The aliens are just here to protect us from the terrible secrets of space.

This has to be done.

Finally, the team point out that since the technique makes few assumptions about the languages themselves, it can be used on argots that are entirely unrelated.

Once again, Star Trek is ahead of the curve.

How odd. I remember Chernobyl (and Challenger) and no one panicked. A lot of Welsh sheep farmers were pissed off, but that was about it.

Basic Edgucation (litteracy)

The irony.

System admins don't need and generally aren't capable of making C-langauge source changes for using software in normal configs.

That's news to me. I think you might underestimate sysadmins.

How does forcing developers into not making use of Free software help anyone?

The nations of the world had just spent the past ten years shipping large, delicate items around the world, in a war zone no less. Even if that was a real issue, the obvious solution would have been to build a factory in North America. That is after all how American companies solved the problem of selling tabulators, calculators and computers in Europe.

The problem with a lot of British computer companies was, as usual, lack of vision. LEO Computers was an offshoot from a bakers; the engineers themselves always thought that they would be "found out" by the "real" computer companies before too long, and it would all be over for them. They were proud of their work, but had a small-world, almost cottage industry attitude. It's no wonder that the Americans wiped the floor with the British and European companies.

In retrospect it turns out that the work on the Colossus wasn't really lost; the guys who had built the Colossus still retained the knowledge, even if they couldn't tell others about it directly, but they cross-pollinated places like Manchester and Cambridge with early knowledge and ideas. That in turn gave us machines such as the LEO, was was really a phenomenally successful line of machines and broke new ground in establishing computers are useful machines for "trivial" tasks, rather than something only a scientist would ever need.

Computing in the UK really had a head start on the US in many ways, but in usual form it was underfunded and lacked vision; in many ways it suffered from the 50's post-war glow that "Britain Will Always Be Great". Once the Americans got in on the act they of course wiped the floor with everyone, and then socialist government meddling in the 60's just about finished off any hope of the UK compan[y|ies] being able to fight back.

The Z3 and Z4 are great accomplishments, and Konrad Zuse is poorly remembered, but that's nothing to do with the Baby being the first machine to run an internally stored program. It was one of the first Von Neumann architecture machines, which is why it's significant.

An article for the Daily Mail is not the same thing as a public declaration of Government policy.

Perhaps we could, I don't know, wait until David Cameron actually announces this policy, rather than just believing everything you read in the Daily Mail, particularly as the Daily Mail are so hilariously biased on this subject in the place. Not to mention it's the Daily Mail.

This is like this news stories you see where they tell you what someone is going to "announce" later. If we already know what they're going to say, why are you telling me before they've said it?

Whack job zealots? This is the UK. Most people quietly giggled at this, then went and did something more interesting, like Christmas shopping or the pub.

The only people who'll pretend to be outraged by this will be the Daily Mail, and we'll all giggle at them when someone makes a joke about them on Have I Got News For You.

The census is supposed to be an accurate snapshot of the state of Britain, if people lie on it, they should be prosecuted.

Does that include all the people who insist on putting "Church of England" but haven't been inside a church their entire adult life and don't even know if they were ever baptised?