As a UK citizen, I have to question the sanity of this judgement. The gentleman in question is suspended from Swansea University at present (and, of course, unable to attend as he is in jail). He has admitted being very drunk when he tweeted. He has admitted initially claiming that his twitter account had been hacked after realising what he had done.

It is hardly a good use of a prison place, or cost effective, or a deterrent to put a drunk student who has done something stupid in jail. If we did that to every drunk stupid student just in Swansea, we'd have jails overflowing even more than they are now, every night of the week.

A long period of Community service and a requirement to do a meaningful race relations awareness course and, perhaps, a ban from social networks and alcohol would have been more than sufficient. Jail? It serves no useful purpose in this case and is ridiculous, and I say that as someone who is usually for longer prison sentences for proper (meaning violent) offenders.

It now transpires that in fact, what I've just written, if it is considered to criticise the judiciary, may well be breaking the UK Law: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17522730 Now I hate Peter Hain as much as the next man, but that's law's more of an ass than he is.

What blasphemy laws? Please do enlighten us...

There's a reason that jokes start "An Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman walk into a bar..." - the Welshman was already there from the night before.

I don't know. I travelled all the way to HD 189733b, I was promised snow showers, wispy clouds, high winds. But, just my luck, it rained. It must be because I'm Welsh.

Bloody Germans, shutting down Google in Greece. How low will they stoop? Is this another condition of the bail-out?


(the German TLD is .de BTW)

So is the Raspberry Pi until it ships...

...and the key phrase there is "if cared for". It usually isn't. I even saw a picture of a so-called professional archivist handling a letter written by King Henry VIII the other day. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-17258508

And when I say handling I mean holding with bare hands, no gloves, no precautions to protect the document taken. When so-called experts are treating documents of historic importance with such contempt, is it any surprise that we have so few remaining paper documents from any more than 500 years ago? They have to survive sunlight, damp, war, flood, accidental damage, fire, leaks, uprisings and human stupidity. Considering that, it's amazing we have any left, actually.

Of course the key consideration is backup. The standard method of backup of books these days is electronic. The Library at the British Museum has digitized most of its collection now. Slashdot loves to trash google over its scan of thousands of books; whilst the copyright ownership issues leave a lot to be desired, if just one important work is saved because Google scanned it then there will have been an upside.

Am I the only one who read this article and immediately started humming "Blame Canada"? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0158983/

Your entire argument is destroyed by quoting the single most dubious tabloid newspaper in existence - the Sun newspaper. There is no reason why anyone should trust a word they say. The Sun hires liars and spouts bile continuously. I wouldn't even wipe my backside with it.

Oil is a fungible commodity. Demand always outstrips supply. The American public (or any other country for that matter) and their use of fuel are not relevant to the price of oil/gas/petroleum

The Pirate Party is totally irrelevant here in the UK. I live in Worcester; their leader stood here at the last General election and he lost his deposit. He gained under 100 votes. There were joke candidates standing for charitable or mental health reasons who garnered more votes than him. They are not a visible group, did not and do not have voting power and are considered a joke by those in power, so they do not, as you wrongly claim, have the ability to shape the politics of those in power.

Oblig xkcd reference: Voting Machines

http://xkcd.com/463/

...unless you want to visit an undertaker...

Given its performance in crash testing, you may find yourself dead should you crash one.

One of the key difficulties is if you are including attachments in encrypted e-mails. This often results in your e-mail being quarantined by (depending on your viewpoint) over judicious anti-virus software as it is unable to scan the encrypted e-mail and guarantee it is virus-free. Your e-mail never arriving rather defeats the purpose of sending it in the first place.

I appreciate that a well configured system can get round this difficulty, but most end-users do not have well configured systems, they have the operating system or software's default settings which are rarely if ever encryption friendly. (If encryption came by default, how would the likes of the NSA and GCHQ spy on us?)