Knowing religion is somewhat useful, as it allows the government to make plans: for example, if they can predict how many children will be going to grant-maintained schools (or whatever they're called now), they know what is worth funding (and, more importantly, they can guess how many aren't going to state schools, and thus how many classrooms they don't need to build).

Even local councils might find it useful: if a denomination is in long-term decline (as Judaism is here) they can assume that there won't be much of an increase in the need for parking around a synagogue. OTOH, if a denomination is growing, they might ins is that they set aside land for future car parking around new facilities.

That said, the French system (with an almost impregnable wall between church and state) does have a certain appeal.

We know that Jedi is an entirely fictional belief system - if Lucas were inspired to write the films to teach us about the Force, there's no way he'd have been inspired to write The Phantom Menace. Even the dark side would have done a better job.

The Commonwealth Realms all agreed to make the necessary changes at CHOGM this year, but I don't know if they've all done it (it not being particularly urgent, one hopes). I think it can be done in all the realms using ordinary legislation rather than constitutional amendment, and there's no serious opposition to the idea, so it is just a question of procedure.

AIUI (although I haven't been following too closely), part of what was leaked in the 2DAY scandal was that the Duchess was pregnant with mixed-sex twins, but there's so much idle speculation (and total rubbish) that I've no idea if that's true.

In Australia, the Pirate Party (usual disclaimer) makes submissions to relevant enquiries and official bodies, and spend quite a lot of time arguing FOI requests with the government (the Greens and various loosely-affilaited organisations do the same thing with environmental issues), but they don't have the money or personnel to lobby politicians and senior officials directly the way the MAFIAA does. On the bright side, the Greens started off like that, and they're now the third most important party in the country, so with a lot of hard work, improvement is possible.

I've never understood why Americans stick with cups rather than using weights like everyone else. Measuring easily-compacted powders in cups is a bad idea because it is rather imprecise - I always weigh when consistency matters (and eyeball when it doesn't). Measuring lumpy things by volume is a PITA too - a cup of butter or of biscuit (cookie) crumbs is a right bugger to measure by volume.

When cooking, I use imperial units mostly (except temperature), but that's partly because my imperial weights are in nice powers of two and my metric weights are in arbitrary sizes (5g, 10g, 20g, 50g, 100g, 200g, 500g in various numbers), which meansI actually have to pay attention to my arithmetic, and partly because many of the rules I learnt regarding quantities and ratios were originally in imperial units (I learnt to cook from old English books).

(Also, everywhere I've lived cups and spoons have defined volumes in ml [1]- otherwise it would be impossible to mix volumes in a published recipe - but that doesn't make them good units for solids.)

Actually, the unibody shells have been painted for a while.

It is actually trivial: require all servers their law can reach to use one of their officially-approved CAs, for security and so on, of course. Then ignore any traffic from a "legitimate' business, and get on with MITM-ing the communications with everyone else. For international messages, just block or interfere with any message to or from a user they can't MITM unless it is a recognised "good" user (i.e. big business). Problem solved, near enough.

No, the principles of the Inner Party in 1984 were purely about power, and they didn't even bother to hide it from those who felt rebellious. After all, the Thought Police were distributing copies of Goldstien's book, even if they hadn't actually written it themselves (which isn't clear).

Apart from the Scary Devil Monastery, which has a trivial but adequate CAPTCHA, some of the comp.* groups are pretty clean even without moderation. They are mostly high-volume groups, but even ones like comp.lang.lisp have a pretty good SNR (although for the comp.* groups, it might help that spamming them is likely to attract the ire of at least a few grey-hats).

If you're migrating within a highly-centralised country like the UK (except Scotland), you're mostly drawing benefits from the same pool as you are paying into, so it all balances out. If, OTOH, immigration and emigration aren't balanced in terms of the kind of people who are coming and going, you can run into problems, say, if you've relied on age as a proxy for paying into the aged-care system.

Of course, you can fix the rules to tie benefits into past contributions, but doing that is likely to create losers among those already in the system, so it is easier to fix things by controlling immigration.

There is also the philosophical point that in most systems of political theory (As far back and Republic and Leviathan), the legitimacy of a government derives from the fact that it serves the interests of its citizens. If those interests are best served with unrestricted immigration, then open borders are the correct policy: if they are best served with near-0 immigration, then that is the correct policy (after taking into account international pressure and the possibility of sanctions etc.).

That doesn't mean that restrictive immigration policies necessarily are or aren't racist in implementation - if there are no regional quotas and are simply skills vs. needs tests, a system is probably not racist, if it is full of quotas which allow immigration more easily from some backgrounds than others, it almost certainly is.

(And, before you ask "why not throw out existing people", the simple answer is that all you'd actually do is imprison them in departure lounges around the country, because no-one else would take them. Also, no-one would be stupid enough to vote for someone acting so obviously against their own interests (I hope).)

It depends on whether the people being charged through the nose for parking are locals or visitors: in my city's CBD, the daily parking charges are fairly high, but parking is free on weekends, short-term parking is cheap, and residents have free parking permits. That means that the city council makes a substantial amount of money gouging office workers without discouraging shoppers or hurting residents, which means that they are probably doing the right thing form the point of view of their ratepayers even if it is annoying to most of the rest of the municipality.

Some of them use Phorm, which is just as bad as what Google are doing. Of course, Google's real aim is to get everyone onto fast internet connections (if possible, without having to build too many of those connections themselves) so they'll stick everything in the cloud, mostly using very well-known providers of free cloud services.

(Also, if they can get your web history rather than just sniffing your connections, they get the full URLs without having to muck around with DPI and without any hassle involving HTTPS - and the subsidiary resources are less interesting to them than the pages.)

iWork is a pretty decent office suite (although IDK if it handles ODF properly): for actual spreadsheeting, Numbers is very nice (although it isn't suitable for the kind of monstrosities that Excel can be used for), and Keynote makes Powerpoint seem horribly primitive. The downside is Pages, which is quite decent for desktop publishing (far less painful than Word for anything fancy) and pretty decent for simple authoring, but not as good for moderately-complex documents - in particular, the formatting UI is horribly inefficient without using shortcuts (which also affects Keynote, but you don't tend to want to do so much formatting in a slideshow). That said, Pages complements LaTeX fairly nicely - the thins which are irritating to do in one are usually day in the other.

Photoshop would probably be the most important program to get working, since that is often mentioned as being one of the critically-missing programs for Linux.

FaceTime would be worthwhile if you have friends with iThings, but that would probably require you to pirate it. There might also be decent software on the Mac AppStore.

They used to allow arbitrary text as well as users' names as tag (I don't use Facebook anymore, so I don't know if they still do). Since they get people to upload their address books, it becomes easier to guess which MarkT you are. Those are the "shadow profiles" which sometimes get talked about.

You forgot the worst trick they have: first get their pet bureaucrats in Brussels to introduce some regulation which forces them to do something unpopular that they know is bad but is good for their mates, or, if they can't get away with that, introduce a regulation that they can misinterpret to do what they want to do - see, for example, the fiasco involving the privatisation of British Rail.

And yet Darth Mandelson kept on coming back. Of course, it helped that some of his friends were friends with News Corp, and that he was being encouraged to do what the US government (and their loyal dogs in Westminster) wanted him to do anyway.