It's a view point in the UK that has been around for years - at least a few decades - although where it originated from and when I have no idea. Quite possibly it was the Daily Mail or a similar rag going off on one of the their diatribes about "declining standards" or whatever they had a bee in their bonnet over that month. From comparing notes though it does seem C of E schools in the UK generally force much less dogma and indoctrination upon impressionable infants compared with church schools of other faiths, and even other christian denominations. I guess you really do reap what you sow... :)

The graphs certainly back up the idea that the best way to raise an atheist is to send the child to a Church of England school (in my case I was an atheist by the age of nine), but I suspect that the increasingly secularisation in UK education has something to do with that as well. When the only primary school in a small rural town is a church school (usually that would be C of E, but sometimes Catholic) and you have a typical rural UK demographic representing both major christian denominations plus a scattering of other faiths that school tends to get coerced into providing a more agnostic education if it wants financial support from the local government.

I think there's more to it than just being exposed to skepticism from existing atheists/agnostics too. You get much more exposure to people who are from different cultures and religions that you might in your own little neighbourhood, both knowingly and unknowingly, and when that penny drops, that's when the thinking part kicks in. Generally you are going to you realise that, hey, they are not that unlike us and we actually share many of the same views on life - most religions teach the same core principles wrapped up in some slightly different stories, after all. It's fairly well understood that major cities with cosmopolitan populations tend to be more open minded and their populations tend to have a less religious view than those from more rural communities, so I suspect this is just the same principle manifesting itself on a much grander scale.

It might actually be more than that. Worst case, the screen in in 80x25 text mode (assuming a PC), which gives 2,000 binary bits, but if you start playing around with extended ASCII graphics characters you could probably encode a KB of data quite easily. Hardly a crash dump, but easily enough to get across the essentials.

That would be excellent if this happened, although unlikely given how much the local population that supports the tourist trade is likely to rely on that same mobile coverage. I go on vacation to *get away* from the daily grind, yet of late it has got to the point that you can't go anywhere without someone yakking on a mobile phone, and I go to some pretty out of the way places to try and make that happen. The absolute last thing you want to hear when you reach Everest Base Camp, slightly out of breath from the lack of oxygen and effort, and are just starting to take in the amazing view is:

*Latest naff ringtone*
"Hello...?"
*pause*
"Yes, I'm climbing Mount Everest!"

It kind of ruins the moment, you know?

Maybe we should #AskJenny about that?

Not just tasty in their own right, but also not be so hot that you kill any chance of really enjoying the taste of whatever else that you are eating them with/in. I can manage peppers a fair way up the scale; a hot Piri Piri sauce doesn't bother me much, nor do habaneros, which are both around the 50-100K bracket IIRC, but all I can taste after a few mouthfuls is the pepper. I'd much rather have something like jalapeños or something even lower on the scale, so I can taste both the pepper and the rest of the meal for the entire sitting.

Inmarsat managed to eliminate the northen arc based on differences in expected doppler differences of the signal pings, when the last ping was received, and assuming a conservative fuel consumption to that point, there would have been insufficient fuel left for the plane to make land, hence it went down in the ocean. It's important to note that Inmarsat is unable to say where exactly, only that it is within a given range of the location where last known ping was now known to have been sent from, which is where the search for wreckage is now centred. I gather this is the result of a highly unorthodox set of data analysis that is well outside normal procedures for determining location, hence the reason it's taken so long - some of the techniques they used probably haven't ever been done before.

Still vastly better than what it was only a day ago, and there seems to be a lot more possible debris sightings in the search area which I take as a sign they might be in the right area and will hopefully pin it down some more. The race now is to find it before the black box transmitters go silent, a task for which the US is dispatching some specialist search gear apparently, because that's probably the only hope of giving the bereaved a chance at some closure left now.

I don't think it's going to be quite the VR nirvana that some people are expecting, at least not for some of the more involved games that would benefit the most from VR - simpler console based stuff will be fine, although I'd expect there to be a similar level of bandwagon jumping crap that we had when the first "Multimedia PCs" were all the rage. Having a device like the Oculus Rift strapped in front of your eyes is a double edged sword; yes, you are totally immersed in the virtual environment, but you are also much more limited in your interactions with the real one. You are going to need to have situational awareness of both worlds, and do everything in the real one pretty much by touch alone, and that's likely a more limiting factor than some people might be expecting.

There's a lot of people planning on using the Oculus to play Star Citizen when it comes out, yet this is a traditional old school style PC flight sim at heart which, as many old timers will attest, even with all the buttons and other controls on a HOTAS setup, you often still needed some controls on the keyboard. The game also has an FPS mode that many of those same players are planning on using with a mouse rather than a stick, so that most likely means that the left hand will be moving between throttle and keyboard and the right between stick and mouse. Sure, most PC gamers can touch type, but with the Oculus we won't even have the benefit of our peripheral vision to find the home keys and get our bearings to find the key(s) we want, and I think that might be harder to do quickly than some people expect, particularly when they are in the middle of a dogfight or attempted boarding. That's not to say it's an unsolvable problem, some extra thought on control to key mappings might be enough to avoid most mis-steps, and I expect to see a lot of work going into making input devices much more tactile to help with this over the next few years - braille keyboards for hardcore VR gamers anyone?

Perhaps. By not applying Full Disclosure to the identity of the "insider" that has resulting in this you could accuse John Cartright of breaching his and the list's principles, but without knowing the details of the threat (and the list has resistant many such threats in the past) it's difficult to know what the consequence of that might be. Or maybe there is no really significant threat other than some inconvenience, but this is just the straw that broke the camel's back. If not taking down this list would result in the breach of a court order, then this is almost certainly the right tack to take, regardless of how painful it might seem, unless we are expecting John to potentially become another fugitive from justice, like Edward Snowden?

Sure,it's a sad day for freedom of information, and will no doubt have negative consequences due to more information being known only those with malicious intentions and companies sweeping issues under the rug due to lack of exposure, but even so I don't think it's ont that is worth compromising your life over, let alone expecting someone else to do so.

It's not negative, the older generation is just more jaded and has seen too many things like this turn into a fad to risk any significant amount of tangible worth on it. There is also the risk of association given the close links between BC and the digital underworld to consider, particularly when dealing with laypersons (many of whom might be in senior management); "You use Bit Coin? Isn't that used to buy drugs and stuff?" It's not some toy like a new programming language, Seti@Home, or an Arduino that you can hack around with and the only real risk is a bit of time and CPU cycles; you've got to put actual money on the line, and quite a bit of it if you want to mine productively. Those "flaws and nitpicks" that you mention are resulting in far too much of that money getting ganked, although admittedly, that's often the fault of the original owner failing to do their homework and making a silly mistake like trusting their BC to a third party that isn't deserving of that trust.

In my view, crypto currencies are still at v1.0, and we all should know the rule about ".0" releases, let alone "1.0" releases. As such, I find that it's an interesting notion but almost certainly doomed to be replaced by something new and improved once all the teething troubles and peripheral issues that we are currently seeing get addressed. I'm not really expecting the tech masses (including the jaded grey beards) to really embrace it until we start seeing the next generation of currencies and have some kind of framework in place to prevent most of those "flaws and nitpicks" without having to RTFM. Any possible mainstream public acceptance is probably only going to come once there are far more legitimate uses than illegitimate ones and it's generally seen as a safe and convenient thing to do, even for a complete n00b that's likely to click on a link to a file called "rootkit.exe", cancel the AV warnings and run it anyway.