Age is everything to do with it, I'm afraid.

This week, you've saved a bit of time and paperwork that may, or may not, make a difference to the overall profitability of the place you work, by happening to have the right bit of knowledge at the right time. Next week, you'll be the guy that fixes things.

I guarantee you, however, that not everything you read on Google is correct. And, one day, you'll apply your skills to a few thousand dollars-worth of equipment and, through carelessness or misinformation or a pesky warranty violation, you'll stop being the guy that fixes things.

That'll be the day when you'll decide that being a jack-of-all trades is not necessarily an advantage in this world. It is sometimes better just to do one thing right, and let other people earn a living at what they're good at. That'll be the day when, if you keep your job, you'll turn into a "stubborn case-screw" who reckons that a regular income beats bragging rights.

But don't stop until you do. Your colleagues will have learnt that lesson the hard way, and will be looking forward to when you do the same.

...so that people and employees...

This always annoys me, whatever the company concerned. The distinction between 'people' and 'employees' mightn't be conscious, but it's an insidious feature of the commodification of human resources. Every time I hear a phrase like it I fear we're one step closer to the sweatshop.

We have medical records already. Comparisons across populations already happen. The effect of habits on lifestyles can already be measured. Choices are available. Education is imposed Unfortunately, the two things we've found that make any significant difference to people's health are where they live and how much money they've got.

As for personal analytics, there's little chance of that extending beyond the small, self-selecting group that has a temporary interest. We've been able to count calories and measure our weight for the best part of a century, but only the self-obsessed bother, and not for long at that. What seems an exciting opportunity for the technocrat is a pain in the backside for the ordinary human who, on the whole, doesn't really care what you think they should die of.

If you really want to encourage healthy lifestyles, you need to convince people that dementia really is better than cancer, and that dying of cancer is more fun than a heart attack. Otherwise, the bad food wins.

Perhaps. Though if this report is anything to go by, their celebrated longevity might be at least partly explained by the near quarter-million immortals whose relatives have been dutifully drawing their pensions for them for up to half a century

So it's an infrared camera. But it's not just an infrared scanner, it's a fiscal stimulus. Look, we're in hard times and there are real sinecures at stake here - nobody will thank you for holding up the gravy train or peeing in the pork barrel.

Besides, since the Sniffex debacle, the US is lagging badly behind the UK in the production and marketing of high-ticket hobdangles aimed at the tax-guzzling fringes of the global paranoia industry, and it's about time it fought back.

We therefore have a duty to leave it to the experts. They're the one's being paid to go "reading the energy people emit" and if they think conductivity's a myth, then so it must be.

There's a simple problem with social networking with pseudonyms: you can't find people from real life.

If you don't know their handle, they're not your friend. They're your victim.

The kinetic energy of the average corpse is somewhat limited. The potential energy is somewhat greater, and easier to access. Which is why young children of today can, quite literally, bathe in grandma's warmth.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-13372702

"apparently they wish to 'encourage the sort of creative innovation that occurs in America.' One can only assume that they've been missing the continual assault on the Fair Use doctrine here in the States."

The two aren't mutually exclusive and, in the UK, revisions to our laws would help address a pernicious problem. It goes without saying that the US has, partly as a result of such nebulous doctrines, the most creative legal industry on the planet; one which contributes significantly to the overall economy. In the UK, where the economy is so fragile that even lawyers with parliamentary incomes are feeling the squeeze, borrowing such innovations makes perfect and practical sense.

First, the UK's armed police is significantly on the rise (for the Met, deployments have risen over 50% in six years, despite firearm incidents falling), and they're almost part of the landscape in London. Most of them are still static patrols of high-profile locations, but the Met has been actively planning for routine armed patrols.

The UK Police also seem immune to legal boundaries - their retention of DNA and the use of 'stop-and-search' have both been ruled illegal, with no discernible effect to date. More worryingly, even in high-profile cases of physical abuse, manslaughter and credit-card fraud, officers have been quietly rewarded rather than disciplined.

Secondly, they're getting much better at PR. If the Guardian is right, they started using the spy drones to scour the coast for immigrants: "There is potential for these [maritime] uses to be projected as a 'good news' story to the public rather than more 'big brother'." And, since then, they've been practicing on the BNP (paradoxically an anti-immigration minority party with a poor reputation).

It would be utterly wrong to conclude that the UK police are power-hungry, trigger-happy thugs with mental deficiencies, lethal toys, immunity from sanction and slick PR skills. But it would be incautious not to consider the possibility.

I had five 'proper' jobs. None for more than five years. Around the age of forty I was made self-employed. And that's where I still am.

I don't think it's that everyone on Slashdot is young. It's just normal employment doesn't last very long any more, unless you're one of the handful that gets promoted to senior management. Once you're over a certain age, hopping from company to company becomes a lot less easy - what's thirty years' experience against a bright young poppet with a shiny new MBA?

This is partly sour grapes, but tax rules, pension deficits, redundancy liabilities and the cost of health insurance would all count against hiring older employees, even if simple ageism were extinct.

There are exceptions, of course. But, if you are still in your twenties or thirties, flitting from job to job, it's probably worth thinking about how you'd earn a living for yourself when the time comes.

Depending on the sort of molecule they're sniffing for, and the detection method, traces in the parts-per-billion range can be detected almost instantly. The limitation is often the speed at which you can get a billion bits of air through your nozzle - or the wind-speed your detection method can withstand. Honeybees, for example, make good detectors in some circumstances, but get miffed in moderate breezes and refuse to work at all if you blow their antennae off.

However, even if they have to parcel up the smells and post them to a lab in Wisconsin, it'll still be quicker and probably cheaper than six years in Cuba.

As for usefulness, I don't think that's the point. It's not meant to be useful, it's meant to give the government a justification for the presumption of guilt. Although the Bill of Rights and the Majesty of the Law are worthy of respect, they are historical throwbacks that aren't always appropriate for a fast-changing world. Any device that can improve the efficiency of justice, even indirectly, must be welcomed by hard-pressed taxpayers.

I've rarely such unexpurgated garbage in my life. It's a sterile semantic argument stirred with misapprehensions.

For a start, Newtonian mechanics is referred to, and often, sometimes by proper scientists, even though Newton didn't do all the work. It's just a shorthand for a model that works adequately in the everyday human-scale world.

In the same way, Darwinian evolution is shorthand for the simple rules of thumb that Darwin suggested, and we refer to Darwinism because Wallacism sounds silly.

And the hubristic assertion that science was 'primitive' in Darwin's day assumes that science today is 'advanced'. Give it another 150 years, and that claim might look a little premature.

Finally, creationism belongs in a different category. Creationists have one thing to say, and they've said it. What more do they want?Scientists, on the other hand, have lots of interesting and useful things to find out, and need support and encouragement to do so. Pitching the two against each other is like pitching bassoonists against bankers - there's no appropriate contest and thus no sensible outcome.

It's admittedly odd that taxpayers are forced to pay for the scheme, targeted minorities are forced to buy the cards, the but the authorities can decide whether or not it's a sensible use of money.

On the other hand, there isn't much point having the readers unless there's a reason to suspect the bearer's identity. As the scheme is voluntary, those with suspect identities won't be the first in the queue for the cards. As law-enforcement will only interested in those without cards, then there's not much point buying in them buying readers. That doesn't, on the other hand, invalidate the cards, which do still serve a purpose.

At present, the standard identification document is the gas bill which, naturally, discriminates against tenants, people without a gas supply and people who have pre-pay meters (usually the poor). The cards therefore improve the ability of poor people to pay for the privilege of 'interacting with government', and thus improve both 'social mobility' and 'engagement'. In addition, a card with a picture on it has to be arguably more reliable than a piece of paper that can be borrowed out of a dustbin by anyone with a mind to.

Google's definition of words is continually evolving. 'Evil' was, as older readers may remember, one of the first to mutate. Now it looks like 'harm' is on the move, too, and will soon join its little relatives 'fun', 'tax' and 'useful' in Google's rehabilitation centre for disadvantaged words.

'In his first act as prime minister, he transferred several significant powers to the Commons.'

There's a difference between power and responsibility, and a majority government has remarkably little difficulty in getting any result it wants out of the Commons, as demonstrated in the case of the Iraq War which was sanctioned by the Commons back in 2003. Electoral reform may redress this imbalance, but electoral reform has been quietly dropped from the Brown agenda, in much the same way is it was dropped from Blair's.

The end result is to diffuse democratic accountability, rather than focus it. The power is in the same hands, but the scapegoats are different.

Older readers will draw comparison with his first action as chancellor, which was to hand direct control of interest rates to the Bank of England, an act of scapegoat-management that's paying dividends at the moment.