I don't know about the US, but here in the UK our broadband speeds keep getting quicker (for the same price). My cable connection gets doubled in speed every couple of years as otherwise, I'd go somewhere else. I don't see why streaming will get less popular over time.

As a UK tax payer, I welcome the move. Finally, someone in government is looking further ahead than just the next election.

I would imagine that someone at GCHQ could easily convert the documents for a tiny fraction of the budget that they've got. In fact, they've probably already got conversions of everyone's private/secret documents already.

Plenty of money for spying on UK subjects, but no money for protecting their interests in not being tied to a predatory US company.

That doesn't make much sense as this particular change would be welcomed by people who think that principles are important. In fact, a lot of changes are brought about by people who stick to their principles (e.g. abolition of slavery).

A lot of the quicker internet packages in the UK are "unlimited", so people are paying for whatever bandwidth they use. I'm with Virgin cable and they do specify that they throttle "excessive" usage during the day (which they count as peak time) after you use too much. However, outside of those times, you get full speed with no limits, so it's pretty easy to specify bandwidth limits for torrents during the day so you don't get throttled.

If we can't download quick enough, then we can always pay more for a quicker connection, which is why heavy users are good customers for the ISPs.

Well, the 4 letters show a history of alleged infringement, but I'd be surprised if they count as anything more than hearsay unless there's a reasonable process to go through to contest the letters.

Getting the ISPs to do the enforcement is not the way forward as the "pirates" are the ISPs' customers (after all, they're the ones who are more likely to pay for the fastest connections).

It'd be like getting car manufacturers to enforce traffic violations.

You can smugly assert that you were "secure", but everyone else can smugly assert that "you're doing it wrong!" by not testing or having any kind of backups to rollback any unwanted changes.

Yes - if you can incorporate a form of exercise into your daily routines then it's a lot easier to keep regularly active.

It can also be a lot of fun to just walk/cycle/run somewhere just because you fancy it rather than because you need to go there. I think it increases the enjoyment you get from exercise if sometimes you do it "just because you can".

Their website is down/doesn't exit, so I doubt they've got any market share.

There's lots of different ways of getting exercise and different methods work better for different people. The trick is to find an activity that you enjoy doing that is also a form of exercise. It can be as simple as walking around exploring your environs, or maybe base jumping is more your style.

I agree that pounding a treadmill in a gym is boring as hell, but put me on a bike with some countryside around and I'm happy as a pig in a Jewish vegan festival.

That's going to take a while to overcome and unfortunately you will have to WANT to overcome it rather than someone just telling you to do so. This is one of the problems of being on the artificial, processed food rollercoaster - once you've been riding it for a while, it's really difficult to change your course.

Exercise should be fun - you just need to find a sport/activity that you enjoy enough so that it doesn't seem like a chore.

Healthy food probably tastes horrible to you as you're not used to it. That's one of the problems with too many sweeteners (sugar and artificial ones) and salt being pumped into everyday food. If you can wean yourself off of the processed food bandwagon, your taste buds will return to a more normal state and ordinary food will begin to taste delicious.

Although there hasn't been any paradigm shifting science come out of the LHC, I wouldn't say there's been zero output. We now have figures for the Higgs that have ruled out a large number of possible theories. Before performing the experiments, no-one knew for sure what the results were going to be - we could easily have had surprising results that disagreed with the Standard Model.

You might think that the statistics are useless, but they're very useful to particle physicists.

It's very difficult to predict which areas of science are likely to produce valuable discoveries. However, due to the incredible success of science throughout the last century (at least) it's quite a safe bet to invest in science and technoloy.

Here's an interesting link about the economic effects of publicly funded science: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/technology/report/2012/12/10/47481/the-high-return-on-investment-for-publicly-funded-research/

However, science can take a while to pay off, so at the moment, the LHC doesn't look good value, but who knows what we'll be up to in 50 years time?

Repairer of Reputations?