Yeah, and how about the fact that she used to look quite cute when she was 18, but now she looks old?

American politics has surprisingly little to do with who's president, considering that this person is supposed to be the 'Commander in Chief' and has to power to push The Button. Politics seems to determined by big business (in which we can include Big Religion) and by opinion polls; any big ideas the sitting president might have are blocked by the opposition, unless they happen to be from the same party, and even then it seems doubtful. So what does it matter what Mrs Clinton is like? America is ruled by an elite, who are the exact equivalent of the so-called nobles of Europe in times past - they inherit their privileged position, the law is applied differently to them (because they are rich enough to pay for lawyers), and they keep the plebs out of their ranks; yes, there are people start at the bottom and get right to the top, but that was the case in Europe even back in feudal times.

This is what people should really do something about - your elections are simply a show put on so people get the feeling that they have democracy, that's all.

Just as an aside - any nudes?

I think all the focus on how cannabis may cause this or makes it more likely to develop that is just scare mongering. We all know that indulging in intoxication is harmful to some extent; the point is that cannabis has been demonstrated to be a lot less harmful, overall, than things like alcohol and tobacco, not to mention the so-called legal highs.

In a sensible society, we would address this differently - we would accept that people will always want to have this kind of recreational substances, and we would actively try to develop something that gave the maximum pleasure for the minimum harm. We would educate people about how to use these things safely, how to recognise danger symptoms, how to help those in trouble with some substance, and we would sell them legally under a licence and with a certain amount of taxation. There will always be people who get into deep trouble with substance abuse; but a cold, socio-economic calculation shows that the costs of using cannabis is less than the cost of tobacco and alcohol - and if better drugs were developed, the difference would be even starker.

Well, we know on principle that all scietific theories are flawed; that's why it is cience, not religion. The problem is that we have two theories that have, so far, checked out in every detail, but which appear to be fundamentally incompatible. And, even worse, we have not been able to find any discrepancy between the two, that is small enough to guide our intuition; all the data that point to something being wrong, are somehow wildly off.

But, but, but, isn't Indiana one of the states that have legalised cannabis? So gays could get really stoned there as well, or did I misunderstand something?

To answer your questions: No, politicians are not stupid; I'll explain below. Yes, voters are often stupid; they could make the effort to understand what is going on, but they choose not to - that, in my view, is the very essence of being stupid.

The point is not to stop those who actually want to see porn, but to protect those who don't want to, but feel pressurised or otherwise intimidated into it, or who stumble across it. It may be difficult for a hard-core wanker to understand, but to many, not least children, porn is genuinely off-putting, and to 11 year old, it may be something they find it very hard to talk to adults about. After all, they were not supposed to look at it, on one hand, and on the other hand, they now speculate that most adults, including their parents, engage in the sort of alien activities illustrated, however poorly, in pornography. It is easy to feel alone with those thoughts in those circumstances.

The point of this kind of legislation is to force a deliberate choice: if you proceed, it is because you have chosen to; and by requiring the ISPs or whoever to take responsibility, they make it illegal to just sit by passively and make money out of it; you now have to do something to ensure that your audience is old enough to legally make that decision. It won't stop young people from lying about their age, but it will now be possible to go after those that exploit this particular vulnerability, if and when it is deemed necessary.

Politicians are not necessarily stupid; certainly not as stupid as people who have nothing to have their opinions in tend to make out. I would argue that politicians are also quite often genuinely motivated by what they believe in, rather than simply being greedy bullies. I don't agree with much of what David Cameron stands for, and I certainly don't agree with his party's ideologically motivated privatisation at all costs, but I do respect him for being competent and for genuinely seeking to do what is good for UK; the same goes for Labour, the LibDems, SNP etc. They are principled and they have certainly made more of an effort to understand thing than you seem to.

This is a "historically stupefying amount of technology":

http://www.enterprise.cam.ac.u...

- an article about how it is now possible to print microcircuits on very thin materials, cheaply. It isn't shiny or cool in the Apple sense, but if you look into what this company is doing, you will see that it is significant in so many ways:

- they can produce very cheap computers that are small enough to embed into a piece of paper
- they can be equipped with networking
- if this takes off, they are going to be everywhere

For example, in bank notes, so every individual bank note can not only be identified securely, but can actually report back about its location. Think I'm exaggerating? Well read about it and make up your own mind

Yeah, whatever.

Is this really tech news? To me it sounds more like a fashion advert; I'm ok with people falling in a swoon over something 'cool', although I can't see what is cool about it myself, but I'd much rather hear about what engineers have to say about something difficult and technical, or even political, for that matter. I mean just imagine that we started flooding Hello magazine with loads of opinions about the merits of this GPU over that - it wouldn't go down well with the usual readers, I suspect. Hmm, now that's a thought ...

- though it hardly seems necessary after the swathe of self-congratulations mentioned in the OP.

Isn't that just a bit rich, when it is well-known that the X Window System was actually invented at MIT (Wikipedia):

- MacOS and Windows work according the principles invented by these guys, so when did "the era of graphics on computers" begin?

You want to be a good manager, who cares for his people, and that's a good starting point, but I think you are on the wrong track. In my experience, what people really want is things like genuine respect and recognition for genuinely good work. It could be monetary rewards, but it could also be praise, a simple 'thank you' or being taken serious.Whatever you do, don't get into idiot 'reward' schemes where people get a choice of glitzy crap that only a sales droid would fall for - I worked for a company with that sort of thing, where you had to go to a web site and claim your reward; I was rewarded like that a few times, and I always decided that I'd actually rather not have any of it.

Secondly, to be a good manager, study the concept of 'servant leadership'; you will find there's a lot of quasi-religious and pocket-philosophical claptrap surrounding this, but it does not mean there isn't a core of very good sense in it. Some say that managing engineers is like herding cats - if you genuinely understand what that means, you'll realise that you can't; cats and engineers are not sheep. A cat will follow your lead if it feels you understand and respect it, but not always and sometimes in a surprising way; an engineer will want to find his/her own way to the target you set, and sometimes surprise you with a solution that better than you could have imagined, where your target turns up as a minor consequence.

The article talks about videos, a small subset of multimedia, and the same can be said about animations. Good use of multimedia IMO tends to be when you insert illustrations into a mainly textual context; these illustrations can themselves be animations, video clips or soundbites. The reason this works is that you are still the one that does the work by reading the text, and the illustrations serve to support the meaning of the text; but if the whole thing was produced as a video, you would in a sense outsource the important part of studying the subject - it would essentially be a sort of reading aloud. A comfortable format, but it doesn't teach you the essential skill of doing it on your own.

Some thing you can try out, but there's a lot that you really can't just try out, or which you try out by sitting down with pen and paper, trying to get your head around the concepts. Especially, I have to say, in mathematics. It is all very well to use a PC to draw graphs, but how about higher dimensions? Or objects in really exotic topologies? Abstract algebra? ... and so on; there are many things that are simply unlikely to benefit from the video.format, except to get you started a bit on the way in the elementary stages.

I agree wholeheartedly. I think audio works as a medium exactly because it is so limited; you only have the soundtrack, so you are forced express yourself well to sucessfully communicate the meaning. I have suffered through enough of these tele-conferences with demonstrations of software transmitted to multiple sites, to know how much it distracts, when the presenter struggles with bad technology, and on top of that had rather hoped that the demonstration would compensate for the lack of clear, verbal communication. I realise, of course, that there are things that require visual communication, but it amazing how much you can achieve with clear, verbal communication; a large proportion of presentation could be improved simply by dropping the visual part and working on explaining things in words.

You take the words right out of my mouth. There are many subjects that are not well suited to a video presentation; in fact, in my view there are very few subjects that benefit much from combining graphics, talk and soundtrack. Perhaps if you can't appreciate a mathematical subject as it is presented in its dry text form, then it isn't something you are likely to ever understand - the beauty lies in the insight it provides, 'wow factor' should be irrelevant.

I think one of the problems with the video format is that it entices you into being passive; when you read proof in a book, you get stuck from time to time because there are things you don't understand, so you look up the things you don't understand etc, but in a video you are carried on without understanding, and although it is easy enough to stop and rewind, you tend not to because you are passively watching a video. Also, studies have shown that people tend to remember and understand less of presentations involving graphics, text and speaking, because the three forms crowd each other out.

Look, we already know that global warming is happening and that it is caused or aggravated by human activities, and whatever we do to mitigate it, we will have to live with the consequences for a long time - thousands of years. So, the sensible thing to do under all circumstances, is to learn to live with it - and another sensible thing to do is to try to predict as best we can, what the consequences will be. There will most likely be huge migrations away from arid countries, for one thing, and unless we want to have all out war against desperate people, who have nothing to lose, we will need to find a way to integrate them. It is not unlikely that we will need to abandon some of the lower-lying areas if the seas-level rises, and so on.

There are still very good reasons to stop doing the things that cause massive disruption of our environment - we have to face up to the fact that we as a species have a huge impact on this planet. We have managed to almost completely cut down natural forest in most of the places we live, we routinely change the course of rivers, build dams, strip mine whole mountains, decimate fish stocks etc. How anybody can imagine that this won't have a serious impact on the way we live at some point is beyound me.

Incredibly, there are still people - intelligent and well-informed people, even - who refuse to accept that our current lifestyle is causing massive issues that can't simply be addressed with a bit of half-hearted recycling; we need to learn to economise our resources. According recent statistics, supermarkets throw out huge amounts of food unsold, and on top of that, people discard about half of what they have bought; to my limited understanding of maths, that means we could save hugely on the environment just by learning not to waste so much - without actually cutting back on our real consumption. In short: we can make a big difference simply by not being idiots.

No, that's the Stig, not the Dick. Or should that be 'Dr Who not Dr Who Cares'?

Oops, another 'troll -10' coming my way. Sigh.