UK = England + Scotland + Wales + Northern Ireland. The central government only controls education policy for England, not for the rest of the UK. State-funded schools in Scotland and Wales were never permitted to teach creationism. I don't know the situation in Northern Ireland but it may be different.

A data centre in Hong Kong would have been a turnaround for Google, since it very publicly pulled out of the country after attacks on Gmail which it blamed on the Chinese government in 2010.

This is incorrect -- Google pulled out of Mainland China, not Hong Kong. The author seems unaware, but Hong Kong has different laws from the Mainland, including data privacy and free speech. In fact, since Google pulled out of mainland China, www.google.cn actually shows a redirect link to www.google.com.hk .

It was equally ineffective in Wales until they (a) required all shops to charge, and (b) required them to donate the proceeds to charity. Now it's normal to carry reusable bags and few people seem to object.

India, he "I" in BRICS, has a high proportion of vegetarians. This is true in the prosperous areas as well as the poorest.

My father remembers sending food parcels in the 1970s from the UK to relatives in mainland China. Now, starvation is almost unknown there. Yet, China was a more equal society in the 1970s -- virtually everyone was extremely poor.

A central reason that Mosley won the original privacy case in the High Court in London is that the judge rejected News Group Newspapers' claim that it was a "Nazi" scenario because they were speaking German (see paragraph 72 of the judgment). The judge found that there was no reason to think the orgy was Nazi-themed, and therefore there was no public interest to justify the privacy violation.

should be more widely understood than it is. Even English-only programmers need to know enough to avoid security holes. You can't normally be sure you're writing safe software unless you know a little about Unicode. In this sense, it's like structured programming, and unlike most other things on the original list.

... because the article gives no evidence or reasoning to explain how Watson could scale up to become a general search engine. Watson as seen on Jeopardy used Jeopardy-specific analysis rules and an info base of a few hundred gigabytes. It's just not the same thing as a general-purpose internet search engine.

Here's a big hint for Tim: on iOS, you can't write a custom keyboard. On Android you can. This is a really big deal in Hong Kong, because iOS has no support for Cantonese-based Chinese input. The best you can do is a kludgy app where you have to copy and paste the result (see https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/canton-guang-dong-pin-yin/id385519764?mt=8).

Therefore, the Cantonese user is hamstrung by Apple's lack of support for the Cantonese-speaking market, together with their locked-down approach which prevents third party developers from filling the hole.

Compare this with the situation on Android, where there are at least five Cantonese-based keyboard input methods, together with Cantonese voice recognition. Why is it surprising if Hong Kongers find iOS seriously deficient?

Sorry, I tried to hold it in but it just burst out

This seems to be an interesting example of a court case being fought for the publicity it generates. It's surely cheaper to file this suit than to advertise his film in conventional ways. However unlike cases such as SCO v. IBM, the litigant probably believes he would win the case if it came to trial. The newsworthiness of the suit lies in the audacity of the defendants in aggressively asserting the copyright in the first place.

The essence of Tor is that your message passes through multiple nodes (say 3), none of which knows your message's origin and destination (and indeed content). But this breaks down if all the nodes are controlled by the same sysadmin.

Surely if we end up with a high proportion of nodes on Amazon, then some communications will be routed entirely between Amazon nodes. Then this breaks the anonymity model, allowing the secret policeman to log (or subpoena) the user's traffic.

On a not unrelated note, what's the general view of the current state of Perl 6? I can look at http://planet6.perl.org/ for the view of those close to the project, but what's the word on the street? I think "word on the street" is a really important metric as to how well a project is doing. Trends are a major determiner of which product potential new users will find. Rather like bank runs: it can be irrational to trigger one but nevertheless rational to follow one.

"You're an idiot. You signed something under threat of prison / arrest without bothering to consult a lawyer. No amount of mention of poverty, trust, or even just plain intimidation should have made you do such a thing without first consulting a lawyer." Hmmm, threatening to go to the police if someone doesn't sign a contract. I'm pretty sure that would constitute blackmail in the UK under the Theft Act (making aan unwarranted demand with menaces), which is a serious offence with a maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment; see http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/21. Anyone know what the law on blackmail is in his jurisdiction?

1. Spark a hunting spree that has no hope of eradicating them.
2. Apply selective pressure to breed unhuntable pythons.
3. ???
4. Profit!

Or am I missing something?