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This kind of payoff is SOP for the Messiah.

Nearly 80 per cent of President Barack Obama's top campaign donors have been rewarded with senior United States government jobs, according to a new study.

"This is just catching up to the state of the art of the mid 90s, when people started (perfectly reasonably) ripping unencrypted cds to their hard drives. These people are now no longer criminals."

Just to nit pick. They are making the action legal in the future. However all of us that have done so in the past and might well do so again before the law comes into effect are still filthy criminals. We broke the law and we could technically still be arrested and prosecuted for it even after the law comes into effect.

Not really, this is a civil matter so you'd have to be sued by the BPI (UK equivilent of RIAA) - and even they think that format shifting should be legal: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/7299505/Millions-of-iPod-fans-breaking-law-by-copying-CDs.html
Note the last paragraph " we have never taken any action against consumers who rip CDs to computers or portable music players. Nonetheless, we do believe it would be better for personal CD ripping to be legal and the industry has made proposals to Government to achieve that." As they want to legalise format shifting as well, I don't think they're about to sue you for it.

I am not trying to be a pessimist here, but I would think there is some small loophole in the new law, that would give the British equivalent of RIAA or MPAA some leverage. Anyone knows anything about this ?

I would doubt it. If its currently illegal, they would have sued 90% of the UK population by now for breaking it. Anyone who owns an MP3 player would almost certainly be guilty.

Yeah, even the BPI realises that format shifting being against the law is stupid:

"In practice, we have never taken any action against consumers who rip CDs to computers or portable music players. Nonetheless, we do believe it would be better for personal CD ripping to be legal and the industry has made proposals to Government to achieve that.”

source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/7299505/Millions-of-iPod-fans-breaking-law-by-copying-CDs.html

They're talking about repealing the extradition treaty as well (cite).

Well, they were back in 2009 when that article was written...

They're talking about repealing the extradition treaty as well (cite).

The treaty was originally only for "terrorists" but as usual the USA has been abusing it for their own purposes

Sorry Sir, I'll get back to polishing the silver in a minute, but in case the references were missed...

Moats Ducks

The link goes to http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/. Parent doesn't realize he's not on Twitter.

Heh.. And you call the climate skeptics "deniers"?

Read it and weep.

Face it, the Hockey Team was caught red-handed. All the denial in the world won't change that.

Yes and no. The data that was already released was the "reanalysis" data which is the culmination of many, many, many observations from all around the world.

Or, as in the case of the Briffa and Jones, from a single tree. Yes, hundreds of samples were taken, but all but one were excluded before reaching the conclusions that solidified the IPCC's position. A single tree.

I guess if you look at that same data set many, many, many times it could in some way qualify as "many, many, many observations"...

Mr Connell was president of GovTech Solutions and New Media Communications. A web designer, he had created a website for Ohio's secretary of state that presented the results of the 2004 election in real time as they were released

He had refused to testify or to hand over documents relating to the systems he had created for the 2004 and 2006 elections but was compelled to do so by subpoena in October and appeared in court in Cleveland, Ohio – the state which gave President George W Bush victory in 2004 – to give a deposition the day before Barack Obama won the presidential election.

source : George Bush aide dies in plane crash.

You're not the only one.
As for "what happened"? I'll tell you what happened: A right-wing smear campaign was organised against the elected Democrat.
When Bush was in office he received approximately 8 death threats per day. That's pretty bad, but it gets worse.
Since Obama has been elected death threats against the President have risen to ~30 death threats per day. That's a 400% increase.

Changing the subject, the oxford comma debate is raging across the interwebs:

The Oxford comma is entering that zombie half-life where all dying grammatical rules survive for a while – appreciated only by the prissy and the fussy. It’s better to kill off the poor, awkward thing, rather than let it linger on, unhappily, between the covers of books published by Oxford University Press.

Actually, in apart from the UK diesel is cheaper than petrol. In the UK the fuel duty is the same for both. Basically we're getting fucked by the oil companies (it's a regular sight to see plenty of laden tankers swinging on their anchors in Lyme Bay waiting for prices to rise.

Working off the back of the motor trade, we look at it that unless you're on the road day in day out, it's just not worth having a diesel as the initial cost plus the extra fuel cost makes it difficult to recoup your money.

Those Dubai artificial "World" islands are already sinking back into the sea and they're what, 3 years old now ? I doubt this'll last 50 years beyond the arrogant asshole's death.

I don't think 'the rich' will leave.That argument is just as much as demagoguery as the 'tax-cuts for the rich' sleight mentioned in your post above.

Are you seriously saying that nobody would move from a high-tax area to a lower-tax area? Because there are plenty of examples.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/study_the_rich_are_leaving_new_jersey_a5E4Ti0z6CxWelbf6nGwOL

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-business/article-23735878-darlings-50-percent-tax-sends-tycoons-to-switzerland.do

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124260067214828295.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8466160/Rich-Chinese-consider-leaving-China.html

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/07/20/more-rich-americans-renounce-u-s-citizenship-for-lower-taxes/

It won't be 100% of course; some rich folks will stay, even if taxes get really high. (There's a cynical old rule of thumb: if you want to hang onto your money, do the same things that retired Senators and Congressmen do. There will always be a way for the rich to keep their money, as long as retired politicians have money.) And some people will just pay the taxes. But there are limits, and the more severe the tax rate, the more it will encourage people to leave.

I don't think it's fair to accuse me of demagoguery.

steveha

They weren't charged under US law because 1 they aren't in the US, 2 the situation is still developing, 3 they have enough clout to likely avoid charges that others would face. Bribery http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/18/news-corp-global-investigation-bribery Obstruction. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/8639107/Phone-hacking-Rupert-Murdochs-American-legal-woes-mount-up.html

Russia's approach also seems to work: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/piracy/7713375/Somali-pirates-captured-and-released-by-Russian-navy-have-died.html

Uhhh...been there done that. Didn't you ever see "Black Hawk Down"? That was the USA trying to keep enough order that famine relief could be brought in to help the starving. Instead every warlord and jihadist snatched everything that wasn't nailed down for their troops and for good measure used the US soldiers as target practice.

If the EU wants to go in there fine, but we kinda have our hands full with trying to keep the reps from tossing our credit rating in the hopes of stomping on the poor and elderly some more by making sure they don't get their checks next month (I swear they need to change their logo from an elephant to the monopoly guy lighting a $100 bill while standing on the poor) not to mention the THIRD war the president now has us involved in, showing us that "Hope & Change (TM)" had fine print that read "I Hope nobody notices the only Change was from a R to a D on the door".

Finally, and I'm sure I'll get hate for pointing it out but I don't give a fuck, the truth is the truth, everything I've seen proposed with regards to "climate change" (I love how they switched it from global warming, so no matter what happens the name fits) has been a GIANT SCAM like carbon credits, led by Rev Al Gore who has set himself up to be a carbon billionaire and just to show his balls are REALLY big has the nerve to claim farting around on his Lear jet and having a home so large it has its own basketball court indoors is "carbon neutral" since he pays himself credits from his own company which would be like moving money from your left to right pocket and claiming its "wealth redistribution" and demanding a tax break for it!

Oh and it might interest some here to know one of the chief architects of credit default swaps, you know the thing that helped slaughter the economy? Well guess who is writing the rules on cap & trade? Yep from the very same people who brought you "lets treat the market like Las Vegas baby!". And I would also point out that NEVER, not even once, have you seen Rev Al Gore come out for increased tariffs on China or India, two of the biggest growing polluters on the planet and who have already said they won't play the carbon swap game. Why? Because he and his friends MAKE MONIES off of them silly!

So I'm sorry but until we see a plan that doesn't consist of "hey you should give large chunks of money to me and my friends, while helping China and India to completely bury your economy!" then I say they can all fuck right off. We have three wars, an economy that has lost more than 20,000 FACTORIES to outsourcing not jobs mind you, whole factories, and a shamefully porous border that is killing Americans daily. So frankly we have bigger things to worry about that guarding some probes. Let the EU do it.

The Russians have a fine solution -- just release them immediately, in the middle of the sea, with no fuel. After all, you certainly don't need a trial not to hold someone.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/piracy/7713375/Somali-pirates-captured-and-released-by-Russian-navy-have-died.html

You forget that NASA, being a government agency, can't sit on research and inventions; it goes to the benefit of all of us.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/5893387/Apollo-11-moon-landing-top-15-Nasa-inventions.html
http://space.about.com/od/toolsequipment/ss/apollospinoffs.htm

Last I checked, independence had support of about 20% of the Scottish population. Seems quite unlikely that the majority will vote for independence. Given that Scotland gets a lot of money from the rest of Britain, only balanced out by North Sea oil, which is running out, I wouldn't be surprised if it had a lot more support in England than Scotland.

Personally, I'd like to see independence for Greater London. The rest of us would be a lot better off without it.

well 69 seats and a whopping historic landslide victory at the last elections kinda takes a huge dump on your 20% number.

we'll see when 2014 comes along And as for north Sea oil running out... sorry but that's crap.. take a look at http://www.oilofscotland.org/ for some simple truths on that.. also have have massive reserves off the west coast and have a large stake on the Rockall claim.. so erm.. kinda blows yer paltry arguments out the water.
oh and as for your poll... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1535193/Britain-wants-UK-break-up-poll-shows.html
also remember that those morons at the telegraphs said that in 2009 support for the sNP and independence was at an all time low..... then they win an hostoric election victory against the odds of the single transferable voting system that was specifically designed so that no single party had a majority?

sorry but your just plain wrong.....

fuck you it's not british IT'S SCOTTISH! and after the referendum in 2014 Scotland will be independent

Lets hope so, you porridge wogs cost us a fortune. At least £11 billion of English money heads for Edinburgh each year

Manufactures of fluorescent bulbs are making false about the brighness fro their products.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/6110547/Energy-saving-light-bulbs-offer-dim-future.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8407047/Libyan-rebel-commander-admits-his-fighters-have-al-Qaeda-links.html
And messing up Libya? Libya was up to now one of the more prosperous African countries, with a semi-decent standard of living, even compared to places like south african republic. It also has a large amount of gold, and also wasn't particularly happy about selling oil to the americans. This , as usual is just another instance of installing a government that is at least for now supposed to have deep ties to CIA and as such will bow to US whims.
As for the elections... that points a flaw in so-called "democracy" in the USA, and definitely isn't an argument for the insurgents. You might as well be telling that being fat is healthy since a large amount of americans is obese.

Have a look at this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/world-war-2/7961211/Hitler-had-Jewish-and-African-roots-DNA-tests-show.html Note that by Ashkenazi (!) is meant a people of non-semitic ancestry: just like the vast majority of Talmudists and Palestine's post 1948,9 colonizers: eastern Europe's Khazar descendants, phallus-worshiping mongoloids Talmudized somewhere in the 8th or 9th century after Christ. The anti-Semite myth is quite pervert: the accusers do convict their own self. Ask yourself why on earth the Yiddish tongue has almost nothing in common with Hebrew, except symbols, that is.

to see that at least they are actually detecting and disciplining breaches, since I was already assuming the worst.

If they were to have the right security and ethical culture, it's not implausible that they have a high detection rate when running a full access log, hopefully cross-referenced to some sort of case allocation log, in which case 900 out of ~242k is less than 0.4% of staff in a 3 year period. On the other hand it is possible the 900 is only from audit sampling, in which case since the sample size is unknown the actual rate can only be anything higher than that.

Incidentally this is bigger news due to it's related nature with the News of the World investigation. Since the recent Slashdot story the "news" paper has been shut down and today there has been arrests of both the editor and a sub-editor at the time on suspicion of phone hacking and corruption allegations. The investigation and the story seems to be turning it's attention to allegations of bribes paid to the police for information, having hit what surely is as deep as the depravity goes on the phone hacking (I've said this a few times before and been proven wrong) by discovering targets included the phones of families of victims of the 7/7 London bombing, soldiers killed in Iraq/Afghanistan and murdered children.

Three networks are planned, with the Britain to China route to be extended to Singapore, and built within a decade.

Passengers on a second route would travel to the north of China and through Russia and on to Germany, where the network would join the European railway system.

A third network would extend south through Vietnam, Thailand, Burma and Malaysia

You can read about it http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/china-to-build-highspeed-rail-link-to-europe-20100309-pvuf.html there, among any other place that has a financial interest in keeping a close eye on these things

Watch the videos others are posting about the ghost cities.

Slashdot is not usually the place I gather my financial information from, especially when 90% of them are links to the same series of videos from one source, who just happens to be selling its own financial advice.

Frankly, if your only evidence is youtube links from other people whos only exposure to this economy is from stories they have read fed out through 'other' investment houses with their own book to sell, your opinion is less than worthless. I never said there weren't ghost cities, I never said they were only on the interior of the country, and I never said they had sane lending policies. I said they have RELATIVELY saner lending practices. There is a reason I use the words I do, and it is because I am trying to point out the difference between the two economies. To give you a car analogy, it is the difference between someone saying that "cars are relatively the same when comparing a Ferrarri to a Kia, and you returning with the counter that it is stupid to claim that a ferrarri is the same as a Kia, when that was explicitly not what was said.

To be blunt, I don't think you have the background to understand what the differences are between China and the US, mainly because your sourcing things like youtube videos and not an analysis of your spreadsheets comparing negative interest rates, and internal lending requirements. If you are seriously interested, you need to understand why the western media has been running stories about 'the bubble' in China for the better part of this century. The point is to try to influence decision makers by introducing a sense of uncertainty and risk, by trying to compare apples to oranges, to influence the decision making process of those who make the important decisions within companies.

Here's a link from 2006 saying the same thing;
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2943687/China-grows-by-11pc-as-fears-of-bubble-deepen.html

The previous year, 2005;
http://www.globegazette.com/news/opinion/article_1e59656c-273e-5889-abf9-62e64c19b88b.html

How about 2003;
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=LXc0AAAAIBAJ&sjid=rI4EAAAAIBAJ&pg=6557,627471&dq=china+bubble&hl=en

I have been involved with some financial entities, and this was part of my research for many years, going back further than a decade. It is quite clear to me that there is a bias, and honestly this is to be understood easily when you understand the way that money flows. Money doesn't give a shit what youtube videos you post, all it cares about is where it is easiest to move to, and more importantly to move OUT. Like I said, I have been hearing this story for a decade, and when you can pull your nationalistic ego out of the equation, you will find it easy to understand

While what you say is true in general, vitamin D specifically is a much bigger deal than that. One example of recent research:
"Vitamin D 'triggers and arms' the immune system: Vitamin D is crucial to the fending off of infections, claims new research."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7379094/Vitamin-D-triggers-and-arms-the-immune-system.html

That is about infection, but related processes may be at work related to dealing with cancer. Humans are just not adapted to spending all day in a cave and then moving from cave to cave in enclosed boxes. But that is pretty much how most people now live in the 21st century in industrialized countries most of the time. Other things like autism may be related to vitamin D deficiency (in part), too:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html

Humans are also just not adapted to eating so few vegetables.

See also, for how to retune your taste buds:
"How to escape The Pleasure Trap! By Douglas Lisle, Ph.D. and Alan Goldhamer , D.C., Authors of The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health and Happiness"
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Huge nutritional and psychological breakthroughs are happening, but it seems people don't want to pay attention because of lifestyle issues related to fears about dietary changes. Last year I tried to give a copy of Dr. Fuhrman's "Eat for Health" to a couple, but they refused it saying they had a lot of "cookbooks" already. Recently, one of them had a painful medical procedure (angioplasty/stenting) costing at great expense (presumably covered by insurance) but avoidable with aggressive nutritional intervention (which would have been free and mostly painless after a taste adjustment period of a few weeks).

See:
"Scientific Studies Show Angioplasty and Stent Placement is Essentially Worthless"
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
"In the most recent study investigators reviewed 61 trials, involving 25,388 patients, in a meta-analysis comparing angioplasty and stent placement with no treatment or medications alone. A meta-analysis pools numerous studies on the same subject. The findings indicated that there was no evidence that angioplasty and stent placement for coronary artery disease resulted in fewer heart attacks or deaths when compared to patients with the same level of disease who were not treated in this manner.
Trikalinos TA, Alsheikh-Ali AA, Tatsioni A, et al. Percutaneous coronary interventions for non-acute coronary artery disease: a quantitative 20-year synopsis and a network meta-analysis. Lancet 2009; 373(9667):911-918.
Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, ne

You mean this guy?

I don't see how it's hypocritical for him. If some infidels are willing to kill other infidels for him - inshAllah, he would be stupid not to use the opportunity. He knows full well that the end result of this will be beneficial for him (madrases and boot camps all over Libya to train more fighters for his cause), and not so much for the infidels.

Well sure, China tends to take the term Poo Poo Platter a little too literally for my taste.

I would have thought he was on the list for decades? Was he on and off the list multiple times? How much does that cost?

Honestly? Probably $2.7 Billion US - the blood money for the Lockerbie victims.

Exactly. For those that don't know Al Gore, or Rev Al as I call him for his Lear jet riding rampant hypocrisy, is setting himself up to be a carbon billionaire by getting the government to jump on board and force folks and businesses to buy indulgences...err I mean credits, so that they can sin...whoops meant pollute to their hearts content.

If you wanna see someone that is for treating the planet better that isn't a complete self serving douche the ONLY one I've seen so far is Ed Begely Jr, who actually walks the walk and sacrifices himself to show that one can live without polluting, and then used his own money to do a tour showing ways to cut down on pollution. He is a stark contrast to Rev Al farting around in his personal jet or 10MPG limo while having the brass balls to say he is carbon neutral because he pays himself from his own company carbon credits which is like taking money from your right pocket and putting it in your left and calling it wealth redistribution and demanding a tax break for it.

Frankly BOTH sides of this debate have been beseeched by the Rev Al types, those that have figured out ways to make assloads of money if AGW comes out one way or the other and are therefor trying to make it come out their way. Then add in the leeches like Goldman Sachs have already set themselves up to blow some really big bubbles if carbon credits manages to pass? The whole thing just stinks on ice on BOTH sides. It is sad to see science turned into a practice bought and sold, but when you are talking about billions upon billions of profits to be made by the winner I guess one shouldn't be surprised.

No kidding. Could have fooled me about the decrease in SPAM.

I run my own MTA for my vanity domain. I check spam twice, once before accept to reject outright SPAM and once after accept to take into account user preferences. My aggressive ACL checks against forged and black addresses, I have an up to date spamassassin and custom rules, and use greylisting services and such. SPAM to my mailboxes has not declined by the massive amount Cisco is reporting. It has gown decreased slightly, about 7% since January, but no where near that 7x decrease. I wonder if this isn't just Cisco trying to sell some kind of spam filtering appliance.

Here's a perfect example of something that cropped up last week: "Pi ckOutYo urPr ef er enceTa bl etsEs sen ti alsWe bsto re" (Pick Out Your Preference Tablets Essentials Webstore) Writing a regex pattern to match those broken words and not tag things like eBay and iPod was a freaking PITA.

That $20 a day is a very good job in China. That's $7k a year (spam is a 24/7 business after all) compared to the $3k you'd get working in Foxconn, for example.

"Serious restrictions on freedom of expression"? It would be nice to know WHAT part of Europe you are referring to

Well, for example, the fact that in the U.K. you can place anonymous gagging orders on newspapers so that they can't publish facts about you.

Or also in the U.K. how you cannot play music to your horses because that is considered a "public performance."

In terms of pure demographics, there is some indication that if "current birth rates" continue, France could be majority-Muslim in about 25 years: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3601901/Is-France-on-the-way-to-becoming-an-Islamic-state.html

Of course, that's predicated on a host of assumptions, most notably that immigration & birth rates will stay constant.

I think it's ridiculously unlikely that French Muslims are going to suddenly turn into fundamentalist sharia adherents, about as likely that the millions of Muslims here in the US are suddenly going to decide it's time to put aside their comfortable, peaceful middle class lives and wage jihad. I'm not particularly concerned about that, and anybody who is worried about that should probably get their head checked. But *literally* speaking, it is entirely possible for France to be a majority-Muslim society in our lifetimes.

The millennium bridge sways because people are walking incorrectly.

You're holding your phone wrong.

A common response for engineers and software developers is to blame the users for doing it wrong. Usually the users win. No matter what, though, the developers lose.

The North West passage was first opened in 1998, if you statement is correct, it would be immediately after the first opening. Correlation isn't causation, but it certainly would have born looking at. Chances are the people studying this have already examined the ballast option and found it less likely given how far the algae would have to travel and the fact that's it's not appearing near shipping lanes. Here's another, better, version of the article.

Not if you accelerate the instrument to match speeds.
Its not rocket science... Oh wait, it is... Never mind.

In any event, we've done it before. Continue your education here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7812623/First-spacecraft-to-land-on-an-asteroid-due-back-on-Earth.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/02/010214075526.htm

It depends how strong it is. I work for http://www.npitx.org/ where we deal with allot of people that have this. Hell, I am even diagnosed with a "high functioning" version of it. Most people diagnosed have a slue of other problems (Dyslexia is mine and a few others I can live without)

That being said, here is a better article about it:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/8594037/Essex-hacker-Ryan-Cleary-co-operating-with-police-as-they-question-him-over-other-alleged-cyber-crimes.html

Sounds like he might even have a case here. Most people use Asperger's as kind of a "catch" all and this article is piss poor on details :P

This guy will be the scapegoat: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/canada/8113296/Asian-man-boards-plane-disguised-as-old-white-man.html

  'We have reviewed the circumstances involving this screening and determined that our officers acted professionally and according to proper procedure.'

If we don't like the procedures we need to change them. Profiling is seen as discriminatory in this country (US). What country(ies) are we using as a case study for our procedures anyway? How is Europe's TSA equivalent standards? Are we closer to them than Israel?

Not to sound insensitive, but a decade out from the only real major foreign non-war attack on the US in decades do we really need to base our TSA security on the scale of a country that gets rocket attacked and suicide bombed on a weekly, if not daily, basis.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8565020/Nuclear-fuel-has-melted-through-base-of-Fukushima-plant.html

And in an effort to show 'playing with Atoms' was safe in the UK - they had a policy of removing organs and go so far as replacing the bones of the dead with broomsticks.

So don't worry - your leaders won't ever let you down in the UK and fail when it comes to Fission power.

Link to the article

Essentially every Nordic country? That's Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Iceland?

Meanwhile, in the aforementioned Nordic countries....

• Officers charged for assaulting whistleblower
  Cops probed for beating handicapped driver
  Police brutality caught on tape
  Nigerian man beaten to death by Trondheim Police
  Danish police beating unarmed civillians
  Five Finnish narcotics police to face misconduct charges
  Photographers pepper-sprayed in Iceland

Mind you, I don't doubt that each of these countries has a better police force than the US. I'm sure they have the best police on Earth!

But even so, it seems to me that Nordic civilians might occasionally have cause to record their own generally-trustworthy police.

Ah, that explains why my petition to save the Australian blobfish was turned down!

As a UK resident I have heard a little more mentioned about this. There is a link below basically saying they are going to use the IWF as a model:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/8419812/ISPs-discuss-central-blacklisting-body-for-piracy-sites.html

The IWF work by forced proxying for sites that are on the ban list. Then the proxy can just filter out the individual pages of a site that they object to.

Obviously whatever they do will be possible to bypass, but the idea is just to make this as tricky as you can without causing too much fuss. Most people in this country did not know the IWF existed at all until they made a complete screw up by proxying all traffic to wikipedia through their servers. The idea of this will just be to make it slightly harder to obtain hooky content, not impossible.

India has had a problem with Google, Mapquest and everyone else since the Mumbai Terror Attacks in 2008.

Remember that? 164 dead, over 300 wounded and the terrorists used Google Earth to pan the attacks and figure out where to go.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/3691723/Mumbai-attacks-Indian-suit-against-Google-Earth-over-image-use-by-terrorists.html

So maybe India has a reason to have a problem with Google Streetview

tl;dr ;)

Seriously, sorry for getting you so riled up. I don't have time to dig out and link to backlogs of supporting articles / data, so I shouldn't have said anything in the first place.

I do appreciate your detailed discussion on the matter, however, and I will be taking a closer look at some of your discussion points. (e.g., I hadn't really looked into the science of recycling batteries, I just know there's a lot more 'dangerous' stuff in them in comparison to an aluminum or iron core motor, so I just assumed the recycling process has to be more difficult, dangerous and require more energy than simply melting down the metal scraps and recasting...) Many of them do seem like alarmist statements that have been thoroughly debunked already, but I will refresh my current reading on the latest AGW topics.

I must call bluff on your claim that AGW policies won't reduce the mitigation abilities in underdeveloped countries, however. In the name of cutting carbon, AGW supporters have actively tried (although thankfully not successfully) to block development of so-called 'dirty' energy sources in countries where having that energy available can literally mean life or death to the local populace.

I say, if they have the capability to build it, let them build coal- and natural gas-fired generating stations. It will raise the standard of life for everyone in the area, provide jobs and potentially provide enough supplemental work-energy so that people then have the time and energy to tackle building dikes or irrigation systems to prepare the region for the next wet/dry season. I'm not saying have no emissions controls on the plants whatsoever, but be sane about it and limit the emissions controls requirements to those chemicals that have been proven to cause direct harm. Don't just block them in a knee-jerk reaction, simply because they'll emit more CO2. CO2 feeds us, remember, by feeding the plants that we need to live...

Only as a brand, they don't make jeans.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2873672/Levi-Strauss-shuts-down-last-factories-in-America.html

"norendition Lara Fist RT @anonesc v @KforKallisti "Ryan has little to do with #LulzSec besides running IRC. All 6 members of @LulzSec are fine & safe." #AntiSec 7 minutes ago" link

"Ryan Cleary, an alleged member of the hacking group behind the claim, LulzSec, was arrested in Essex this morning by specialist cyber crime officers from Scotland Yard." link

Given the ease with which they traced him, I can't help wondering if LulzSec is overrated and the security expertise of the PCeU is over rated. What the security people don't seem to understand is that groups like LulzSec are not formal organizations like PCeU but more a loose collection of individuals drawn together through a shared ideology. As such there is no command-and-control structure to take out. As someone once wrote - you can't fight an idea.

Meanwhile, floods and fires continue. I have always thought that the first major impact on society will be on food supplies, with a concomitant increase in food prices. This will at first bring civil unrest in poorer countries, as food takes up an increasingly large proportion of their livelihood. Eventually these high food prices will have a severe economic impact on wealthy nations as well.