When I said about a commercial disadvantage I meant towards other search engines, portals and start pages; not News Aggregation websites.
For example if typing 'CNN' (and all the others) into Windows Live Search brings up the CNN website but Google brings up nothing (because google have de-listed CNN after refusing to let google aggregate their news) then Google certainly will have a commercial disadvantage to Windows Live Search and others. After a while people will stop using Google as their start page or even as a Search Engine if prominent media websites (which as previously stated have amongst the highest unique hit rates) are absent from Google.
This would work both ways though. People only use Google as their address bar because they are pretty certain the website will come up. National newspapers and other mainstream media websites are normally some of the highest traffic websites (in terms of unique hits) on the internet for any specific country, therefor by not linking to the media websites Google would also be doing themselves quite a lot of harm.
If people typed in searches like 'www.nytimes.com', 'www.cnn.com', 'www.bbc.co.uk' into google and it didn't mention the respective websites then a lot of people would probably start switching their homepage away from Google.
I therefore doubt Google will consider de-listing mainstream newspaper websites. It would give Google an immense commercial disadvantage to their rivals!
I don't some of the top newspapers in Belgium will see their traffic "plummet to zero" because their not listed on google.
Media organisations are in the unique position that they are able to readily attract hits without using search engines like google as they already have a massive advertising medium - themselves. Have you ever visited a national newspaper webiste by searching for "national newspaper" in google?
I know I haven't and I bet it is quite rare that people discover their sites that way.
"I mean, since the info is true, does it legally have any bearing if PJ is one of IBM's lawyers, a real person, or the Easter Bunny?"
There certainly are legal consequences if PJ is infact the Easter Bunny. Massive consueqences indeed!
For at the moment Easter Bunnies do not in fact have any legal rights in the USA or any other country. Many laws would need to be changed and the source of his/her easter eggs found and appropriately taxed!
I think the point of my post was that there is value in printed material.
I like to think of myself as a member of the "younger generation", but when I'm studying or at the university library printed encyclopaedias are much more useful.
If you are not currently at a computer then to view wikipedia you must first boot it up and type in / click on a bookmark to wikipedia then look up the article. On most computers this takes anywhere in the range 2 - 5 minutes. There is no way it would take that long to pull out the volume from a bookcase and flick to the right page, thats more like a 30 second operation.
Additionally, about many academic subjects (unlike TV series) Britannica contains a lot more useful information that lecturers are likely to be impressed by.
If on the other hand I want to look up some information on the band I'm currently playing on my computer I'll use Wikipedia every time, but unfortunately I don't get to spend all day doing this.
Additionally, the encyclopaedia Britannica is predominantly a printed encyclopaedia, whereas Wikipedia is entirely a digital / online encyclopaedia.
The two are in less competition than many people realise. Sure wikipedia probably killed off Britannica's on-line subscription revenue dreams but - although I do not know their subscription figures - judging on subscription figures for similar print media which has transferred to the web (newspapers, dictionaries, other encyclopaedias) I bet it was extremely low anyway.
Encyclopaedia Britannica's printed edition is still doing pretty well. Personally I think it is far better than Wikipedia for times when I am studying through books at my desk, but Wikipedia is better for times I want to quickly lookup something whilst using the internet.
I bet that is the way it will stay for quite some time, the printed and online worlds suit quite different situations,...hence the slow uptake of e-books.
"Another government passing an idiotic and unenforcable law!"
Ummm I take it you didn't RTFA.
This is a proposal from a 6 member panel at the bottom end of the Norwegian Government. Thankfully, it's still unlikely the actual Norwegian parliament will even look at a bill based on the proposal (since it isn't yet even in bill form!!!), let alone make a law based upon it.
Two major problems have occurred here:
1) People should RTFA before posting!!! 2) Slashdot should stop people from submitting extremely misleading summaries. (and FireHose just makes the situation 10x worse due to point 1).
If playing computationally demanding games is important to you then it is simple really, upgrading Windows is pretty much always a big mistake.
Every new version of Windows inherently runs at least slightly slower than the previous (and often much slower). I am still using Windows 2000 as games tend to run much faster with it than with Windows XP. I upgraded to XP but then went back to 2000 for that bit extra performance bonus...my computer has decent specs but downgrading is still better than wasting a few bucks on a RAM upgrade!
The USA is a strange place. Here in the U.K. a university student would probably recieve extra marks in modules just because he/she was using networks like Tor.
After all, it's academia, as long as the university keeps getting enough students in (for which they get thousand of pounds for each student off of the government) then why would they care?
It seems to me the problem lies with vested commercial interests. Once these infiltrate an academic institution, the focus is no longer purely about research but also about the commercial interests of the sponsor institutions. Such vested interests cannot be good for the long-term academic principles of any institution.
I saw that but it's only for talking about the one satellite, what about the vast, vast majority of the debris?
Besides, despite going on and on about the Chinese satellite incident, the article states that the low-altitude stuff is most dangerous. Personally I think the article is just badly written by someone who appears to know very little on the subject and keeps confusing different things.
Nice attack piece on China and Russia. An alternative summary could read: The evil Chinese and Russians don't care and create space debris just for kicks; whereas we, the noble U.S.A., do care, it's beside teh point that we just happened to have actually created more (and we don't even bother mentioning other space programs like the ESA or the Japanese because they aren't communist and are therefore also O.K.).
One important question though the article doesn't seem to mention is whether the space debris will plague future generations (when space travel may well be more common place). Won't most of this low-level space degree simply get burned up sooner or later or is that kind of like saying "well plastic pollution does biodegrade eventually"?
" The judge did warn against 'wholesale surveillance' of the population, though.
The judge in this case was a complete and total idiot. He can warn all he wants to, but he just set a legal precedent that says they can if they want to.
I think you are the total idiot. His legal precedent will specifically go against such widespread GPS tracking as that is what he ruled. If any instance of the cops, the feds or anyone performing such is discovered then they will be facing charges themselves, as they will be breaking the law. Whether they still do it or not is be side the point, they will be acting illegally.
Personally I suggest you buy yourself a tin-foil hat as you seem to be that sort of privacy obsessed "they feds are out to get me" loony.
This is one obvious reason the whole "everyone should use public transport" argument is disingenuous. If everyone used public transport, UK Plc would go bust within months.
That's not how economics works. If no-one brought fuel then UK plc would go through the roof and foreign debt (one of the British economy's current biggest problems) would decrease massively. If everyone used public transport and didn't buy petrol, they would either have more money to spend on other taxed items (public transport for start which is taxed at the company profits level) or if they put the money in the bank, the extra tax from interest payments would more or less make up for the difference. Taxes would almost certainly be altered but the only effect tax and charges can have is to either encourage or discourage specific expenditures, they don't effect the overall "money in the pot", just where it goes.
At the end of the day the only change would be that far less money flows out of the U.K. and into countries like Saudi Arabia and Norway. The fundamental point being that a reduction in consumption never hurts the economics of a country or economic entity (in fact as stated above it helps it to the amount of the net price of those consumables), the only ones who are hurt are the specific companies who produce those consumables.
"Looked at purely in economic terms, railways are a commercial nonsense and always have been. As far as I'm aware, there is no heavy rail system anywhere in the world that competes successfully with other modes of transport on price alone, nor even that makes a profit without government subsidy to drive it."
Although somewhat true, other forms of transport (i.e. roads and planes) do actually receive massive subsidies via methods such as road/airport building projects. Where as the cost of building and maintaining rail infastructure is pretty much always completely incorporated into the per mile cost of transport, this is rarely the case for road transport. Also roads use up an absoultly enormous amount of land area, in cities in particular, road transport infrastructure (roads, driveways & carparks) often take up about 60% of the available land., This is an absolutely massive economic (not to mention ecological) cost which is almost never taken into account.
Also, the cost of road usage (particularly car usage) is on average about double that of just the price of the fuel due to vehicle depreciation and maintenance (although slightly less for trucks and lorries) however this is rarely taken into account, by individuals at least.
Finally as you point out, there are several indirect - and very hard to calculate - economic advantages from rail transport which governments rarely take into account; probably because they know won't be credited for them when they subtly help the economy and citizens' quality of life 10+ years later.
"Their reservations do not seem to be held in good faith. Nor are they using good faith methods in support of thier beliefs."
From reading a fair bit about the enquiry, I agree with what you are saying.
What is worrying is not so much what the Bush Administration has actually so far done, but the obvious mentality they have towards what should be a strictly scientific issue. Just like the catholic church, the bush administration have decided their opinion (which just coincidentally happens to mimic that of their energy industry sponsors) and doesn't want anyone else concluding otherwise.
Such mentality is extremely worrying for American scientific research, in fact it's the very sort of attitude which many of the scientists who have migrated to the USA have wished to escape! The only difference seems to be that this scientific persecution is on commercial grounds rather than on the usual religious or racial grounds.
(note: I said commercial grounds and not economic grounds because global warming based policies would only really affect an extremely small proportion of the USA economy, e.g. the energy industry)
Although I agree somewhat with your point, I think you're greatly oversimplifying the issue. After all a privately owned company still has shareholders; the difference is just that not everyone can go and buy those shares as easily.
There are many different types of stockholder and although I agree going public inevitably opens up the company to the ones just looking for short term gain, its erroneous to think all stockholders think that way (many of the most savvy investors realise investing means potentially going in for the long haul). After all, unless your a hedge fund manager or such, then the chances of you making money from buying and selling stocks in the short term (i.e. less than a few years minimum) are actually pretty low.
Personally, I think the problem isn't as much about stockholders only being concerned about the short term - unless the company starts loosing money and/or avenues of revenue, when this happens stockholders do tend to panic and want random things changed - the problem is the possibility of stock holders seeing a good quality, well run, company (which happens to sell OSS) and buying a stake because they can see the company has potential but then attempting to shift the company towards a more conventional business model. This usually means less resources going towards the actual open source development and more emphasis on the revenue generating services on the side. I worry companies like Red Hat have been greatly affected from this stockholder driven change.
"Ugh THAT IS NOT EVOLUTION. An evolution is a change to better suit the environment, NOT a result of people's apathy and laziness."
Actually, "An evolution" can be any sort of change, besides evolutions as the result of "apathy and laziness" are actually one of the most common "evolutions" observed in evolution (i.e. species gaining an advantage by loosing energy intensive features which are no longer needed).
While "An evolution" is a correct term, it could perhaps be better understood as "a mutation" and it can be any change good or bad. In no way does evolution imply a beneficial change, its just that the beneficial changes are what are mostly observed as over time animals adapt to better suit their environments as the beneficial mutations/evolutions generally allow those individuals to become dominant as they have a better chance to survive and reproduce.
It should be noted however that many of the unique aspects evolved into various animals (e.g. hair/skin/coat colour and other aspects of appearance), aren't necessarily beneficial changes just changes which happened by chance.
By the way, lynguists do tend to class such changes in the general use of languages as "evolutions", due to the fact that evolution is a totally accurate term to use for the gradual changes observed in many languages.
"I think this is a real test case of whether the notion of the UK as a nation holds any actual power in the World."
I don't agree at all. I think that historical events and affairs along with the specific treaties and circumstances of the two countries will be the major determining factor in their relationship.
If the U.S.A., China or any other country was in Britain's position, their relationship with Russia would be mainly based on the various elements I described (along possibly with others), rather than on some sort of 'world-wide power rating' that the country has. Even specifying such a league is impossible due to the complexity of the many individual relationships. For example I would presume a deportation between Russia and China would be more likely than one between Russia and the U.K., not due to China necessarily being a 'more powerful nation' than the U.K. but because Russia and China have always been a little closer than Russia and the U.K. (who until recently have always been quite hostile towards each other).
"If the UK does not take a strong, principled stand on this issue, then I feel that our identity of "British" is very probably meaningless"
I fail to see how this has anything to-do with the Britain's national identity. The victim himself was originally a Russian national anyway.
There is quite a large disparity between that case and this one however in that the case you mentioned was a local offence that was not politicaly sensitive and not in the legal area for which diplomatic immunity is for. This case however is politicaly sensitive and may or may not involve the Russian government, unlike the other case, there are many overriding reasons why the Russain governemnt would not wish to hand over the suspect.
Maybe, but in that case I think the media themselves would be the "weapon of mass destruction" rather than the actual explosive device.
For example: In the 1930's a radio broadcast of H.G. Well's "War of the Worlds" book caused panic in Manhatten also. I think it would be universally agreed that in that case it was the radio station (i.e. the media) rather than the book (i.e. the device) which was to blame for the panic. I think the same would apply in any situation regarding a dirty bomb.
Making x blocks of a critically important city center unlivable is certainly mass destruction.
That would count as a Weapon of Mass destruction. Fortunately a dirty bomb can't do this! The media love their scare stories stating that a dirty bomb would cause such destruction but it is totally at odds with all the research which basically shows that the most lethal part of a dirty bomb is the conventional explosives themselves. It would marginally increase radiation levels, but considering people don't tend to grow food in the middle of cities this would not really do much harm. In no way is it a "weapon of mass destruction". The customary article provides real basic info along with some good links.
every time we put in a new nuclear power plant a terrorist gets a weapon of mass destruction!
The idea that terrorists could obtain nuclear weapons grade material and then actually use it to create a thermo-nuclear device is absurd. Its not like someone can just walk into the reactor building of a nuclear power plant and sneak some highly fissile plutonium into their pocket and walk out (for starters, they would be dead by the time they reached the door). If they could, why would they not instead steal it from one of the many nuclear power plants dotted throughout various Asian countries which have only a fraction of the security and safety measures of nuclear plants in western countries. The only feasible way to steal fissile material would be to 1) secretly acquire the highly specialised handling and transportation equipment needed and 2) they would have to somehow forcibly takeover almost the entire plant - all without anyone finding out.
They could also try fly a large plane into the plant but it probably wouldn't do much as for decades nuclear plants have been designed to withstand plane crashes. Even if it didn't withstand the crash (which it would anyway) there may be some radiation released but that almost certainly wouldn't cause a chernobyl style "nuclear fire" disaster in all but the oldest nuclear power plants (certainly not in any of the proposed designs).
So how exactly do you justify the statement: "every time we put in a new nuclear power plant a terrorist gets a weapon of mass destruction"?
Out of interest, why is the x64 version almost 50% bigger? I realise that this is somewhat inherent in 64 bit processor designed apps, but never thought it was anywhere near that much.
Slashdot Mirror
When I said about a commercial disadvantage I meant towards other search engines, portals and start pages; not News Aggregation websites.
For example if typing 'CNN' (and all the others) into Windows Live Search brings up the CNN website but Google brings up nothing (because google have de-listed CNN after refusing to let google aggregate their news) then Google certainly will have a commercial disadvantage to Windows Live Search and others. After a while people will stop using Google as their start page or even as a Search Engine if prominent media websites (which as previously stated have amongst the highest unique hit rates) are absent from Google.
This would work both ways though. People only use Google as their address bar because they are pretty certain the website will come up. National newspapers and other mainstream media websites are normally some of the highest traffic websites (in terms of unique hits) on the internet for any specific country, therefor by not linking to the media websites Google would also be doing themselves quite a lot of harm.
If people typed in searches like 'www.nytimes.com', 'www.cnn.com', 'www.bbc.co.uk' into google and it didn't mention the respective websites then a lot of people would probably start switching their homepage away from Google.
I therefore doubt Google will consider de-listing mainstream newspaper websites. It would give Google an immense commercial disadvantage to their rivals!
I don't some of the top newspapers in Belgium will see their traffic "plummet to zero" because their not listed on google.
Media organisations are in the unique position that they are able to readily attract hits without using search engines like google as they already have a massive advertising medium - themselves. Have you ever visited a national newspaper webiste by searching for "national newspaper" in google?
I know I haven't and I bet it is quite rare that people discover their sites that way.
"I mean, since the info is true, does it legally have any bearing if PJ is one of IBM's lawyers, a real person, or the Easter Bunny?"
There certainly are legal consequences if PJ is infact the Easter Bunny. Massive consueqences indeed!
For at the moment Easter Bunnies do not in fact have any legal rights in the USA or any other country. Many laws would need to be changed and the source of his/her easter eggs found and appropriately taxed!
I think the point of my post was that there is value in printed material.
I like to think of myself as a member of the "younger generation", but when I'm studying or at the university library printed encyclopaedias are much more useful.
If you are not currently at a computer then to view wikipedia you must first boot it up and type in / click on a bookmark to wikipedia then look up the article. On most computers this takes anywhere in the range 2 - 5 minutes. There is no way it would take that long to pull out the volume from a bookcase and flick to the right page, thats more like a 30 second operation.
Additionally, about many academic subjects (unlike TV series) Britannica contains a lot more useful information that lecturers are likely to be impressed by.
If on the other hand I want to look up some information on the band I'm currently playing on my computer I'll use Wikipedia every time, but unfortunately I don't get to spend all day doing this.
Additionally, the encyclopaedia Britannica is predominantly a printed encyclopaedia, whereas Wikipedia is entirely a digital / online encyclopaedia.
...hence the slow uptake of e-books.
The two are in less competition than many people realise. Sure wikipedia probably killed off Britannica's on-line subscription revenue dreams but - although I do not know their subscription figures - judging on subscription figures for similar print media which has transferred to the web (newspapers, dictionaries, other encyclopaedias) I bet it was extremely low anyway.
Encyclopaedia Britannica's printed edition is still doing pretty well. Personally I think it is far better than Wikipedia for times when I am studying through books at my desk, but Wikipedia is better for times I want to quickly lookup something whilst using the internet.
I bet that is the way it will stay for quite some time, the printed and online worlds suit quite different situations,
"Another government passing an idiotic and unenforcable law!"
Ummm I take it you didn't RTFA.
This is a proposal from a 6 member panel at the bottom end of the Norwegian Government. Thankfully, it's still unlikely the actual Norwegian parliament will even look at a bill based on the proposal (since it isn't yet even in bill form!!!), let alone make a law based upon it.
Two major problems have occurred here:
1) People should RTFA before posting!!!
2) Slashdot should stop people from submitting extremely misleading summaries. (and FireHose just makes the situation 10x worse due to point 1).
If playing computationally demanding games is important to you then it is simple really, upgrading Windows is pretty much always a big mistake.
...my computer has decent specs but downgrading is still better than wasting a few bucks on a RAM upgrade!
Every new version of Windows inherently runs at least slightly slower than the previous (and often much slower). I am still using Windows 2000 as games tend to run much faster with it than with Windows XP. I upgraded to XP but then went back to 2000 for that bit extra performance bonus
The USA is a strange place. Here in the U.K. a university student would probably recieve extra marks in modules just because he/she was using networks like Tor.
After all, it's academia, as long as the university keeps getting enough students in (for which they get thousand of pounds for each student off of the government) then why would they care?
It seems to me the problem lies with vested commercial interests. Once these infiltrate an academic institution, the focus is no longer purely about research but also about the commercial interests of the sponsor institutions. Such vested interests cannot be good for the long-term academic principles of any institution.
I saw that but it's only for talking about the one satellite, what about the vast, vast majority of the debris?
Besides, despite going on and on about the Chinese satellite incident, the article states that the low-altitude stuff is most dangerous. Personally I think the article is just badly written by someone who appears to know very little on the subject and keeps confusing different things.
Nice attack piece on China and Russia. An alternative summary could read: The evil Chinese and Russians don't care and create space debris just for kicks; whereas we, the noble U.S.A., do care, it's beside teh point that we just happened to have actually created more (and we don't even bother mentioning other space programs like the ESA or the Japanese because they aren't communist and are therefore also O.K.).
One important question though the article doesn't seem to mention is whether the space debris will plague future generations (when space travel may well be more common place). Won't most of this low-level space degree simply get burned up sooner or later or is that kind of like saying "well plastic pollution does biodegrade eventually"?
" The judge did warn against 'wholesale surveillance' of the population, though.
The judge in this case was a complete and total idiot. He can warn all he wants to, but he just set a legal precedent that says they can if they want to.
I think you are the total idiot. His legal precedent will specifically go against such widespread GPS tracking as that is what he ruled. If any instance of the cops, the feds or anyone performing such is discovered then they will be facing charges themselves, as they will be breaking the law. Whether they still do it or not is be side the point, they will be acting illegally.
Personally I suggest you buy yourself a tin-foil hat as you seem to be that sort of privacy obsessed "they feds are out to get me" loony.
Or that Ipods are capable of lasting for an entire year.
At the end of the day the only change would be that far less money flows out of the U.K. and into countries like Saudi Arabia and Norway. The fundamental point being that a reduction in consumption never hurts the economics of a country or economic entity (in fact as stated above it helps it to the amount of the net price of those consumables), the only ones who are hurt are the specific companies who produce those consumables.
"Looked at purely in economic terms, railways are a commercial nonsense and always have been. As far as I'm aware, there is no heavy rail system anywhere in the world that competes successfully with other modes of transport on price alone, nor even that makes a profit without government subsidy to drive it."
Although somewhat true, other forms of transport (i.e. roads and planes) do actually receive massive subsidies via methods such as road/airport building projects. Where as the cost of building and maintaining rail infastructure is pretty much always completely incorporated into the per mile cost of transport, this is rarely the case for road transport. Also roads use up an absoultly enormous amount of land area, in cities in particular, road transport infrastructure (roads, driveways & carparks) often take up about 60% of the available land., This is an absolutely massive economic (not to mention ecological) cost which is almost never taken into account.
Also, the cost of road usage (particularly car usage) is on average about double that of just the price of the fuel due to vehicle depreciation and maintenance (although slightly less for trucks and lorries) however this is rarely taken into account, by individuals at least.
Finally as you point out, there are several indirect - and very hard to calculate - economic advantages from rail transport which governments rarely take into account; probably because they know won't be credited for them when they subtly help the economy and citizens' quality of life 10+ years later.
"Their reservations do not seem to be held in good faith. Nor are they using good faith methods in support of thier beliefs."
From reading a fair bit about the enquiry, I agree with what you are saying.
What is worrying is not so much what the Bush Administration has actually so far done, but the obvious mentality they have towards what should be a strictly scientific issue. Just like the catholic church, the bush administration have decided their opinion (which just coincidentally happens to mimic that of their energy industry sponsors) and doesn't want anyone else concluding otherwise.
Such mentality is extremely worrying for American scientific research, in fact it's the very sort of attitude which many of the scientists who have migrated to the USA have wished to escape! The only difference seems to be that this scientific persecution is on commercial grounds rather than on the usual religious or racial grounds.
(note: I said commercial grounds and not economic grounds because global warming based policies would only really affect an extremely small proportion of the USA economy, e.g. the energy industry)
Although I agree somewhat with your point, I think you're greatly oversimplifying the issue. After all a privately owned company still has shareholders; the difference is just that not everyone can go and buy those shares as easily.
There are many different types of stockholder and although I agree going public inevitably opens up the company to the ones just looking for short term gain, its erroneous to think all stockholders think that way (many of the most savvy investors realise investing means potentially going in for the long haul). After all, unless your a hedge fund manager or such, then the chances of you making money from buying and selling stocks in the short term (i.e. less than a few years minimum) are actually pretty low.
Personally, I think the problem isn't as much about stockholders only being concerned about the short term - unless the company starts loosing money and/or avenues of revenue, when this happens stockholders do tend to panic and want random things changed - the problem is the possibility of stock holders seeing a good quality, well run, company (which happens to sell OSS) and buying a stake because they can see the company has potential but then attempting to shift the company towards a more conventional business model. This usually means less resources going towards the actual open source development and more emphasis on the revenue generating services on the side. I worry companies like Red Hat have been greatly affected from this stockholder driven change.
"Ugh THAT IS NOT EVOLUTION. An evolution is a change to better suit the environment, NOT a result of people's apathy and laziness."
Actually, "An evolution" can be any sort of change, besides evolutions as the result of "apathy and laziness" are actually one of the most common "evolutions" observed in evolution (i.e. species gaining an advantage by loosing energy intensive features which are no longer needed).
While "An evolution" is a correct term, it could perhaps be better understood as "a mutation" and it can be any change good or bad. In no way does evolution imply a beneficial change, its just that the beneficial changes are what are mostly observed as over time animals adapt to better suit their environments as the beneficial mutations/evolutions generally allow those individuals to become dominant as they have a better chance to survive and reproduce.
It should be noted however that many of the unique aspects evolved into various animals (e.g. hair/skin/coat colour and other aspects of appearance), aren't necessarily beneficial changes just changes which happened by chance.
By the way, lynguists do tend to class such changes in the general use of languages as "evolutions", due to the fact that evolution is a totally accurate term to use for the gradual changes observed in many languages.
"I think this is a real test case of whether the notion of the UK as a nation holds any actual power in the World."
I don't agree at all. I think that historical events and affairs along with the specific treaties and circumstances of the two countries will be the major determining factor in their relationship.
If the U.S.A., China or any other country was in Britain's position, their relationship with Russia would be mainly based on the various elements I described (along possibly with others), rather than on some sort of 'world-wide power rating' that the country has. Even specifying such a league is impossible due to the complexity of the many individual relationships. For example I would presume a deportation between Russia and China would be more likely than one between Russia and the U.K., not due to China necessarily being a 'more powerful nation' than the U.K. but because Russia and China have always been a little closer than Russia and the U.K. (who until recently have always been quite hostile towards each other).
"If the UK does not take a strong, principled stand on this issue, then I feel that our identity of "British" is very probably meaningless"
I fail to see how this has anything to-do with the Britain's national identity. The victim himself was originally a Russian national anyway.
There is quite a large disparity between that case and this one however in that the case you mentioned was a local offence that was not politicaly sensitive and not in the legal area for which diplomatic immunity is for. This case however is politicaly sensitive and may or may not involve the Russian government, unlike the other case, there are many overriding reasons why the Russain governemnt would not wish to hand over the suspect.
Maybe, but in that case I think the media themselves would be the "weapon of mass destruction" rather than the actual explosive device.
For example: In the 1930's a radio broadcast of H.G. Well's "War of the Worlds" book caused panic in Manhatten also. I think it would be universally agreed that in that case it was the radio station (i.e. the media) rather than the book (i.e. the device) which was to blame for the panic. I think the same would apply in any situation regarding a dirty bomb.
That would count as a Weapon of Mass destruction. Fortunately a dirty bomb can't do this!
The media love their scare stories stating that a dirty bomb would cause such destruction but it is totally at odds with all the research which basically shows that the most lethal part of a dirty bomb is the conventional explosives themselves. It would marginally increase radiation levels, but considering people don't tend to grow food in the middle of cities this would not really do much harm. In no way is it a "weapon of mass destruction". The customary article provides real basic info along with some good links.
The idea that terrorists could obtain nuclear weapons grade material and then actually use it to create a thermo-nuclear device is absurd. Its not like someone can just walk into the reactor building of a nuclear power plant and sneak some highly fissile plutonium into their pocket and walk out (for starters, they would be dead by the time they reached the door). If they could, why would they not instead steal it from one of the many nuclear power plants dotted throughout various Asian countries which have only a fraction of the security and safety measures of nuclear plants in western countries. The only feasible way to steal fissile material would be to 1) secretly acquire the highly specialised handling and transportation equipment needed and 2) they would have to somehow forcibly takeover almost the entire plant - all without anyone finding out.
They could also try fly a large plane into the plant but it probably wouldn't do much as for decades nuclear plants have been designed to withstand plane crashes. Even if it didn't withstand the crash (which it would anyway) there may be some radiation released but that almost certainly wouldn't cause a chernobyl style "nuclear fire" disaster in all but the oldest nuclear power plants (certainly not in any of the proposed designs).
So how exactly do you justify the statement: "every time we put in a new nuclear power plant a terrorist gets a weapon of mass destruction"?
Out of interest, why is the x64 version almost 50% bigger?
I realise that this is somewhat inherent in 64 bit processor designed apps, but never thought it was anywhere near that much.
Sorry, you are quite correct. Thankfully it is no longer afflicts the majority of countries around the world however.