The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 grants PUBLIC bodies the right to use covert means to spy on it's citizens - not private entities such as people or companies.

Police organisations can use RIPA to bug, wiretap, intercept communications of whover they damn well please for crime prevention. Military organisations can do the same for national security.
That won't change as long as government minsters know one huge terrorist incident in the UK will be the end of their careers.

HMRC (the tax office) has the powers for Tax Evasion.
Pretty much every government beuracratic department can use RIPA for spying on its citizens. The local councils use RIPA for everything from making sure people obey parking regulations, putting the right type of trash in the right type of bin, catching benifit cheats, making sure people do not cheat the education system by buying a house they will never live in within the catchment area of a good school.

The real Interested parties are the large corperations that secrectly dispose of electronic waste as household waste to avoid rediculous disposal charges - whos senior management have a desire to try and park three mercedes down city residential roads where they have bought a cheap flat to remain empty to get their children into a good school because they are wealthy enough to - and they are wealthy enough to because they don't declare all their earnings to be raped by the tax man! - These people who can afford the best solicitors to get them off any charge of wrongdoing save one backed up by concrete evidence only organisations using the powers granted by RIPA can provide. These people also form the backbone of the paid up members of the Conservative Party - along with man small c conservitaves of the Liberal Democrats.

If they had a long consultation period, they would have the socialists fighting them to keep RIPA as well as the civil rights campaigners getting their input. Better to have a short consultation period to allow the big companies to get rid of the powers to bring them to account nice and quietly.

If you lost all faith in big business as a force for good... you can alwayse rely on them giving you freedom so they can do evil things to you :)

just as a footnote - wikipedia does have a good article summarising RIPA

Key phrase in the guardian article:

They had this problem a while back with the company Trafigura who tried to remove information regarding their activities that was in the public domain. It was available in hundreds of places within the hour.

Usually people do not replicate information, instead pointing to the origional source. Only when the origional information is threatened with censorship is it replacted to the point of it not being able to be removed.

Of course - being able to shut down domains such as www.facebookaccounts2010.co.uk, preventing idiots from giving away all their credit card details is probably quite a good thing.

It is too bad that in the hands of the Serious Organised Crime Agency; a department with the ability to violate almost every one of our civil liberties (car-number plate tracking, Bank snooping, hidden CCTV cameras to name but a few) but not it would seem the ability to make a single dent in the crime felt by any community, my less than competent friends will still be able to hand their data over to www.facebookaccounts.co.uk whilst I read material I do not particularly care about becuase "they" wanted to stop me reading it, and giggle at the absurdity of trying to censor the internet.

To be clear, the article states using domain-name registrars to shut down Domestic websites. The workings of the DNS are nicely described by this Wikipedia example;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_zone

So using the same logic, to block thepiratebay.org on the root name servers, all 13 root DNS servers (worldwide) would have to add an entry for thepiratebay.org and send it to a separate IP address. so the US government could mandate that the the .org authoritative nameserver blocks thepiratebay.org - however control of the top level domains is a useful thing for a country to have - and there is nothing stopping the generic authoritative namesevers from relocating out of the US. even if they did not do that - where is the authoritative nameserver for .se? if it is in Sweden (likely now- more likely if they are pressurised by a foreign government) they most will not fold to US pressure - and even if they did nothing to stop the pirate bay moving to another country.

Since hosting websites selling counterfeit/illegal goods hosted in the US would already most likely end up in a knock on the door from the police - I would imagine the better pirate websites, along with other sites such as wikileaks, are already hosted outside the US and are pretty much immune.

The next part is the court order to force ISPs to redirect traffic from non-US sites. what exactly will the court order require? if it requires ISPs to redirect traffic destined to the IP address of the site in question - what happens when the site changes it's IP address? is it to "whatever IP address is registered to the site" in which case who is responsible for tracking all the non US websites when they change their IP addresses? Is it to change the IP address the DNS resolves the name to? if so all foreign DNS services will need to be blocked from inside the united states, and all American DNS requests routed to a server that will comply. it all adds up to a half hearted attempt at a firewall that will be circumvented almost as soon as it is implemented

This sort of thing just goes to show the distance between the people who manage laws and policy against those who manage the technology. I'm sure Every ISP would say with much more depth something similar - ISPs would love to stop piracy since it costs them in transferring data. they don't implement these measures because they know it is less cost effective than letting pirates use their networks.

One argument for this action is it will stop "casual pirates" and does not need to target the technically minded. This argument falls down on the realisation that "casual pirates" are spoon fed how to pirate materials by the technically minded. I could easily keep 20 people up to date and pirating whatever measures are taken, and it would take up so little of my time I could do it for a beer down the pub later. (just as a disclaimer, I don't give lessons on how to pirate, and I don't pirate myself. I Will however try and provide council on what is technically possible, and provide them with enough information so they can assess the risks and benefits of piracy themselves - and alternatives that exist. I do require a payment in ale though!)

What is the history of the site? Was the feature there when your grandparents moved into the farm? Do they remember the day when the feature formed. The best thing to do would be to ask how big the bang would be to make that crater - and what sort of radius would the blast be felt, heard, and seen? then check local newspapers for reports on something that would create a bang that size. (probably something like "ammunition train explodes". The fact you haven't heard anything like this suggests it probably was not a meteorite impact.

If we are talking about pure logic: it boils down to the probability of just a sucessful return vs the probability of when that return will be

A return trip to Mars will be successful IF:
The return craft is not damaged,
All members of the crew remain healthy enough to prepare the return craft,
supplies do not run out.

If the return craft fails, or the crew are unable work to prepare the return craft before the supplies run out, the entire crew will die. Space travel has too many unknowns to realistically give a chance of survival of a return trip.

By taking out the return, we have to assume and plan that there is no minimum survival date. Then we get this scenario:

Robotic construction equipment and materials are sent to Mars. Controlled from earth; solar power, water cycle equipment, machines to actually convert CO2 into breathable oxygen, and comfortable habitation are all constructed. These are sent as many, smaller missions so if one fails it is not the end of the effort.

Many "one way craft" carrying food and spare parts are sent to the red planet over a long period of time. Each supply mission increases the reliability of the craft.

A Large team of space colonists are sent on a one way trip using these now tried and tested vehicles. They arrive at Mars to a fully functioning, powered, habitable colony they can occupy indefinitely on food supplies sent from earth. (This would consist of many small supply missions carrying a surplus on the assumption some will not make it)

The large team is then sent ample supplies of food, materials and equipment to expand and maintain the colony. As the colony expands more are sent - the colony is subdivided into small independent units so if one fails the entire Mars population is not killed.

Eventually the colony becomes populous enough that return vehicles are constructed and two way transport is possible. The original colonists, all be it 10-15 years later, return to earth to a heroes welcome.

I have quite a nice life on earth with a nice family. Of course I would like to be a Martian pioneer, but would want to be given a decent shot of returning to earth. If going on pure logic - this way I can say there is a very good probability I will be returning to earth alive – even if I cant say the exact date.

You'r right. Limewire is utterly irrelevant as a file sharing service - but it makes a useful case study in the use of litigation to destroy a product. If this pirate edition is well accepted, and traffic on the gnutella network increases, Hopefully the people that sued them will learn that lengthy, costly ligation against software developers is utterly futile if the developers release the code into the wild and the software is back a month later. Hopefully those who develop efficient file sharing paradigms and technologies will realise the best possible protection from litigation is to open-source their software from the beginning (Frostwire never gaught on) to give the best possible guarantee that any legal action will, ultimately, be unsuccessful.