I took GP as meaning that he's quite convinced AGW is real, and OP is overstating claims, thus making GP's camp look foolish, because overstated claims have repeatedly been shown to be false, and that causes a credibility gap. Because that's pretty much what I told the kid in town getting signatures for carbon sequestration or some such. And the kid admitted the overstatement of claims is a big problem.

I'm not sure what ignorance you're talking about here. How are people going to be unaware that they've had a chip implanted under their skin that stops them from getting pregnant?

But again, functionally, the birth control application isn't much different from a Depo-Provera shot or an IUD. The differences are A) it lasts somewhat longer, and B) you can turn it off without removing it.

We don't need to fantasize about what hypothetical dystopias might do -- we have an existing one to look at. In China, there are existing technologies that already do what you're talking about. They are backed up by fines and other punishments. Outside of China, trying to force surgery on an entire population is a risky move that could easily provoke a popular uprising. China spent decades under a Stalinist dictatorship before enacting the One Child Policy, and as such they are a pretty extreme case.

Do you know how hormonal contraception normally works? It doesn't take effect right away. You'd something high-dosage like a morning after pill or shot. Subcutaneous chips are designed to release low dosages over long periods of time.

Also, why would someone who's okay with institutionalized rape be worried about their victims getting pregnant?

I don't understand why you're more worried weird hypothetical dystopias than the kinds of evil that are already happening.

Sorry, perhaps I was unclear. I was responding specifically to your statement about family planning, not to the device described in the article. As for the device, it seems to be targeted at areas where people don't have good access to medicine (probably Sub-Saharan Africa), and things like regular birth control prescriptions or Depo-Provera shots aren't practical.

One could conceivably use this for forced birth control, but I don't see how it improves on forced sterilization or IUD insertion. Forced birth control is used to stop women from ever having children again, not to control fertility timing. Even in China they seem to rely more on fines and forced abortions than contraceptives. Also, lowering birth rates tends to make people wealthier and give them more free time, so if you want to keep your population poor and uneducated, forced birth control seems like a bad idea. And of course, outside of China and (apparently) Uzbekistan, it's forced pregnancy that's the problem, not forced birth control. I'd be more worried about this tech being used for psychiatric medications than birth control.

The key is that they have to prove you had control over it. If you have lost control, because you forgot the key or because they destroyed it, you can't be held responsible. If you destroy the key that would come under simple destruction of evidence.

That's why you need two factor authentication. A password and a keyfile stored on floppy disk. Ideally an old floppy disk with multiple read errors. If you are arrested you can say that the police must have damaged the disk.

Alternatively TrueCrypt's plausible deniability works well.

People have argued the right to not incriminate themselves right up to the European courts, but it was rejected. When you are arrested in the UK you are told that if you fail to mention when questioned anything you later rely on in court it may harm your defence, so there is no right to silence either.

What isn't clear from the story is if this guy just forgot his password or if he refused to hand it over. The law says that the police must prove you knew the password, e.g. by showing that you used it very recently.

Either way, it's a fucked up law that needs to be repealed.

How does the Tor Project get safe harbor? They're not an ISP.

In that case, it gets thrown out one step sooner, since they're even less involved than an ISP would be.

LED bulbs sold in the EU must be lead free. The shops have to accept the dead ones back for recycling. The fact that they last a lot longer limits the environmental impact. The energy saved vs. incandescent can be used for other things that would produce a lot more pollution. The mistake of looking at technologies in isolation is a pretty common one when evaluating environmental impact.

Where do you draw the line? Some level of badness has to be classified as a fault, some limit on what bulbs must be capable of surviving must be set for the standards. You can't expect stuff to be indestructible (except Model M keyboards, obviously).

Place false memories in people. Assassins, or just government functionaries who honestly don't believe they did the paperwork to have you audited. No problem.

having a generation of students that don't know how to use pointers seems, rather scary to me.

We've managed to get along with the first one, so another one won't be much worse.

You know, for things like memory allocation, pointers, and so on?

Compared to Java? I think it would hold its own.

I think there are good arguments for being exposed to C early, but I wouldn't say it necessarily should be a first language.

For example, when adding some new code I will often put it at the beginning of the line (ie with no indent) so I can see it more clearly whilst coding (usually this is for temporary tracing lines), and only indent it before commit.

I do that in C++ all the time, especially when it's something I don't intend to keep. This is definitely something that you can't do in Python, but that doesn't keep me from liking it.

With Python, on the other hand, I'm actually more likely to have an error in the indenting, because there's no easy way to see how many blocks I'm terminating when I outdent by an arbitrary amount.

I've never really had that problem, but then I always break up code into reasonable sized functions so the nesting doesn't get too deep. Perhaps that's what you need to change.