Sure, I would acknowledge that may be a few lessons on religion would be fine. Much the way sex education is taught. But I think any more than that and it risks turning in to indoctrination. There are so many wonderful and useful things our kids should be learning about, that there is no way to justify spending more time on it. I find the growth in state sponsored religious schools (in the UK) a very worrying trend.

This is one of occasions where the French have it about right, they have separation of church and state. They do not even allow religion in schools in any form. I don't understand why people think it is ok to force their beliefs on me.

exactly, the spokesperson making these comments clearly has no concept of security. The worrying thing is though, that this is exactly the sort of short sighted rubbish that our government laps up and puts into law.

I just spent about an hour reading the discussion linked to on the above post [schneier.com]. It is truly insightful, and well worth reading if you have any interest in encryption.

Some thoughts, the most terrifying phrase in the abstract was "'What he is doing would be illegal in Britain and the United States". I find these laws are very unscientific, they are effectively trying to hide _the_ truth. Which in this case is that the GSM encryption algorithm is shoddy. Secondly as a brit I find it very worrying when people justify draconian laws by saying other people do it. On to more technical things, the above post mentioned DES and AES, as I remember did EFF not build a 250k$ DES cracking machine some time back. I thought triple DES had now superseded DES. As for AES, according to wikipedia weaknesses have been found quite recently in AES. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard. I don't understand how compromising these attacks are though (presumably very).

fantastic! you are a genius. However I think I can improve on it. Mandatory bacon sandwiches _and a free beer_ before boarding the plane. Everybody wins.

"He said that because Bing used more imagery than other search engines, it attracted more children. ..." translation: bing is for children who have not yet leant how to set the default search engine to google.

I like the idea of offsetting charitable donations against tax. It seems a very good thing. We don't have that in the UK. However, I only give to one charity regularly. It is the poppy appeal, http://www.poppy.org.uk/ they raise money to look after soldiers wounded in conflict. In my experience, a lot of charities are just self sporting institutions with far too many directors and accountants.

one interesting fact I heard on a documentary recently is that around 1/4 of the cars should not be on london's roads anyway. Either no insurance, not tax, no driving licence, or the car has been stolen. So I think mobile phones are the least of the polices worries.

I saw this windows CE netbook on sale in the UK: http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=257308 Maplin is an electronics/gizmo store, but I have seen one or two others on sale in medium sized chains. I has been on sale for a year or so so I guess it can not be doing too badly.

To be hoist, one of the main reasons I turn my office computer off when I go home is so it is not hacked by script kiddies at night - I don't think I need a non updating embedded linux system running all the time on my network.

You must remember that our national life boar service (RNLI) is a CHARITY and receives NO government sponsorship whatsoever. They get all there cash by collecting in the streets, collecting tins in shops and charity events... They are a truly amazing charity and save hundreds of lives . All there members are highly motivated volunteers who have ordinary jobs but when called upon drop everything and go and save lives what ever the weather. So my point is that it is not so amazing that they dug there own fiber link, they do after all maintain all there own kit and are out to save as much cash as possible because they don't have that much of it in the first place. http://www.rnli.org.uk/rnli_near_you

may be the radar is cooking the bats and that is why he is finding less of them!

I have the same problem, I use fedora 10, on an samsung NC10 with an atom processor. I just ticked the encrypt file system box on the install. I do not notice any noticeable slow down due to the disk encryption overhead.

Thought I would just put this in perspective for non UK readers:

This is quite ironic because the politician Jacqui Smith who was backing this crazy plan. Justified the plan with logic such as if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. Well.... last month she found out that this was true. Somebody leaked her expenses claims to the nation press it turned out that she had claimed for two porn films along with a load of other essentials for her house such as flat screen TVs which were of course essential for here to carry out her job. Oops.

Secondly, the last few months and in especially the last week has been very bad for the government. It is generally agreed in both the left and right wing press that the government has totally lost the plot and is also losing control of its MPs. (there is talk of the ruling party splitting in two and senior ministers defecting) Add to this that the UK is in massive debt, and I mean massive. This means that after the next election (in 12 months time) the ruling party will most probably be out. The incoming party will HAVE to cut expenditure and things such as this mad project will be cut and all the employees fired. I can not wait!