So does every other major ISP in the country.

Which does in no way somehow make it ok.

But it does make it understandable. The current Government has little to no regard for civil liberties but likes to project the illusion that they are a liberal party. Passing laws to censor the internet would damage this illusion, give MPs the chance to debate the rules and Lords a chance to delay/revise them. This is not an acceptable situation for the Government, especially after the problems with ID cards and ninety day detention; thus they opted to threaten the ISPs in to joining their voluntary schema. This avoids the oversight and glare of an actual law while having the appearance of free choice.

Obviously there was no choice; the alternative to IWF would have either bankrupted the ISPs (not good for those who own them) or forced a huge rise in prices (which would have been blamed on the those owning the ISPs). Any complaints made by the ISPs were dismissed using the dual shields of "fighting terrorism" and "protecting the children", which made it impossible to build any real support in the media for their cause. Given the choice between dropping a rock on your head and having someone else drop a boulder on you, there's only one way to go. The ISPs did the absolute minimum required to keep the Government off their back and stay in business. The only people to blame here are the current ruling party, those who make policy for them, those who fund them and those who vote for them.

The problem with fat client software is not that it's equal or inferior to a well-built website. It's definitely superior.
...
There's certainly a wide range of applications that will always remain fat client only

Websites cannot be definitely superior and unusable in certain situations. As it is they are not definitely superior as anything that can be done on a website can be done using a local client. However not everything that a local client can do is possible on a website (unless you start using embedded applications and turning the web page in to a local client within a web browser frame).

I also take issue with the implication that all local clients are fat clients. It's perfectly possible to have a system with a thin, locally hosted GUI and a much larger server backend. You can even use HTTP to communicate between the two. The use of a local GUI in such situations gives you (the software designer/programmer) much more control over the user experience. Your well-crafted UI isn't going to fall apart because a user has decided to use Chrome or the latest version of Safari has introduced a rendering bug.

To repeat my original post: web interfaces have their place but they are not a replacement for properly implemented local GUIs. For something that is relatively simple and for which the zero installation benefit of the web outweighs the downsides, an HTML/Flash/Javascript interface is the way to go. That not withstanding, the functionality available to the local GUI designer is a superset of that available to the web designer. The local GUI isn't limited to HTTP as a transport mechanism. The local GUI isn't subject to vagaries of browser "standards" compliance and to crash briefly back on topic; there is no web UI toolkit that approaches Qt for ease of use, cleanness of interface or cross platform functionality.

Yes - because web frontends are the silver bullet that solves all of our client-side needs. In fact, why bother having general purpose computers out side of data centres? Instead we can have a global installation of five (for example) really big computers and we can access them using dumb internet terminals. Luckily the infinite bandwidth and uninterrupted global connectivity on offer, combined with the well enforced WWW standards means that even the most complex of GUIs can be provided via the browser. Why do we even bother with proper operating systems when everything man could need from a computer can be provided via a TCP/IP stack and XULRunner?

Oh wait, because even the best web based GUIs are primitive and unresponsive compared to a well designed, well implemented local interface. With Qt it's possible to create a native GUI that runs on all major desktop platform (and even Solaris) with less effort than it takes to get even a moderately complex web interface running correctly on IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera.

Web interfaces are excellent for simple tasks like email and feed reading; they are terrible when deployed in more complex arenas. Even when you take in to account proprietary, binary only workarounds like Flash and Silverlight.

It is distinctly non-trivial to set up a secure, trustworthy, reliable internet payment system. It's a financially worthwhile undertaking for the high per-capita income markets, but not for the rest of the planet; predominately due to the vast array of regulation and red tape one would have to jump through for each new country.

This is compounded by the problem that many middling-to-lower markets have onerous Governments that are often outright kleptocracies. These kind of Governments don't take kindly to payment systems they don't control and can't easily manipulate.

South American nations could make their citizens' lives easier in this regard by converting Mercosur in to a regulatory union: with common bank controls and free movement of wealth, if not a common currency. This would greatly increase the viability of an internet accessible payment system being profitable and so successful.

While the parent poster has clearly had too much coffee, the overall point made is valid. There are so many colour/pattern matching games available it's no surprise that this one failed to make an impact. It must be disappointing for the author, but he has to be honest with himself as to whether the game is actually any good and if there's any space in market for it at the chosen price point.

Obviously it would have been better if these questions had been asked and researched before spending six months and thirty-two grand on development; but what's done is done.

Exactly. To all the people complaining about police involvement: it's what happens when you create a society in which only the police have any real authority. Teachers have been cowed by law and the ever increasing threat of lawsuits. In such situations they can either ignore any disruption which, with children being children, will ultimately lead to a situation where teaching anyone anything is impossible; or they can call in the people that society has gifted the only effective authority to. The first option will prevent those who want to learn from learning, the second affects only the disruptive pupil.

I find the involvement of police in the education system abhorrent. But if it is to end the rights and powers of parents and pupils with reference to schools must be reduce and those of teachers increased.

Oh, and on an vaguely related note. American schools have "guidance counsellors"? When did they decide to base their schools off Star Trek: The Next Generation?

How much beer can you brew? Beer requires hops, which requires arable land in the correct climate; these are finite resources and beer producers will be in competition with innumerable producers of other goods for the same resources.

If beer consumption dramatically increased with the reduction in working hours (which is a pretty safe bet in many countries) then:

• The supply of beer remains the same, but the rise in demand means that prices will rise. You could cap the price by law, but that would simply result in massive beer shortage which in Britain, Ireland, Holland and Germany at least would lead to bloody revolution in about a day. You could subsidise the beer prices, but that would either force up inflation, making everyone poorer (if the Government simply printed money); or reduce overall incomes, making everyone poorer (if tax were increased).
• The supply of beer increases, but this requires more land be purchased by the beer manufacturers (which costs money) and will leave less land for the producers of other goods (reducing their supply and forcing up prices).

Everything of value is scarce. There is a finite amount of any given natural resource available to us and everything uses natural resources to some extent. You could try to ameliorate the issue by having some central authority distribute the resources available, but the vast complexity of even a small economy means that it's a wildly inefficient process. The alternative is to allow a market to determine the values and accept that people who like stuff will work longer hours, increase demand and drive up prices.

Either that or we can just wait until Earth is Contacted.

The problem with a lot of third world nations is that they have zero competitive advantage. Many of them are not capable of sustaining sufficient agriculture to feed their populace, have zero natural resources and are not well placed to be trading nations. In these cases no amount of capitalism, or indeed socialism/communism/etc, can help them. The best thing they could do is get absorbed by a more successful country, ideally one who has a labour shortage and so could with a few more people.

In the past this happened all the time. Even in Europe the smaller, weaker nations were absorbed by their larger, more successful neighbours (e.g. England absorbing Wales and Scotland, Prussia absorbing Hanover and Saxony). But in the modern era we treat nation borders as immutable boundaries, never to be breached. That and the corruption endemic in the ruling elite of such countries, who stand to lose their privileged position if a take over were to occur.

Obviously this doesn't apply to formerly successful nations who collapse under the weight of their own stupidity (see Zimbabwe).

All statists are alike, they may fly flags of convenience (socialist, fascist, social-democrat, conservative, etc ...) but deep down they all place maintenance and growth of state power above all other considerations. The old school Labour party were as guilty of this as the current mob.

Frankly it's all been going downhill in the UK since Lloyd George destroyed the Liberal party.

The IWP was created by the ISPs to avoid Government interference. The "choice" put in front of the ISPs was either self-censor or have a censorship regime imposed that would most likely destroy their business. Some will say this is a victory for the free market, other less deluded people will note that this allows the Government to impose censorship without the trouble of getting a bill through Parliament (mere threats don't require prior debate).

As such it is in the ISPs' (and so the IWP's) interests to occasionally censor the odd high profile site. This shows the Government and it's reactionary supporters that The System Works. They backed down on the record cover when it became clear that commercial sites would have to be censored as well as the non-profit Wikipedia. Commercial sites that could afford to sue. Targeting images from dead sites, hosted by a non-profit entity is a win-win scenario for the IWP. They show everyone how they are helping to keep our children safe from poor defined threats and they don't offend anyone who can sue them.

Mathematics is a language, it provides an unambitious way of explaining processes that is (relatively) independent of general purposes languages (e.g. English, Mandarin, etc).

Without a good grounding in maths you're barring yourself from all but the lowest rungs of Science, Engineering and associated disciplines like Computer Science. Even the great cash cow that is the City of London requires a decent knowledge of maths in most high paying positions (except Risk Manager it would seem).

Not that there's anything wrong with taking other paths: a good liberal arts education can go a long way. But just as scientists benefit from skills other than pure number crunching (the ability to explain their results to non-experts for a start), everyone benefits from understanding basic (i.e. A-Level) maths. If people understood compound interest maybe we wouldn't have such a problem with personal debt levels.