The system isn't fully online, and you have always needed either the V5 document number or renewal number to buy your tax through the DVLA website anyway.

If you didn't have tax previously, you were driving your car illegally on the road (unless you were in one of the few tax exempt bands which don't require you to get a zero cost disc) and would have been caught long before by ANPR cameras already installed.

The post office definitely isn't, they have always had an electronic system in place.

Depends how much spare capacity you want to keep around - by some accounts, the upsurge in visitors peaked around 400% over the same day the previous year, so do we really think keeping that amount of spare capacity in reserve, or building on a public cloud system for extremely rare occasions is worth it?

The sole reason the website broke is because there was a massive upsurge in people accessing it, well beyond the normal rate for tax renewals as people were for some reason waiting for it.

I've done my previous 8 vehicle tax renewals online via the DVLA website just fine (yes, this isn't the first time you could buy your vehicle tax online, they've had it for years, all they are doing now is not sending you a physical tax disc) and the website has been fine - in this case I wouldn't lay all the blame on the service provider as they were working to previous usage levels that have been long established.

As for health care services, well I've never had to fill out a form relating to health care in the UK, I just receive the care that I need. Oh, and I can book appointments, order prescription renewals and even choose a specific doctor to have an operation with online. Have done for years :)

In summary, the system isn't as broken as the story makes out.

If that were to happen, you could say good bye to more than 99% of all mass produced content as most is created for the non-commercial consumer and has no comparable alternative commercial consumer.

While there's no doubt that technology does play a part in the success of that school, MHO is that it is wrong to attribute all the success on technology alone

The fact is that school got so much attention from so many people, so much so that the inventor of the 3D printed limb, Richard van As was present at that school

Or, in other words, it was Hawthorne Effect ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... ) that has contributed to the dramatic improvement on the performances of the students of that school

While I do not know how you would define that "overly" in the "overly spiced" description of yours, real Thai food (and yes, I have been to Thailand many times on business trips) are certainly much more tasty than what you get from those "Thai Restaurants" on your main street in Europe or America

I have great doubt that the robot could do a decent job identifying a real tasty Thai food from a bad one

Sure, the bot can judge the level of spiciness / sourness / sweetness by measuring the level of glucose / acid / capsaicinoids, but that still doesn't mean it can ascertain how tasty the food is

Actually, BOTH !!

Everyone knows the even number versions suck.