Do you have any proof that China systematically back-doors hardware before it leaves the country? I have not seen any, just lots of innuendo from US companies trying to make out that China is as bad as they are and you are screwed either way.

The US is exceptionally bad. It spends more money spying on people than anyone else. It has more extensive programmes than anyone else we know of, except perhaps the UK who they are close partners with. Let's not pretend that everyone is as bad, because they are not. There is zero evidence that China installs backdoors in routers or hard drive firmware before they go through customs, for example, while we have photos of the US doing it.

China is bad, but all the evidence suggests that the US is worse. Most of us prefer an evidence based approach to our paranoia.

The time when companies could make big profits supplying electricity is coming to an end. In the future a large proportion generation will be distributed renewables, much of it owned by private individuals or small groups. There will still be centralized generation of course, but without the huge peak demand to rely on profits are going to be a lot lower.

We probably won't need that much large storage. Home battery packs will become common, so there will be a lot of distributed storage as well. I imagine quite a number of people will pretty much drop off the grid entirely.

The whole market is going to change, and of course the established players will have to be dragged kicking and screaming along. It's inevitable though, and they would be better off getting on board with it.

The problem is that the people who own the grid want it to serve them, not the public good. The grid needs to be run as non-profit with clean, distributed generation in mind. It's critical infrastructure that we all need, like roads.

The current retail prices being paid are to encourage take-up of solar. It's always been understood that it wouldn't last forever.

No, Google uses patents defensively. Apple uses them offensively, to attack other companies and get their products either banned or crippled.

She's the richest woman in the country but still gets tax money. We would get far more money from tourism if we opened up the various palaces and state buildings she has exclusive use of to the public. She would still be around, just as an ordinary citizen instead of a constitutional monarch.

To be fair, he's just a low level back-bench MP without too much power. It's like we found the dumbest guy in the country and elected him president or something.

Still, you have a point. We have yet to see an atheist Prime Minister. Can't seem to abolish the monarchy.

Most of Apple's hardware designs are ripped off from other places. Slide to unlock is centuries old and other phones did it first on a touch screen. Their tablets look almost exactly like Samsung photo frames released years earlier. Much of their other hardware looks like Braun products from the 70s and 80s, the kind of stuff Jobs would have lusted after when he was young.

We have all hard Steve Jobs talk about how Apple used to shamelessly stead good ideas. That's the way it should be. Apple, and Jobs in particular, turned nasty in later life. They could use patents defensively, but instead they use them to stifle competition with nonsense claims that defy common sense. Normal people who are raped do not then become rapists because they had a bad experience.

Did the voters really have a choice? For a start the choice at the general election is for both the ruling party and local MP, so if your national party of choice puts up an idiot as your local candidate you can support one or the other but not both.

Tredinnick had a 9% majority in 2010, ahead of the the Liberal Democrats. Their vote has collapsed now though... The most realistic alternative might be UKIP in his constituency. So it's a choice between someone who believes in astrology and closet racists, or maybe treacherous liars if the LDs can pull it back together.

We rejected the alternative vote and I imagine would reject PR on similar grounds (too thick to understand it), so this is what we are going to be stuck with for the foreseeable future.

... die by the sword. Apple loves abusing patents and is one of the companies behind Rockstar.

There is no consistency at all. The US has said more than once that real-world military force is a reasonable response to state sponsored cyber attacks, yet we don't see cruise missiles headed for GCHQ or a tactical ICBM targeting NSA headquarters.

Instead other countries will develop their own cyber offence capabilities and start fighting back. It's already open season on US companies thanks to the actions of the NSA. If a US company is involved in any kind of infrastructure it can expect to have relentless attacks from foreign powers. We are on the brink of WW3, except that it won't be a traditional war fought with bombs and guns, it will by a cyber war where the lights keep going out and banks collapse as their accounts are drained and depositors pull out. Your computer, your router, your phone are all just tools that will be conscripted into foreign armies to attack your country, if they have not already been p0wned by your own cyber military looking to hide themselves.

GCHQ and the NSA were bragging in their internal documents that they have those encryption keys. If true, Gemalto would need to replace billions of SIMs (they manufacture about 2 billion a year) and there is zero chance they could recover the cost from GCHQ.

So no, we can't believe them.

The stat about French women is a lie. Even if he means it in the sense that "90% of pregnant French women drink water", which is all homeopathic medicine is, it would still be wrong as I'm sure 100% of them do.

This guy is up for re-election in a few months, let's hope he loses his seat.

There are secure webmail services where only the client can decrypt the message content. They are not perfect but the people running them are at least protected from being forced to decrypt messages since they don't have the keys.

Of course, you lose two of the most valuable aspects of webmail. You can't log in from any random location because you need to have a copy of your key on you. The service probably won't be free, because the service provider can't datarape your email account.

Sure, but we are already on the terrorist watchlist anyway. Some of us are into flight simulators, some of us have Islamic sounding names, some of us just complain about surveillance a lot. I use a VPN constantly which is enough to make you interesting to them. At this stage encryption can only help.

To clarify, I was talking about Moxie's claim that there were not that many GPG users because there are only about 2 million public keys on known key servers. I'm sure there are loads of people like us who don't publish public keys.

Enigmail is very easy to install and use in Thunderbird, and there are similarly easy plug-ins for other popular mail clients. It really isn't hard to set up and use at all.

What is holding adoption back is webmail. Until someone comes up with a really good solution for webmail the number of users will never get above some subset of the small minority who still use email clients.