In most if not all European countries, the amount of money that any party may spend on election campaigning is strictly limited, and is remarkably low. Volunteer canvassing is permitted but wages or expenses count towards the total spending on an election. Each candidate in an election must deliver a deposit to the electoral authorities to cover their costs, but this is refunded if that candidate receives over a set and small proportion of the vote.

The end result of this is that new political parties can and do crop up from time to time, and new parties have a chance to challenge established parties and even surpass them. This has happened several times in UK politics, most recently when a nationalist, anti-EU party called "UKIP" was formed and so increased its share of the vote that the established parties had to listen to it.

This all comes about by limiting spend on politics, and thus permitting change in the political world. This is one of many lessons the USA badly needs to learn.

The standard way of getting around censorship laws is to use a VPN with an endpoint somewhere that doesn't enact stupid bans like this. So, from the spooks' point of view you go from being able to see which websites persons of interest are looking at, or knowing who to look at next because they're using a VPN to hide what they look at, to a state whereby VPNs are commonplace and not an indicator of dubious dealings.

You lose valuable intelligence-gathering ability, and gain precisely nothing other than allowing a bunch of extremely dim politicians to claim that they have "Done Something", using much the same tones as a toddler using a lavatory for the first time.

Version 2 will come along when IPv6 becomes common.

Right now, most of these cheap and terrible Internet of Things (IoT) devices are in peoples' homes, and these are in the main going to be on domestic broadband. This typically has one IPv4 address set by DHCP, with a NAT router supplied by the broadband supplier; this router is typically set to hide all NAT addresses from the public Internet. This means that the vast majority of these insecure rubbish IoT devices are hidden from the malware.

IPv6 has vastly more addresses than IPv4, hence one domestic address could be supplied with an initial allocation of perhaps 20 public addresses per address. To connect their devices to the Internet, I would think it likely that the broadband suppliers would cheap out as much as possible. Gone would be the NAT router, and instead a wifi portal and hub would be all the customer would get; this would likely lack a firewall hence all the local IoT devices would be exposed on the public Internet.

Therefore, IPv6 will herald a huge increase in the amount of IoT malware on the Internet, to the extent that dreadful device-bricking things like this current malware might actually be a force for good, albeit by destructive and evil means.

Every so often, police just sort of drop on some counterfeiters. Criminals vary, you see; some almost want to be caught but can't quite stop what they are doing.

An example of this was a tale my father told, of a UK post office postmaster who had invented a fairly good forgery scam. This all occurred in the days before the UK decimalised its currency; non-UK readers may wish to take a deep breath at this point, since the currency had 144 pennies to a pound, with coins of varying denominations from half-pennies upwards.

This postmaster had worked out that the three penny coin (known as a "thruppenny bit") was made of an easily reproduced brassy alloy and was simultaneously too small to receive much notice, but still valuable enough to be worth forging. This he did, for decades, until caught by chance. A policeman came to the post office house door, on routine enquiries, and was met by the man's wife.

"Oh, so you've finally caught him, have you" was her greeting to the police officer.

The policeman agreed that he had, and proceeded to find out what he had caught the man at.

Oh, I heard a story of a UK counterfeiter of coins who was actually even worse than this guy.

For twenty years or so, the UK has replaced one pound notes with a gold-coloured coin (now replaced by a two-part coin of two different alloys) which rapidly became a target for coin forgers, because it could be duplicated so easily. One coin forger decided that rather than the usual trick of striking coins out of zinc then colouring them appropriately, he would use an alloy that was actually the right colour to start with.

He was fairly rapidly caught for passing dud coinage, and was questioned by the police about how he had done the deed. The basic point of coin forgery is that you end up with more money than you started with, but this apparently was a nuance this fool hadn't appreciated. He had bought sheets of this particular alloy and had stamped out fake pound coins from it. When asked how many fakes one sheet made, first the police officers interviewing and then the man's own lawyer started laughing at him.

Forging pound coins this way cost more than a pound each!

If you read the reliability reports (like you seemingly have not) then you will discover that Tesla cars sit right at the top of the unreliability index. They are even less reliable than known bad vehicles such as the modern Landrover and Rangerover series, and lag far, far behind Honda, Toyota and Mazda internal combustion vehicles.

Even modern diesel vehicles are much, much more reliable than are Tesla electric vehicles, despite being a nightmarish blend of anti-pollution systems.

So, though your point on the simplicity of modern electric vehicles is well made and I acknowledge that they are much simpler than ICE vehicles, the actual reliability index does not bear out your point.

Sorry.

These comments from Goldman Sachs are as good an example of overt evil in the name of profit as can be imagined. I define evil as the infliction or prolongation of suffering in the name of some other gain, and this fits the definition exactly.

At least these monsters are not arguing for the cessation of general vaccination in the name of selling treatments for preventable disease.

No, I don't think that this will occur. What is more likely is that several major governments will buy the research instead and simply give away the treatment.

The reason I say this is that a person with Alzheimer's Disease costs money to look after. Even if the state isn't paying, then the person is still going to be a drag on the State since people who are looking after the dementia sufferer are not doing other things which would be producing tax revenue. Whichever way you slice it, demented people are a drain on the resources of a State.

However, if a government subsidises a partial cure or prevention system for Alzheimer's Disease, then several things happen. Firstly, fewer people get dementia before they die of old age, so the costs of caring for the elderly are reduced. Secondly, the government acquires an air of beneficence, which is politically good for them. Thirdly, research like this also ties into other research into other diseases.

By way of illustration of point three, there has over the last fifty years or so been a great reduction in heart and vascular disease. Part of this can be attributed to reduction of smoking (and switching from smoking tobacco to vapes), but by no means all the reduction. Some of the reduction is down to removing various toxins from the environment, such as coal smoke and lead in petrol (gasoline). However, what if living conditions have reduced the incidence of a background infection which was also contributing to the problem? Shouldn't we be on the look-out for things like this?

The UK Government have recently decided, in their great, mighty and beneficent wisdom, that they shall do something to "protect children from internet pornography". Their Cunning Plan is to force all adult-themed websites to verify that users are of adult age, using one of a number of age verification services, some of which may well be UK government-sponsored. Needless to say, very few people actually care to self-register on what amounts to a register of masturbators, nor would many people care to have a list of which sites they visit available for a vast array of Government agencies, prodnoses and tabloid journalists to see. UK civil servants have a long-standing record for being quite incredibly bad at keeping sensitive information under wraps. Tricks such as encrypting data on a CD (because regulations say they must) and writing the password on the CD (because whoever wrote the regulations did not foresee such creative stupidity) have been seen in the past.

Furthermore, the age-clade of 13-18 year olds (mostly males) will also wish to view such sites and will for the most part be unable to do so, not being able to lay hands on hacked age verification credentials. So, both people who value their privacy, and adolescents who cannot obtain the age verification tokens, will be looking to use VPNs to get at the, err, reading materials.

People are for the most part cheapskates. A free VPN would seem like a wonderful gift to them, but a logged Chinese VPN is very much a poisoned chalice, especially when those doing the logging realise what a wonderful source of blackmail material they have on their hands.

Protein synthesis works by translating DNA to RNA, then feeding the RNA through a cell structure called a ribosome. Three nucleotide bases code for one amino acid, so the RNA steps through the ribosome three bases at a time (each trio is called a codon), adding one amino acid to the protein chain each time.

There are more different codons than there are amino acids in nature, but here Life does something clever; the extra codons code for the same or similar amino acids.

Theoretically it should be possible to repurpose the extra codons to represent new amino acids; this team look to have chickened out on this one and instead introduced new nucleotides to give entirely new codons, and to use these entirely new codons to add on new amino acids.

If I recall correctly, this isn't a new thing at all. I vaguely remember these sorts of emails being sent out several years ago.

However, this sounds a lot more like some Johnny-come-latey has heard of the fabulous sums being reaped by the porn extortion racket (yeah, right) and has decided to try a new angle on the scam. Given how sensitive the powers that be are to terrorism these days, and given how brutal the likes of China and Russia can be if they have a point to make and a worthless moron to make it with, I would really not like to be the poor schmo who is trying this one. I wouldn't even want to be the owner of that particular Bitcoin wallet.

Oh to work in a company that rewards long-term employees like this!

I currently work in the IT department of a UK university. Employees are classified into pay grades, and once a person reaches the top pay of any particular grade, there they stay until they either change jobs inside the university, or leave entirely. Around here, the peak grade for IT workers as opposed to managers is generally Grade 7; this has the unpleasant effect that as soon as people start hitting top of grade and becoming superstar workers, they depart for pastures greener to get more money. Those that stay either fossilise into a role, or switch to management. Ace techies rarely make good managers.

I would rather beg to differ on this point. At the moment personal automotive transport is sticking with hydrocarbon fuels because they are so convenient, and because batteries are slow to charge, hold too little power and worst of all, are hideously expensive.

Once battery costs are reduced somewhat, possibly by the development of effective flow batteries or possibly by some other innovation, then personal EVs will start to become more commonplace.

Nukes are useful, necessary even for a number of reasons. First and foremost nukes deliver power and lots of it all the time, which heavy industry absolutely requires; batteries are not yet capacious or cheap enough to store power in sufficient quantity to make up for the patchiness of renewables.

Secondly, the world still has a lot of high-level nuclear waste that really needs destroying in fast-neutron reactors; it also has a lot of plutonium which ought really to be classified as "Really dangerous high-level waste". Plutonium is useful mostly for making bombs, so the less of it about the better.

Finally, apart from vehicle fuel much of the world's energy requirement is heat, rather than electrical or chemical power. Small, sealed-for-life nuclear reactors powering district steam heating would go a long way towards replacing gas as a heating fuel.

Her argument makes sense only when you look at the context it is made in. She is the leader of a party which held an election recently, thinking that their main opponent was so utterly useless that the result would be a massively increased majority for them. In this assumption, she and her party were wrong, because the opposition rightly surmised that telling outright lies and promising untold riches stolen from "the rich" via tax, borrowing and printing more money would increase their vote share by persuading the younger and stupider voters to vote for them.

This technique worked.

Mrs May is now working with a greatly reduced majority, and cannot steamroller through unpopular or just plain wrong-headed legislation at will.

This is why we are seeing this transparent pleading and attempts at persuasion; any attempt to impose legislation against companies who will in the main simply ignore her and her stupid laws is going to fail. Britain is also in the process of leaving the European Union, and once it has done so will drop down to "nowhere very much" in terms of economic clout when it comes to negotiating with technology giants.

So, mindless drivel from now on will be the order of the day, and indeed has always been so with politicians and encryption. Ever since the written source code to Phil Zimmermann's PGP was smuggled out of the US, the public has had access to strong end to end encryption, and the laws of physics and mathematics thus trump the laws that can be dreamed up by politicians.