A compromise would be to let customers indicate whether they want or need to use anonymiser services (wither TOR or conventional proxies). Much like customers who do/don't use their credit cards overseas. Very very few customers would choose this (or even understand the option), so it wouldn't reduce the protective effect compared to a blanket ban on TOR.

This seems very common in the US. The weird, almost religious belief in the "efficiency of business/inefficiency of government" that legislators choose the worst possible combination of business and government. All the loss of control of out-sourcing a monopoly, while retaining all the stupidity and corruption of bureaucracy.

The weirdest thing is that this hatred of "government" seems to come, without a trace of irony, from politicians.

How is that different from the "white swans" that we see all the time? Week long winter storms that take out power lines with ice build-up (while preventing repair crews from getting out), or hurricanes that take down power lines across an entire region, or even pull major power stations offline.

However, after those first nearby colonies have developed, some of their population will have an economic, political, religious/etc interest in setting up their own colonies slightly further out. And some of those colonies will spawn others yet further out...

Exactly as humans spread around the world by foot and canoe.

And with FTL it would only take a few tens of thousands of years to expand through the entire galaxy, even if colonies developed fairly slowly (by human standards.) Without FTL it would only take a few tens of millions of years.

[And realistically it would happen faster. Colonies which develop quickest are those more culturally likely to seed further colonies. And the fastest developing of those would be the first to seed the next round. The process would be self reinforcing. The culture of colonising would be amplified each round.]

Time is also big.

If it takes 1000 years on average to colonise and develop a new planetary system to the point where it's willing and able to spin off its own colonies, and each successful colony produces just one child colony every thousand years (allowing for failed colonies, colonies that don't further colonisation, etc), it would take just 38 thousand years to colonise all 200 billion stars in this galaxy.

Even allowing for a practical limit of 1% of the speed of light, if it is even possible to reach another star system, you can colonise the entire galaxy in just a few million years.

If just one civilisation in the last few billion years had a culture of colonisation even a fraction as much as humans do, the entire galaxy would have been colonised, even without FTL. And colonised repeatedly, in thousands of waves, exploiting every niche. We simply wouldn't have had a chance to exist.

All of them?

Not a single faction from a single alien civilisation is interested in other early intelligences? We study dolphins and chimps. We study parrots and ravens. Hell, there are researchers who study ants, lichen, plankton...

- Advanced tool use, up to and including electronics and networking,
- Cooperation/communication, allowing a global information network and the standards required for web/video.
- Symbolic logic, to use the OS/browser/smartphone/tablet... even amongst the simplest users.
- Advanced socialisation, not only establishing in-group/out-group, but abstracting that to online entities.
- Humour, which requires strong social awareness, and, in the case of "fail" videos, dissociative empathy.

It all suggests a reasonably intelligent species, with at least pockets of high intelligence.

Hell, even Youtube trolls require high level social skills for the recursive opponent modelling (just not quite high enough.)

All of them?

Every faction from every alien civilisation in the entire galaxy all unanimously decided to go away for thousands of years, even though their own rules (according to your scenario) allow them to interfere.

There are 200 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. If intelligent life can appear on just 1 in a million, that's still 200,000 civilisations right now. And that doesn't include the civilisations that rose and fell over the last 8-10 billion years since metallicity became high enough in the galaxy to support planets.

If even a single alien civilisation enjoys/wants/requires colonisation, and interstellar travel is as easy as you believe, then our whole solar system would have been colonised billions of years ago; and more likely colonised again and again and again, hundreds of times, every few million years as new civilisations rise and fall.

[People just don't comprehend how big these numbers are. Star Trek has a lot to answer for.]

Assuming that a basic English vocabulary has 30,000 words, four-word passphrases allows just 30k^4 combinations. That's the equivalent of a system that requires a 5 letter lower-case non-dictionary password. You get more combinations from just two random upper/lower/numbers/punctuation characters.

It's probably worth pointing out that these are not "given" to police. They are "loaned".

Therefore police depts that accept this gear are required to pay for maintenance (which on some of the vehicles can be more than the value of the vehicle) and are forbidden from selling them if they become surplus to requirements.

If they got the accounts system, (which seems likely, given that Sony seems to have put every subsystem on the same network, employee medical records on the same network as raw film files) then any electronic receipt for purchase of items for office lunch rooms could include the model numbers for the sinks.

Not in most jurisdictions, including the UK. Malicious release of information can be libellous even if the information is truthful. (And on the flip side, falsehoods aren't necessarily slander.) I think there's also a "public interest" requirement under EU privacy rules which the UK complies with.

However, in this case, the police will have an exclusion somewhere in the law because they will be allowed to create a "public record", such as the old police blotter. Which gives them a giant loophole to selectively and maliciously target what and how they report in order to turn it into an extra-judicial punishment (as in this case).

No, it's a selective record of what they want to release. There's no uniform reporting requirements, it's not an official record, it's solely at the discretion of the Met's own PR gimps.

They are not going to tweet anything that embarrasses the Met, nor anyone who is protected, no insiders will be shamed. For DUI'd politicians, influential businessmen and off-duty cops, whether they end up on the name'n'shame roster will be purely a political decision - whether they are considered "friend" or "foe". Similarly, if some researcher or NGO uses the Twitter feed to show, for example, a statistical bias in arrests, then from then on the PR gimps compiling the Twitter feed will simply filter the cases to fit whatever "balance" is deemed acceptable to their higher-ups (note: doing nothing to change the actual target rates).

You either make it an official record of every qualifying incident, at a central .gov.uk site (not using a social "play" site like Twitter or Facebook), where reporting conforms to uniform requirements and there are set legal and civil penalties for misuse of the register, or you do none of it.

Selective reporting is inherently unsound.

Holy shit, your country sucks.

Ah, yes. We call that "printing", which is clearly much less confusing.

"Tearing" isn't something you get from lag between PC and monitor. So that suggests he was using bad cables, or bad connectors, or bad cards, something that caused a signal drop-out. Meaning his problem would be solved by simply improving the cabling.

[That said, his wife doesn't like fan noise in the living room, but he wants to go to a projector?]