unfortunately for them the Russians had a cunning plan with weapons. Soviet weapons systems actually came in two variants - a high end one to be made in peace time and a stripped down one to be made in a war quickly and in larger quantities. The export customers got the stripped down version, known as the 'monkey model'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_model

The term was popularized in the West by Viktor Suvorov, in Inside the Soviet Army. Suvorov states that the simplified monkey model was designed for massive production in wartime, to replace front-line stocks if a war should last for several weeks. In peacetime, Soviet industry gained experience building both standard and monkey-model variants, the latter being for sale "to the 'brothers' and 'friends' of the USSR as the very latest equipment available." He also cites the benefit of disinformation when an exported monkey model fell into the hands of Western intelligence, who "naturally gained a completely false impression of the true combat capabilities of the BMP-1 and of Soviet tanks".

I.e. the monkey model looked the same or similar to the domestic version but was cheaper to make and had far inferior capabilities.

You don't go to jail...

"After a three-hour meeting in London, the Featured Artists Coalition, which emerged as a breakaway lobby group in the summer, backed the government's proposed introduction of "technical measures" to combat the rising tide of copyright theft. If they ignore two warning letters, persistent illegal filesharers should have their broadband connections throttled "to a level which would render filesharing of media files impractical while leaving basic email and web access", according to a statement after the meeting."

Source The guardian

That is pretty much entirely untrue outside the US, where people seem to think that cows can eat grain. They can't eat grain, and most of it gets shat out largely undigested. Cows eat grass.

Which is not entirely correct. Had you read the article I posted you would have understood that the European meat industry is deeply dependent on import Soya Beans (largely from South America) to feed European Cattle. What was growing on the soil before soya crops?

The European meat industry is increasingly similar to that of the U.S, short of the health-hazardous (practically de-regulated) hormonal alteration of livestock that Americans employ.

Peat sodden hill-farms are not at all representative, geographically or industrially, of the means for raising livestock that Europeans actually eat.

"It's a rule that isn't based on justice but intimidation."
Its truly fun for the Forward Intelligence Teams.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_Intelligence_Team
Note your licence plate number at a few too many protests and find your IP.
As the database would be IP and counter based, just send out a letter and 1+ the strike counter.
Soon the faces on spotter cards of people who might "instigate offences or disorder"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/25/spotter-cards
will be without home networking.
Forced to use a cyber cafe under cctv with face recognition and logging or via a friend :)
Two people sharing a computer is a terrorist cell just waiting for a sneak and peek security letter :)

Here's an article from just last month about the guys that MI5 nailed in 2006. So, no, this isn't just some security wonk dreaming this stuff up. The TSA Blog has some interesting details that were not available to the public until the trial concluded.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/french-branch-of-scientology-is-convicted-of-fraud/ or http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/27/scientology-church-fraud-france

The final point is that it's not really useful to talk about turning the world's farmland over to arable farming. It works where you've got hundreds of acres of gently-rolling countryside and you can actually plough it without your tractor rolling sideways down a hill or disappearing into a hundred-metre-deep bog. It does not work where the vast majority of farms are hill farms, which are more suited to grazing animals. I know this might be hard for people in the US to comprehend, but not all farms are rolling Iowa cornfields.

And how many trees are cut down so this seemingly benevolent and indigenous pastoral scene can be enacted? Many of the world's cows are in continents that never even had bovines until a few hundred years ago. I think you've mixed your chickens with your eggs..

Eating cow meat as a part of your diet, from wherever it comes, has an undisputedly negative impact on the environment. Another cow is reared to replace it, another tree felled for the next born human reared as a carnivore.

Recommended reading regarding our wondrously pastoral European meat-industry.