That reminds me of the awesome Tim Minchin song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx3kMBoeZh0

Damn, a reasonable explanation. That's not nearly so amusing.

Or maybe they're keeping it at a distance and hoping nobody notices that they made him another right hand by accident.

Depends on your definition of democracy, if you see it as picking your dictator (from, I might add, quite a limited pool), fine I accept your point.

If however you have a more rose tinted view, like the view that the will of the majority matters, then we should get a say in matters of law, not just be told what's legal and illegal

Everyone who thinks this is a bad idea should sign this government petition, get everyone they know to sign the petition, and generally cause a ruckus
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/dontdisconnectus/

Then install Tor, because you have to look out for yourself when you don't live in a democracy any more.

Except... 101 is actually faster. Sorry, it just is.

It would be perfect if the much talked about Video element supported p2p streaming. It can't be that hard to set up either, you have a definitive list of everyone who is watching the video at the time so tracking should be easy. The only problem I can see is getting the end of the video, when people who have finished watching close their browser and don't upload their fair share of the end of the video.

Even if it's not perfect, it would take a lot of the burden off these sites, hopefully enough to make it worth their while to host.

This would also be a boon for smaller innovative sites which want to host videos but can't afford the bandwidth.

You could try varnishing it first, I reckon you could get a pretty good shine up.

It really *is* turtles all the way down??

It's cheaper to buy a $50 item today than 4 years ago?

Interesting.... Forgive my gross misunderstanding but is it possible to make a pair where they both have a higher chance of being A than B when observed. In an extreme case 90% chance of it being A for both particles, but the other particle still has to be B.

Thus you could convey the information that the other particle was read at the other end and thus take it in turns to send information, synchronising so you know the other side has already been `written' to. There would only be a 10% chance of misreading.

That's heading towards the voight-kampff test.

Alternatively we could *fix* the UK. Perhaps the time is right for a new party with new ideas about how to run the country. I'm not just talking about policies, the actual mechanisms of government.

The technology is there to set up a completely transparent government. All the information is available to everyone, and everyone with an opinion can vote on every issue by means of a public forum.

Imagine a government where any citizen could have their say and be moderated in a similar fashion to slashdot, leaving a concise summary of the points for/against and how many people concur with a given viewpoint, allowing a truer democracy.

This kind of system could either get voted away, or completely opened up so that anyone can access the information and the system can be used to keep politicians in check more than spy on citizens.

The old argument against a system like this was that it would take too much time to collate viewpoints and no definitive decisions would be reached, but with the internet, the issues would doubtless be dealt with faster than calling as assembly in parliament and thrashing out the issue could ever take place.

Revolution anyone? (Shotgun me as Prime Minister)