Suppose your philosopher king came to you and said, "We want to set up our own national network with privacy/neutrality as the core principle, away from the prying eyes of our tyrannical neighbours".

What would you do differently? Can much of the problem be engineered out, at least at the network layer?

Is it just end-to-end encryption? Or anonymised routing? What's the collection of technolgies you'd use to make things at least better?

Surely this is the excuse you've been waiting for to buy night vision goggles?

I know this will get modded down into oblivion, but...

Seriously, writing a list of slashdot memes is the kind of crap that passes for funny on these days? It's so uncreative, I bet fucking Clippy suggested it to you. (Although if he had, at least he'd also have highlighted that you're supposed to have a comma before speech quotes.)

In all honesty, I don't know why I still read slashdot. Every time I feel like a Fiat owner driving back to the garage for one last rust treatment. And FWIW I don't know wtf TBBT is, would it have killed you to include a wiki link?

Retard. If my mum were home I'd get her to drive me round yours for a good slap.

The insidious bit of this particular story was that there was a supposed cover-up in which doctors were hiding the "truth" for various reasons. At that point her choice was:

a) Newspaper: if you get the MMR jab, your child might get autism, which is an incurable disability requiring a lifetime of support. Even Tony Blair refuses to say whether his kids have had it so it must be true, and the government/NHS is lying to you.
b) Doctor: if you don't get the MMR jab, your child might get measles which in a few cases can lead to complications or even be fatal.

Ordinary, lottery-playing people aren't really in a position to judge the probabilities involved, even were the newspapers' position true.

I don't really blame her; she's probably doesn't have the kind of technical background that innoculates you against quackery. Nor do I really blame Andrew Wakefield; he's proven himself to be a poor scientist and generally a colossal douche, but in science there are mechanisms in place to deal with that (peer review etc). The real blame does indeed lie with the newspapers, who don't have a fucking clue about science and will send out the same guy who does the cinema reviews to cover a medical story. He of course studied Hispanic literature or whatever and doesn't know the first thing about science reporting, and falls prey to every logial fallacy and unconscious bias along the way.

Newspapers should take truth and accurate reporting seriously. They should have a science editor with a scientific background who can check the work of the reporters. If they're not going to do it, and the consequence is panics and deaths, then perhaps we (i.e. our government) need to do it for them via a regulator.

Note to musicians. Here is a possible business model.

1. Set up a retarded hipster startup - something like http://www.hellolamppost.co.uk/
2. Get dumb people to fund you (if you're struggling, maybe you need to dumb down your concept a notch or two)
3. Pay yourself that money and do what you really want instead
4. Wait for the world to lose interest in your startup, fold, and GOTO 1

Does he not get tired of having no money? Even if he has food and a home, at some point surely he has to buy stuff, even if only video games?

Here is a vision of our glorious future:

http://www.musicforthejiltedgeneration.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/1-043-0437fd39-Aphex-Twin.jpeg

The things that stop me installing CM are:

(a) last time I looked (a year or two ago) their forums and instructions were basically unintelligible to me; is it now more streamlined?
(b) not knowing whether updates are easy - do you get a notification when an update is available, and is it then easy to install?

I appreciate it's just a bunch of hackers fiddling with undocumented hardware, so it's always going to be a bit slapdash.

I use my phone for talk, text, calendar, alarm, occasional web browsing on the go, random photography, and toilet gaming. I don't need all the exciting social and lifestyle integration that mobile platforms assume you want.

So I'd certainly go for one, provided (a) there's some affordable, nice-ish hardware (like my Nexus 4), and (b) I'm not beholden to the network operator for software updates.

Being free of that pervasive "am I happy with Google slurping this?" feeling every time I do anything on my Android phone would be worth it.

In general, there is food for thought here.

But the bit that most amused me were his complaints about large companies and their patent warchests. If you turn patents into a weapon, you're starting an arms race, and guess what? The guys with the most money can afford the biggest guns. And despite his assertion that he's not going after the little guy, I wonder whether he's also not going after the big guy, i.e. finding his own niche in the chain of bullying.

Just because a system (the patent office in this case) permits an immoral act (patenting something obvious with no intention of using it in any form except as leverage for extortion) doesn't absolve you of your responsibility to act morally.

Capitalism, on the other hand, does require you to act immorally in this case. (Because if you don't, your competitor will, to your disadvantage. Hence patent war chests.)

Now all we need is an apostrophe robot that check's all our submissions!

Apparently (google tells me) ants live about 90 days. Let's say that humans live about 90 years. In that case, saying "The ants can probably be in any place within their enclosures in less than a minute..." equates to "The humans can probably be in any place within their enclosures in roughly 6 hours, but even in these simple spaces, they organize into these spatial groups."

"It wasn't the Tory party that sold it off, it was Ofcom, but you can guarantee it's the Tory party that instigated this investigation."

According to the BBC, "The NAO's move was prompted by a complaint by Labour MP Helen Goodman." I don't think the Tories care particularly how much money was raised; ideologically, they don't want the government to have money. You could argue that cheap 4G licences will translate to higher profits and so more tax revenue... if any of these companies paid their taxes, that is...