Interesting choice of name, though: The Impact Team (TIT). What were they thing of?

While I agree with the gist of what you say, to some extent, I think your wording is unfortunate. Being ignorant means, by definition, to not know about something, so we are all born ignorant - that's why I prefer to use the term 'stupid' as something distinct from 'ignorant': stupid is when you learn to ignore facts to protect a belief, that would otherwise be proven false. I am ignorant about a lot of things, but I'm not stupid (I hope), because I don't refuse to change my views and beliefs if facts prove me wrong.

That's an easy choice, at least. I'd rather have nothing than help feeding a buch of parasites, considering that most of what gets streamed is empty calories with artificial flavours.

On a different note - with your skills at pleasing the crowds with sweet words, surely you must be in advertising yourself? What advertiser still haven't managed to grasp is that when people avoid adverts, it isn't because they are subversives with a communist agenda tryig to take away fundamental rights. They are simply sick of advertising and advertisers that show no respect for anybody, unless they are forced to at gunpoint. Advertisers appear to shamelessly lie, cheat, invade our privacy and steal time and space from us - and the effect is that most of us loathe advertising, and most of us subconsciously or consciously decide to place our shopping elsewhere.

Hopefully, in the future, businesses will learn to not spend money on idiotic advertising that only alienates their customers, but I'm not optimistic.

- and choosing to be an asshole, as you call it. Is being an 'asshole' by choice justified when you want to score easy points slagging off a society that you don't really seem to know much about? I'm sure we all know there are serious problems on many levels in China - as there are in most countries in the West - but unlike many countries in the West, the Chinese government are actually addressing them. You may not agree with the way they have prioritised the momentuous task ahead, but then it isn't your call either. It is easy to sit in your armchair and have great opinions about things you are not personally responsible for finding a practical solution to - not just whether some other nation should intruduce 'democracy' or 'freedom of whatever', but also the stupid questions about 'why didn't they just ....' when some expensive satelite fails etc etc. Fortunately it can't cause much harm, and one can shrug it off, but sometimes the stupidity of it just gets too irritating.

I don't mind genuinely insightful criticism, especially because insightful people know how to offer constructive criticism.

Well, say what you will, it IS a strangely appropriate name: SIMP, all considered.

Well, all I can say is, it hasn't worked on mine.

RTFA - this is not about something trivial as that; this guys was ABSTRACTING electricity!! Fortunately they got him before he got to the extended metaphors; a close call. Too damn close for comfort!

The real problem with Javascript is that it is code that gets pushed to your browser from an essentially unknown source. It doesn't matter if it is fast or not, it gets pushed at you in a situation where you are not in a position to make a good decision about what this software is and whether you want it or not. My own, somewhat awkward solution is to use NoScript and not allow any Javascript as a default. Most sites work OK without, and for those that don't, I have the control I need to make a decision about things.

Javascript can be a brilliant tool and if used correctly, can make a web application run like a desktop application; but I have been around far too many obscenely abusive Javascripts to allow it unlimited access to my system. It isn't a lot of fun, when you have to go to a console to kill off your browser because some idiot has served you a looping Javascript.

Regrettably, the efforts to Lunaform the Earth are at a more advanced stage ;-)

This idea came to suddenly in a flash! How about we send the immigrants into space?! It would solve the crisis with The Hordes Of Immigrants Looming Over Us To Steal Our Jobs and benefit space exploration. I can see no downside! There is no downside!!

There's that, of course. But I think a very significant part of doing things by hand, with simple means, is that you enjoy the actual process, being able to apply your skills and achieve something that isn't trivially easy, but requires insight into what you are doing.

Years ago I worked for an American company, and I got to talk to one of the vice-presidents about fishing. To me fishing is something about trying to land a single fish or maybe two with a bit of cleverness and local knowledge, but to him it consisted in owning a 60 foot vessel on one of the big lakes, equipped with sonar, trawl etc etc. Or take bread making - you can probably make a good bread in one of these automatic breadmakers, but I can't imagine why I would want to skip the most enjoyable part of it.

Sadly, justice as defined by the law is not necessarily just in a moral sense; it only means that it follows the law as currently practiced. What is too often lacking is the reality of full restitution - that you can be forgiven your past sins. I think it is fundamentally important that criminal justice happens in public, so that people can see that crimes are properly and consistently prosecuted, and the punishments are neither too harsh nor too lenient.

As for things becoming a life sentence - whether it is fair or not, what is done stays done, we can't change the past. In the more serious cases this reflects the fact that lasting damage has been done to a victim; and even if the may seem trivial, the victim is likely to feel significant distress that goes far beyond the objective loss suffered. I've been on the receiving end of petty crime several times, and although I am usually a very robust person, you can't help feeling violated and upset; and it doesn't help knowing that whereas you have lost a valued possession with memories attached, the thief is going to flog it for next to nothing. So, is it really always so unfair that you can't shake off the consequences of your actions?

Apart from that, in many countries you do in fact get rid of your past as far as the justice system is concerned; in UK, for example, many sentences will be 'spent' after a number of years, in the sense that they no longer occur on your criminal record, and you are no longer barred from things like applying for citizenship. It may not mean that there are no longer people who will remember that you were the one who did the crime, but then it is up to you to go and amend your relationships.

To me this sounds like the not uncommon hype that seems to follow the release of indifferent 'horror' movies. Like the one called something like 'The Human Centipede', which was supposed to be the most incredibly extreme horro movie ever. Only, it turned out to be a flop, hardly worth a shrug, something that could have been thought up by a couple of teen-agers and filmed on a smartphone.

I don't know, maybe I've grown too critical with age - I've stopped having night-mares because I tend to wake up and think "What is this crap?" because the story is too thin and the effects are unrealistic.

Well, without reading the article, you don't know if what they call molestation would be called child rape in our part of the world. To enlighten the debate a little: "The Japanese Penal Code sets a minimal age of consent of 13" (from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) - which to means that the court would be biased towards assuming consent, unless the girl was very young. Japan is also a society that still has a great deal of sympathy towards the rights of men is realtion to women.

From the article:

What is interesting here is Google's statement; they are normally very competent when it comes to covering their own arse, so they would not come out with such a harsh statement unless they fellt sure it would stand up to scrutiny. The defence lawyer's statement, on the other hand, is vapid nonsense, as far as I can see. Just imagine anybody else getting away from their past with that excuse, even if all they had done was shoplifting a bottle of cheap wine. When we do something wrong, it stays with us; criminal cases are public: justice must be SEEN to be done.

One of the things that immediately puts me in alert mode is that name 'Liquid Metal', capitalised, no less. Understanding of what a glass actually is, is realtively new, of course, and something that is likely to become very useful in the future, but why make a phone with frame made of it? If it is indeed as good and durable as all that, is it actually going to be relevant? Smartphones are 'old' almost as soon as they go on sale, since the technology is still developing quickly, and unless the hardware etc can be upgraded easily, having an expensive phone like this is no more than a toy for the rich and stupid.