Wheras in america they can legally shoot back. Don't tread on me, officer.

You earned twice as much as an executive's bonus when you were young and immature? That would make most execs I know cry in their beer.

Agreed. Flamebait crap about unions and corporations might boost page views, but it is killing the site.

Can you see why death threats and mock executions are criminal? If the US jailors in Abu Ghraib doctored pictures of the prisoners' families to show their children being executed, then presented them to the prisoners as real photos, would that be criminal, in your eyes?

You actually go further than this in your sig - "intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent". Does that mean you wouldn't mind if I just copy and re-post all of your comments as my own? If, in an exam, I copied you and your friend's answers, and through doing so raised the pass grade, so through my actions I passed and you both failed - would that be fair? If a hedge fund manager steals information on a stock, and through doing it makes money, is that wrong? I'm not criticising your views - I agree this legislation is horrible. I would just be interested from a philosophical sense, what you believe.

The future is tech rather than oil.

It seems perfectly fitting to western society. When Papua New Guinean natives first met western GIs and explorers, they noticed one major difference between our societies - the westerners had more "cargo" - cargo being sharp knives, jeeps, planes, radios, tinned food. This is the one area which the west has consistently outperformed, and has led to the dominance of our society over all others. The ipad is just the latest useful tool that has been produced. In the 40s, the future looked bright for the west, and not so bright for the Papua New Guinean natives. Might I suggest that today, things look bright for Apple, but not so bright for Exxon?

And you know what the really strange thing is? After these riots, you can bet there will be a whole lot more CCTV cameras, and police, and I suspect that Theresa May is quietly reviewing the costs of getting a water cannon fleet. And what is even stranger is that the British people will be right behind her. Strange thing is, when people see their houses being burnt down, they stop caring about whether a CCTV camera guy might take photos of a stupid girl that leaves her curtains open, and start thinking it's nicer to lose a bit of privacy than be burnt to death. Funny old world, isn't it?

UK is AAA because we have a competent government which has undertaken spending cuts, even at the cost of riots. It also helps that our debt is denominated in Sterling, so we can print as much as we want - of course the same is true of the US, but Standard & Poor's Credit Ratings never have been very good at actually rating credit. Remember when they downgraded Japan, then had to upgrade them again :)

Thank you for making this point so eloquently.

I accept your point that it is impressive that such a mountain of suck runs so effectively on MySQL. However it is still a mountain of suck. Or to put it another way, I don't think computers were invented so some mini bill gates can try to cajole me into "poking" my friends for the purposes of selling advertising.

This all seems pretty simple. You record every access, all accesses will be audited at a later stage by an oversight committee. 99% of cases are automatically handled (e.g. doctor accessing records for his patient day after admission) but cases which are not clear are reviewed. Any employee who accesses records has to explain his rationale for doing so. If the rationale doesn't hold up, they are disciplined / sacked. A warning explaining this comes up when you try to access records. I would imagine the guarantee of losing your job would curtail the curiosity of most nosy employees, and while the sacking might be post-hoc, their apprehension will be before the fact.

These are the guys that brought you the credit crunch. Nice to see nothing has changed.

I agree. The party line seems to be "Things like Wikileaks are good, because they deny privacy to other people. Things like car number plate recognition are bad, because they deny privacy to us." I personally hope that personal privacy is eroded at the expense of public information. I'm here to learn, not to cheat, and I'm not afraid of anyone.

It's a religious movement - after Marxism was totally discredited, these guys have got to believe that someone is out to get them. Monsanto, Nike, GAP, Starbucks. I waded through some anti-globalisation literature, there's a whole post-modern framework ("counter-narrative") behind some of these guys. Total bullshit of course, but new religions usually are. Their form of the armageddon is that man's sinful ways (capitalism, scientific advance, industry, the evil pursuit of money) will lead to an ecological catastrophe. They don't provide any solutions, because that's not their job.