This new party would be best advised to stand a full senate team for each state and look to exchange preferences with other minor parties. The difficulty here is that the Wiki Party voters would probably also be Greens voters and the Greens might be hostile to an exchange.

Who wants to be the guy who keeps repeating a joke that was never funny?

Getting a message after it was sent is no biggie. I mean; write yourself a letter if you want to see that in action. But getting a message before it was sent causes issues (see for example; practically every sci-fi franchise). What those issues are exactly depends on how time travel works (e.g., "Timecop" or "Back to the Future" rules?), and thatâ(TM)s wide open to debate.

If a Lexra processor encountered an unaligned load or store instruction in the program that it was executing then it did the same thing that it would do for any other invalid opcode, it took a reserved instruction exception. In the second lawsuit between MIPS Technologies and Lexra, filed November 1999, MIPS Technologies claimed that because exception handler software could be written to emulate the function of unaligned load and store hardware, using many other instructions, Lexra's processors infringed the patent. Upon learning of this broad interpretation of the patent, Lexra requested that the US Patent and Trademark office (USPTO) reexamine whether the patent was novel when granted. Almost every microprocessor in the world can emulate the functionality of unaligned loads and stores in software. MIPS Technologies did not invent that. By any reasonable interpretation of the MIPS Technologies' patent, Lexra did not infringe. In mid-2001 Lexra received a preliminary ruling from the USPTO that key claims in the unaligned load and store patent were invalid because of prior art in an IBM CISC patent. However, MIPS Technologies appealed the USPTO ruling and won a favorably broad interpretation of the language of the patent from a judge. That forced Lexra into a settlement that included dropping the reexamination request before MIPS Technologies might have lost its appeal.

One interesting problem with the patent system is that one institution, the USPTO, determines whether a patent is valid but a different institution, the courts, determine whether one infringes. It is entirely possible for the two institutions to interpret a patent differently and for either a non-infringer to be wrongly convicted or an infringer to get away with the crime.

The case of MIPS Technologies v Lexra was ultimately settled out of court and the request for reexamination of the patent was dropped. To this day there is no precedent indicating that processors that execute the MIPS-I instruction set that treat unaligned loads and stores as reserved instructions, such as Lexra's, infringed the '976 patent. The patent expired on December 23, 2006 at which point it became legal for anybody to implement the complete MIPS-I instruction set, including unaligned loads and stores.

After its experience with Lexra MIPS Technologies changed all of its 32-bit cores to use its new MIPS32 instruction set which extends the MIPS-I instruction set to include other features patented by MIPS Technologies. This is similar to Intel's addition of the instruction set extensions to Pentium III in order to prevent AMD from building compatible processors.

Cores from Lexra as compared to cores from MIPS Technologies were smaller, had higher clock speed, had high performance instruction extensions, brought features (such as on-chip debug, MIPS16, write-back caches, MMU, and more) to market sooner, and were less expensive. Despite MIPS Technologies' relatively abundant resources, their product offerings in the market were inferior, their investors wanted to see MIPS Technologies defend its intellectual property, and MIPS Technologies needed to justify the license fees that other companies such as Broadcom, PMC-Sierra, and LSI Logic were paying for rights to use the instruction set for their own processors. This left MIPS Technologies little choice but to sue Lexra, despite a weak case.

Ultimately, MIPS Technologies hurt Lexra's business, Lexra hurt MIPS Technologies' business, and ARM made off with a solid dominance of the IP market. In the court case MIPS Technologies' stalled at every opportunity possible until Lexra ran out of money to fight. Because MIPS Technologies started the game with far more money than Lexra, they outlasted and Lexra was forced into a settlement one week before a trial. Though MIPS Technologies was suing Lexra, the settlement agreement involved MIPS paying Lexra money. The benefit that MIPS Technologies got in exchange was that Lexra exited the IP business. Lexra failed one year later in an attempt to establish itself as a communications chip company during the bottom of the telecom business downturn.

Some Lexra customers disabled the reserved instruction exception for unaligned loads and stores in their chip products. With such a design modification, unaligned loads and stores are treated as no-ops and can not be emulated in an exception handler. MIPS Technologies would have had no claim of infringement against such designs. Despite that, after settling with Lexra, MIPS Technologies threatened legal action against Lexra's former customers. Many companies each found it less expensive to agree to contracts that require payments to MIPS rather than to fight. This strategy by MIPS Technologies is viewed by some as extortion under threat of malicious prosecution.

he'd have to have one hell of an interview.

If they do attack, the US and South Korea should seize upon the opportunity to wreck as much of their military equipment as possible, as we did with the Iraqi army in Gulf War I, so as to limit their future offensive capabilities and degrade their military effectiveness.

In highly sensitive discussions in February this year, the-then South Korean vice-foreign minister, Chun Yung-woo, told a US ambassador, Kathleen Stephens, that younger generation Chinese Communist party leaders no longer regarded North Korea as a useful or reliable ally and would not risk renewed armed conflict on the peninsula, according to a secret cable to Washington.

Chun, who has since been appointed national security adviser to South Korea's president, said North Korea had already collapsed economically.

Political collapse would ensue once Kim Jong-il died, despite the dictator's efforts to obtain Chinese help and to secure the succession for his son, Kim Jong-un.

"Citing private conversations during previous sessions of the six-party talks , Chun claimed [the two high-level officials] believed Korea should be unified under ROK [South Korea] control," Stephens reported.

"The two officials, Chun said, were ready to 'face the new reality' that the DPRK [North Korea] now had little value to China as a buffer state - a view that, since North Korea's first nuclear test in 2006, had reportedly gained traction among senior PRC [People's Republic of China] leaders. Chun argued that in the event of a North Korean collapse, China would clearly 'not welcome' any US military presence north of the DMZ [demilitarised zone]. Again citing his conversations with [the officials], Chun said the PRC would be comfortable with a reunified Korea controlled by Seoul and anchored to the US in a 'benign alliance' - as long as Korea was not hostile towards China. Tremendous trade and labour-export opportunities for Chinese companies, Chun said, would also help 'salve' PRC concerns about . a reunified Korea.

"Chun dismissed the prospect of a possible PRC military intervention in the event of a DPRK collapse, noting that China's strategic economic interests now lie with the United States, Japan and South Korea - not North Korea."

Chun told Stephens China was unable to persuade Pyongyang to change its self-defeating policies - Beijing had "much less influence than most people believe" - and lacked the will to enforce its views.

A senior Chinese official, speaking off the record, also said China's influence with the North was frequently overestimated. But Chinese public opinion was increasingly critical of the North's behaviour, the official said, and that was reflected in changed government thinking.

Previously hidden tensions between Pyongyang and its only ally were also exposed by China's then vice-foreign minister in a meeting in April 2009 with a US embassy official after North Korea blasted a three-stage rocket over Japan into the Pacific. Pyongyang said its purpose was to send a satellite into orbit but the US, South Korea and Japan saw the launch as a test of long-range missile technology.

Discussing how to tackle the issue with the charge d'affaires at the Beijing embassy, He Yafei observed that "North Korea wanted to engage directly with the United States and was therefore acting like a 'spoiled child' in order to get the attention of the 'adult'. China encouraged the United States, 'after some time', to start to re-engage the DPRK," according to the diplomatic cable sent to Washington.

In actual reality, even in private insurance, the low-risk ratepayers subsidize the high-risk receivers.

I work for the NHS on the frontline, and binge drinking is a huge problem, but you can't charge drinkers, unless you charge the smokers and the fatties for the illness their choices cause. You'd even have to charge sportsmen who damange their ligaments running!

A nationwide Freedom of Information request by the medical magazine Pulse revealed many types of surgery, MRI scans and IVF treatment are being withheld from obese people and smokers.

In the Anglia region, NHS Bedfordshire has barred obese patients from hip and knee surgery until they loss 10% of their weight or their Body Mass Index drops below 35.

NHS North Essex requires patients to lose at least 5% of their weight, and keep it off for 6 months.

While NHS Hertfordshire patients must have a BMI under 30, while smokers have to attend a stop smoking course to have any type of surgery.

Lawyers warn that health authorities risk being sued by patients if they can prove they've been discriminated against.

In 2009-10, the top 1% of Income Tax payers were responsible for 13.9% of declared income before tax. Conversely, the same group paid some 26.5% of the money taken by HMRC in Income Tax. These figures are very close to those cited by Mr Redwood, albeit slightly different.

According to Department of Health figures, the poorest children are almost twice as likely to be obese than the richest.

Government figures published last month showed that 24.3 per cent of the most deprived 11 year-olds in England were obese, compared with just 13.7 per cent of children from the wealthiest homes.