Fortunately the US is likely to tell Cameron to fuck off, since it would be unconstitutional to ban encryption...
Just like it is unconstitutional to torture prisoners etc. etc.? I expect that you are right in that they will deny his request but the reason will be because it is the request of a foreign power. I also expect that many US politicians will think that it sounds like an excellent idea and after a suitable period so that they can claim it is their own idea there will be an American lead initiative to do the same thing. Why would they listen to some idiotic right wing UK politician when they have plenty of their own to choose from?
"Incorrect" in languages is only incorrect until we change the rules.
True but there needs to be some definition of what counts as 'we' when it comes to changing the rules. A few ignorant kids posting comments on Twitter and Facebook showing they have no clue what 'literally' means should not be enough to get the meaning changed in a dictionary. Indeed I would guess the way that most people saw the 'new' meaning was through reposts with a comment to the effect of "look what this idiot wrote".
What constitutes a forest might be complicated in the UK. But it's simple in the US
No, what constitutes a forest is simple everywhere. It is just defined as
The first nuclear bomb test heated a volume of atmosphere to higher temperatures, and reached higher pressures, than any similar volume of atmosphere in the entirety of Earth's history, by natural or artificial means.
What about a meteorite impact? The shockwave from a sufficiently large one (and there is plenty of evidence of these) would presumably be very similar to that of a nuclear device. While the energy density at the core of the explosion might be less than a nuclear bomb presumably it is the shockwave heating which you need to generate the chain reaction since this will create high temperature and pressures rather than just temperature? I'm not a plasma physicist though...
Why should they? When the banking secret was killed by the EU, the banks did not threaten to go elsewhere.
There is a large difference (of almost 400 million people) between the EU and the UK. Large businesses cannot afford to pull out of the EU, much like they cannot afford to pull out of the US. However I imagine they would be far less adverse to moving their HQ from London to Frankfurt, Dublin or some other non-UK, EU location.
The other thing I wondered about is the different expectations. If your instructor still thinks myspace is where the cool kids hangout....
Well having grown up in the UK and been to computer lessons in school (in the 1980s) I'd say that my expectations were that the teachers knew the subject material. When it came to maths, physics, chemistry etc. the teachers I had really knew their stuff and I learnt a heck of a lot from them but with computing it was far more variable.
I almost got into real trouble in one class using BBC Micros. We were told to write a program to add two numbers together which was incredibly trivial so, having the same computer at home, I thought I'd do the assignment in a more challenging way and teach myself assembly to add the numbers using the 'Advanced User Guide' which they had at school but I'd not got at home. I ran into some problems (you had to loop the assembly code through the parser twice to compile it) and when I asked for help and she saw the code she threw a fit. I was threatened with detention for not doing the assignment etc. etc. despite my protestations and explanation.
Fortunately the senior computing teacher walked in before anything got set in stone and she got him to come over to show him how badly I'd been behaving. His response was 'leave him to me' at which point he sat down and proceeded to show me what I was missing and then set me the challenge to figure out how to add two numbers which gave an answer greater than 255 (since it was an 8-bit machine) and how to store negative numbers using 2's complement. I learnt more computing in the 10 minutes he spent with me during one of his free periods than I learnt in the entire rest of the term with the idiot we had who was supposed to be teaching us.
So this is hardly a new problem. Teachers have a duty to make sure that the know what they are teaching and, worse, if their reaction to someone who may know more than they do is anger and hostility then they really have no business at all being a teacher at all. Who cares what they think about "fashion" - that's only relevant to education when it comes to engagement and sometimes being hopelessly out of date can be more engaging than being up to date.
Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker