I don't know about the law in the US, but here in the UK you must NOT tell the police if you come across kiddie porn accidentally like this.

In the UK, possession of this stuff (even cartoons) is a "strict liability" offence. If you've got it, you've broken the law, no matter how you came by it. So, if you tell the police that you've got it, they can (and will) prosecute you.

There are lots of laws like this in the UK, and they are becoming more common: the government likes them because they eliminate any possibility of people successfully defending themselves in court. Of course they leave open the possibility that you can be forced to commit a crime against your will - even by the police - and then punished for it.

Another indicator of the decline of democracy is the rise of the power of the military. Considering that Aristotle was employed as the tutor of Alexander the Great, you would have thought he would have pointed that out.

Have you tried a tinfoil hat?

You do realize, don't you, that the airlines that say they need "proof of ID" and will only accept a passport, do so because they are being forced to act as unpaid police and immigration agents?

It's a good example of the privatization of law. The government can say "we have abolished the need for passports to travel in Europe" while in fact making state surveillance more, not less, pervasive.

the rule should be a simple one: if you are an EU national you are allowed residency in the UK, otherwise not

Why?
OK, we've got a political treaty with the EU, but if you were starting from scratch, why pick on any one country and give its people more favourable status than any others?

If they're so locked down that the students can't do what they want with them, then no, they won't. They will just teach the students to accept spoon-fed information and not to try to investigate anything for themselves.

I stayed with them for a few months after their takeover by Thus, until a new ISP installed ADSL+ in our exchange. In that time, the bandwidth I was getting deteriorated enormously, and their customer service changed from an engineer who understood "I can see your pings hitting my firewall" to a call centre worker in India who could only say "reinstall windows". And after I left, they forgot to remove me from their billing system, so they kept sending me letters threatening court action and bailiffs.

That must have been a couple of years ago now, and they were trying to get this e-billing system to work back then. They kept on sending me emails about it, but I could never log in to it. If it's taken them until now to get it working, their competence must be worse than I remember.

Fantastic, so after you are done rounding up all the teenagers posting with attitude and skinheads, how is this system going to help find competent threats?

There was a case here a few days ago, where some teenagers who wrote in their diaries some fantasy story about blowing up their school were arrested and held in jail for some months and then tried as terrorists. Luckily they got a jury trial: the jury acquitted them straight away, and then took the trouble to wait outside the court to congratulate them on their release.

The next step for the authorities will have to be to abolish jury trials for terrorist offenses.

Actually, the metadata (program times, etc) can be downloaded for free, in machine-readable form, from one of the BBC's own websites: they also supply the data from all their rival broadcasters. So programs like mythtv get this data for free.

There's a disclaimer that it's for personal use only: I think they are at the same time providing the data feed free to everyone, and also selling it to Microsoft for use by their media player program. I hope they're charging Microsoft a lot of money for it.

Since most mammals manage to feed their babies without obvious breasts, it's generally accepted by biologists that human breasts *are* for waving around in public.

Having sold "unlimited" access at a fixed price, ISPs run on tight margins, so one simple email or phone call, plus the subsequent dealing with the customer, will wipe out the whole year's profit from that customer. So what in practice will happen if ISPs go down this route is that they will simply start blocking the ports for IRC and mail. And then the malware will move to another protocol, and that will be blocked, and so on.

I suspect the the law of unintended consequences will mean that we'll end up with ISPs that provide access only to http and https.

Absolutely. Thank goodness these people were caught and put in prison for talking about doing something. And thank goodness that their guilt was so obvious that a jury could be convinced that they were guilty after only only two trials for the same offence. Although I see that they are going to get a third trial, as they weren't found quite guilty enough the first two times.

Some might think that keeping on trying someone with different juries until you find a jury that gives the answer you want would be some sort of abuse of the legal process. But not us Brits!

There certainly is a political entity called the Republic of Ireland. Most people in Britain either call it that, or else call it Eire, in order to distinguish it from Ireland the geographical region, which is not a single political entity.

Of couse the name of the Republic of Ireland is just Ireland (or else Eire, depending on which language you are using). But all attentive readers of Alice Through the Looking Glass will know that there is often a difference between the name of something, and what it is called.

Yes, because it's really confusing when we get mixed up between (say) heroin, a wicked and dangerous drug, and diamorphine, a useful medicine. Or between medical marijuana and the addictive stuff. Or between codeine and cough mixture. Or...

That's right. All these prisoners who flush their medications down the toilet should be put in prison.
Oh, wait...