On this topic, a dishonourable mention for the open-plan office really must be made. If a person is trying to concentrate on a task, then quiet is what is needed. Where I work at the moment, I'm in an open-plan office and in these environments there always seems to be some moron with no brain, not much appreciation of others and a LOUD voice.

So, any chance of getting the concept across to management that noise and disruption do not mean more working output?

Satelites, which are solar-powered and thus only have a fairly low and thus very easy to jam signal, or cameras which can be spoofed, or simply painted over, or fed a false input signal.

Which part of "crap idea" don't you understand?

I'd go further on this one: what are you not seeing in those clips which you would expect to be present?

What you are not seeing AT ALL is any personal protective equipment. The medics are not wearing respirators. They are not wearing protective clothing. The general public have not been excluded; there are people running around all over the place in their shirtsleeves. This, remember, is supposed to be the aftermath of a chemical warfare attack.

Chemical warfare involves deploying deadly chemicals, especially ones which are deadly by skin contact. The victims of such an attack are by definition the people who have been exposed to, and are covered in a deadly chemical; they're chemical hazards in their own right and here we have a scene of pandemonium with completely unprotected people and medics walking about completely unconcerned about contamination with deadly toxins. Either these people are complete morons, or they know something we don't know.

This scene has been staged. There are no deadly chemicals present and the medics know it, because they know what was fired. Assuming that this was an actual attack, I would guess that hydrocyanic acid was used; this decomposes into hydrogen cyanide which is deadly and causes the symptoms seen but which is very volatile. Fire the shells, let the scene air out a bit and the gas dissipate and the entire thing is safe to enter, and the casualties are safe to handle. HCN was the active ingredient in Zyklon-B, which was used by the Nazis as a tool of extermination precisely because it could be removed from a room fairly easily leaving no toxic residue.

Were this an actual act of war, then the medics would be dressed in full NBC suits with respirators and there simply would not be all the idiots milling around in the room; any sane commander would exclude them and set up a decontamination system before triaging the patients. If this was not done, then the myriad of bystanders would rapidly become patients in their own right as they got contaminated with the nerve agent or blistering agent.

No, this is a staged event of some kind. It may be pure sham, or it may have been HCN shells fired by these people at their own civilians to create this scene, but make no mistake this was NOT an military attack.

This is the basic problem: assumptions. When formulating any hypothesis, you always have to state the assumptions you are making, and take steps to show why these assumptions are valid ones; if you don't then someone else will, and bang goes your scientific credibility in your field (this is another failure mode for scientific social systems; scientists exist in fields and just because someone is famous in their field doesn't make them marvelous; they can just be mediocre in a field of dunces).

In the case of climate change, the assumptions have to include things like "Solar irradiance and solar wind either don't change or have no effect" and "We know about, and have allowed for all long-term cyclical changes that the climate makes". As you can well appreciate, neither of these assertions is completely false or completely true. However, as the models fail to predict either the Elizabethan mini-ice age, or the Roman and Medieval warm periods no matter how accurate the supplied data are, it is certainly true that we are missing something somewhere.

The next question that arises is simple: we know that all our models are missing a mysterious something which renders them incapable of predicting these quite sizeable though relatively short-lived climatic swings. Is this lack a significant flaw for long-term models? The only answer is that until we know what the flaw is, we cannot say. To sum up, the climate models we have are inaccurate but we do not know why they are inaccurate or whether this inaccuracy is significant or not.

What is going on is politicians trying to sound as though they are "getting tough" on paedophiles whilst not actually understanding how the internet works. For instance, some years ago I read an article by a self-confessed paedophile on how internet access to this illegal material is actually managed. As I am sure nobody here will be surprised, the serving system is via encrypted filesystem virtual servers, hosted off-shore, working entirely over https, where the web address is usually a plain IP address or dynamic address changed frequently. The payment gateways into these systems are publicly visible; the actual systems need a username and password to get in and even see anything other than a login screen.

Actually tracking one of these vhost servers down is difficult, and as the illegal pornographers will, on being discovered, simply delete the machine and its encrypted filesystem and start afresh elsewhere, it is mostly a futile exercise. Similarly the internet Watch Foundation is mostly a waste of time, save for performing back-door censorship of web sites. It catches some paedophillic sites, but the vast majority are not detected or filtered.

The way to actually hurt paedophile websites is to follow the money, and attack the revenue stream. Hosting illegal material is only worth it if the hoster is getting paid, and paid extremely well for the risk. Going after the punters paying for the material is mostly just an exercise in identifying and recording potential paedophiles (all of whom then need to be carefully screened and assessed); it provides nice headlines for tabloid papers and pleases police chiefs, but it doesn't actually hurt the suppliers. Locating the payment systems and heavily fining them for being complicit in the supply of illegal materials is the way to go (or at least until everything switches to Bitcoins).

So, the government got a huge dollop of data on supposed tax evaders from a source which can best be described as nefarious and which ought to be described as downright untrustworthy. Who is to say that this data dump is correct in its entirety? It won't be complete, and it is likely the fruits of computer crime. Indeed, it might be almost entirely bogus, put where moron investigators can nab it simply to land these fools in the smelly.

You simply cannot trust data from nefarious sources like this; you certainly cannot make it stand up in court.

Your problem here is actually proving that they are breaking, or broke the law. To put it another way, think how you might get an innocent rich man into trouble with the authorities?

This trick works thus: Grab a large amount of sensitive data, and into it insert lies which you wish to be believed about the target. Then you leak this doctored document to the press, and await results. Most of the document is true and checkable; the bits that are untrue or uncheckable will be believed anyway.

All this fails as soon as a court of law is encountered, for defence lawyers are wise to these sorts of shennanigans.

This is pretty much the size of it. The NK political situation is quite simple really, it is a rather unusual medieval-style monarchy, with generals substituting for barons. Poor, pampered Kim just got made king, and all of a sudden he goes from being nobody much to this guy whom everyone wants dead.

The generals however didn't know who else to make king, and Kim is currently trying to keep them too busy to decide. Hence the state of war; not aggression, more make work.

To be honest, the main arbiter of what happens now will be China. China is the local large power, with ambitions to be the local super-power which it will be by default if the Americans can only be persuaded that setting up more of a presence in the neighbourhood is a waste of money. North Korea, which was long kept as a sort of pet of many Chinese administrations as it was vaguely Communist as long as you didn't look too hard, has just done the pet equivalent of crapping on the carpet after being repeatedly told not to.

North Korea isn't a Communist state. Communist states strictly separate the military from the political, and make sure the military is subordinate. Communist states also don't have much trouble retaining power in the ruling group when the original boss-man dies or is deposed, but this is a problem in North Korea. The best political model for North Korea is a feudal Royal one, where an usurper has taken power a while ago and only now are his descendents approaching a steady state of power.

The net political effect in NK now is that everything is unstable. The new king isn't secure; his barons who control the armed forces are restless and uncertain as to how much they think of the new king but nobody wants to break ranks and rebel in case everyone else attacks the rebel to cement their reputation as loyal followers of the king. North Korea right now is a Game of Thrones in a modern world.

This is what the nuclear test was all about: this was partly a show of strength and partly a provocation, so the new king can demonstrate to his barons that the entire world is out to get them, so unity is the only option. Only problem here is, the barons ain't completely daft and probably don't buy it, but as the only real alternative is inviting in China and spending one's retirement in a cell somewhere, they ain't complaining.

Like I said before, China is the arbiter here. If the NK leadership has any brains at all, this will be the last nuclear test (and the last ballistic missile test) for a very, very long time. If they carry on raising the pressure, they're going to get invaded by China simply to get rid of America's main excuse for being in that area, and also for international brownie points for removing a known mad dictator from power. The only thing is, I have grave doubts as to the intelligence and indeed the sanity of the current NK leadership; I am not at all certain that they know just how close to an invasion they are pushing China.

Raising fuel prices to insane levels is EXACTLY what the UK Government has done. As a result, fuel consumption has dropped dramatically, leaving the Government considerably puzzled as to where all that lovely tax revenue just went to. One outcome of this is that the old road-pricing black box idea is being raised yet again, despite universal unpopularity.

Lunatic fuel prices notwithstanding, reading the comments of mostly American commentors is, for a UK resident such as I, really rather hilarious. As has been repeatedly proven over the last few years, especially with vehicles like the Subaru Impreza, Mitsubishi Evo X and similar types, it can be very quickly and easily proven that a 4-cylinder engine plus a turbo can give a scarily quick machine that is also tough, and extremely agile. Our roads police use these vehicles since they are about the only thing on four wheels that can catch a speeding Jap motorbike. Woe betide the fool who tries racing one of these with a US-made V8 vehicle; the first couple of bends will sort that one out.

Even down at more sensible levels, European and Japanese designs are still far, far ahead of US domestic car designs. I drive a Toyota Avensis diesel; universally regarded as staid, boring and not especially quick. However, driven correctly this car will accelerate to 60 in about 10 seconds and carry on to over 100 in similar times, will cruise quietly and easily at 70 and still return close to 50 MPG. This isn't using strange, alien technology; just a 4-pot direct-injection turbodiesel and a 6-gear manual gearbox. This is a 2008 model; the latest variant will do over 60 MPG on a combined cycle, again without needing to use hybrid technology.

It isn't difficult to achieve this sort of economy. It isn't even difficult to do it and still have quite hefty vehicles that accelerate very sharply when asked properly, and you don't even need to be driving a plastic box to do it.

To be honest it sounds to me a lot like the kid's major existence was on assorted social networking sites, and much of his social self-worth was about getting reactions from other people in these social networks. There're only a few ways of consistently getting such reactions; always posting wise and apposite comments (which I manage maybe 30% of the time, try though I might), posting jokes or humourous cat photos, and posting attacks which attract the schardenfreude tendency of others.

However, I think that social media must have become pretty much ALL of this kid's socialisation and social life; like all teens he is mentally driven to socialise as much as possible, but he's not actually meeting people face to face much so isn't getting the all-important slaps in the face for being rude, aggressive or basically just a jerk.

The cure is to limit his access to social media and try get him socialising face to face a good deal more. He simply hasn't learned the rules, and won't do either, not if socialising is confined to texting on a smartphone or somesuch.

I am rather tempted to suggest a novel solution here which relies upon Darwinian natural selection.

Firstly, select an area of completely worthless land somewhere that the majority of Arabs can get to fairly easily. Afganistan would be a good choice, somewhere where there are no easily-exploited minerals and which is too far from a major river to be worth irrigating and living on.

Secondly, build a spider-web of basic roads leading out from the chosen area.

Thirdly, set up a very large military base there, complete with runway for resupply/maintainence. Put around this a good, strong fence, several ditch and bank defences and a minefield. Inside this place an over-abundance of automated machineguns, set to fire on anything moving into the base. Set up all equipment so it can be left unattended for long periods, and so that maintainence can be performed as safely as possible otherwise; under normal operating conditions this base will be unmanned.

Finally, signpost the base lavishly, on the lines of "This way to extremely well fortified Infidel base of certain death".

At this point, you will have given all the loons who want to martyr themselves fighting the infidel the perfect place where they can go do it without inconveniencing normal folks, although flying a large variety of flags over the base might also be a good idea, just in case the martyr-loons are fussy about which particular nationality of base they want to kill themselves on (flying a few completely fictional flags is also a good idea).

Usually this is done by hanging a car or truck tyre around the camera, and setting this alight with kerosene or something similar. Once alight, tyres burn a long time and burn very hot; this frys the internals of the camera.

This isn't the only trick used; in the north of England someone has taken to disabling the cameras using rock-blasting explosives; spray-painting the camera windows is common, as is rotating the entire camera body by force to point away from the road. Cutting the supporting arm, smashing the entire unit with earth-moving equipment and so on; there's almost no destructive technique you can think of which has not been tried.

In Britain, it was found that whilst it is possible to operate a laser speed measuring device at night, the associated camera to record vehicle licence plates doesn't get a picture at all. So, over here if one speeds during the day when the traffic camera (Talivans, they are nicknamed) units are out one risks a fine. However at night, feel free to drive like an utter loon as you have only the rather over-stretched police force to worry about.

It is also the case that these cameras rely upon the car licence plate being correct, and the registration being up to date and registered to a person who can be traced. As it is quite possible to buy a legal-looking show plate without showing ID or car registration documents, then the obvious happens quite often: criminal goes out looking for a car that is the same make, model and colour as his vehicle, notes down the licence plate, gets a pair of show plates of this number made up and puts them on his car. Police checks will simply come back with the car looking like it is the correct make, model etc and much of the time police won't take it further, as long as the driver looks safe and sane.

However, someone else is getting all this moron's tickets and likely having the very devil of a job proving his innocence (and yes, it does now come down to proving innocence as opposed to forcing the prosecution to prove guilt).

Actually, there is one major componentthat is not trivial to machine or otherwise fabricate: primers.

About twenty-odd years ago, Britain was engaged in a low-level counter-insurgency fight with Irish nationalist terrorists. These people liked bombing things, but had a problem producing all their bomb components. They did try to make their own primer devices but eventually gave up in disgust being unable to fabricate explosives detonators which could be relied upon to work every single time without premature detonation or not working at all. This is a known fact: primers for ammunition and detonators for explosives (much the same thing in terms of design) are very, very difficult to reliably manufacture.

So, whilst it will be possible to make 3D-printed guns, manufacturing conventional ammunition will be an on-going headache for anyone doing so. Most countries are not like the USA, remember; few are as paranoid as the UK but most restrict the sale of critical components like primers to officially-authorised personnel and most once again tend to get very interested in anyone trying to purchase the chemical precursors for primers.

The only way around this would be to copy and update the 60s Gyrojet pistol designs, which were essentially miniaturised rocket launchers rather than conventional firearms. Suitable updates here would be electrical ignition of the ammunition (which replaces a complex firing mechanism with a couple of switches) and increasing the calibre to a couple of centimetres or thereabouts; the "gun" thus produced would work very effectively indeed without needing conventional primers to ignite the charge. The exact composition of the rocket fuel might be a difficulty, however, but it is an easily surmountable one.