(Man, I'm sorry I don't have any mod points today, so you'll have to settle for kudos. Well done.)

Isn't Florida supposed to be underwater ?

Since you obviously haven't been here for a while, many parts of Florida are underwater at high tide. In Palm Beach and parts of Miami storm drains flow backwards and boat docks are underwater. Just across the inlet, West Palm Beach has a massive project going on to raise sewer lines so toilets will confinue flushing and there are several similar projects in Miami. They're also spending hundreds of millions to reinforce the well casings in the wells Miami gets its freshwater.

Florida is fighting that losing battle quietly. It's not like an area dependent on tourism and investment can announce they're sinking and there's no way to stop it but that's the reality.

Climate deniers are the most ignorant fraction of our society.

"How can a government department concerned with security not get this sort of thing right?"

Very funny.

When did a government department of any kind ever get anything right? Especially when it concerns computers. Triply when it concerns security. See for example:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

etc., etc. passim.

The truth of the matter is that politicians and civil servants tend to be highly non-technical, and very much focused on high-sounding (but misleading) talk. This is the exact opposite of the attitude you need to accomplish anything with computers. But they are also very arrogant, and committed to the belief that - since they don't understand computers - programming and the like must be extremely easy.

Sounds like an imitation of the Inspector Morse episode "Masonic Mysteries", in which a criminal whom Morse has had imprisoned pulls a similar trick. And then the fun begins!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt06...

So much so that they even have a name for it: Maskirovka. The term was originally used just for camouflage, and the uses of it seem entirely in keeping with ordinary warfare. The disinformation campaign around D-Day would have been a brilliant example of maskirovka.

But the Russians do it before a war, and even during active hostilities as a way to demand that they be treated as if they were non-combatants. It's going on right now, pretending that they aren't engaging in war against Ukraine. It's so traditional in the culture that it's not even really something we can blame them for, exactly. But it means that our actions and reactions have to be calibrated around the fact that this is part of the way they view the world.

(known to the Christian churches as "The Apostate" because he tried to restore the official religion of Greece and Rome for the previous thousand years).

Educated, cultured, humane, civilized: along with Marcus Aurelius, a living proof that near-absolute power does not always have to corrupt absolutely. Sadly, he was murdered by Christians to prove that their religion (which mandates peace, forgiveness, and non-violence) was better than his.

While I'm sorry about the loss of a fun activity, we don't spend tens of billions of dollars per year on roads for entertainment. If the best way to make the roads efficient and safe would be to get the human drivers off of them, I'd vote for that in a heartbeat. (I don't know if that is really required or not, but I suspect that roadways could be a lot more efficient if we eliminated the human factor: closer following distances, no need for yellow cycles on traffic lights, better planning for capacity, etc.)

People can use the roads for leisure driving now, because every other driver on the road is human and we have built everything to take that into account. But I just don't see giving up potentially billions of dollars in efficiency gains to preserve your ability to have fun on the roads.

There's probably some compromise that sets aside some roads for you, and maybe even sharing the roads at certain times when there are few other drivers. But I think a lot of people, including me, will consider that a lower priority.

There are an incredible number of obstacles that a person can instantly recognize that even today, a computer can't.

And that list gets smaller and smaller all the time. When you look at the progress that's already been made, the last mile of automation is totally achievable. Around here a good third of the drivers on the road are old people who can barely see past the hood and another 10 percent are functional alcoholics. The handful of relatively competent people are texting or talking on the phone while they're driving. As someone who commutes by bike in this metallic soup of human incompetence, the transition to self-driving cars can't happen fast enough. I'll take my chances with machine intelligence and machine reflexes any day.

The underlying assumption to your comment is that human drivers are competent. That may be true in BF Nowhere Utah but, here in the civilized world, human drivers are fucking idiots. So, sure, go ahead and drive your pickup to the market. Around here I'd rather see a computer at the wheel than grandma.

Thanks!

I've been thinking of doing some backpacking, and had been wondering it if was a good idea to carry some everclear with me. Pleasantly relaxing taken orally (with water), and useful externally (especially when the internals accidentally become external).

Question: can it also be used to make the water safer? If I were to mix it up as, say, a beer-grade solution (4%), would it be a more enjoyable alternative to filters and chlorine? (Googling has been less than useful; most of what I get is the fact that you can't drink while taking giardia medications.)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I'm sorry, that's just so funny. What were they expecting?

I'm going to have to get some of this just to see what happens when you light it. I bet it's very pretty. It's just going to be well away from my FACE when I do it.

Indeed. While technically stars beyond any doubt, they aren't exactly the kind of stars we are looking for at the moment. (IMHO).

Ah, I hadn't realized that one of the sources was the Daily Fail. That, I dismiss out of hand.

The Telegraph isn't much better, but yeah, it does seem like this is election-year tough-on-crime sloganeering. (I haven't seen any polls, but I can't imagine it going all that well for the Tories. Not that Labor has dug themselves out of their hole yet, either, but I don't see the LibDems pairing with the Tories again. You guys could be in for a lot of post-election nastiness.)

They're both plenty likely to stir up terror of nasty brown people coming into your house to steal your stuff. It wouldn't half surprise me if people did want to rush out and have these things installed; at least, the kinds of people who read the Torygraph and the Fail. Whether they actually end up catching anybody, or deterring any more crime than they already have...

Any form of discipline against the students would be illegal.

That may qualify as the dumbest comment I've ever read on /. and, considering the competition, that's quite an accomplishment.

Here in the US, violent crime has been falling for quite some time, and total crime as well. While every burglary is upsetting, and unfortunately few are prosecuted, is Britain so worried about it as to consider something that a lot of people would consider rather a damper on their daily lives? (A lot of people would be very self conscious doing ordinary dressing and sex with a camera in the room, even if they've taken measures to keep the data from getting out until a crime occurs.)

I know that Americans are quite paranoid about crime. A great many people would tell you that the crime rates are going up, even though they're going down. Is that what's going on in the UK? Or is there actually some rash of crime that's making them this worried? Or is this simply some top cop blue-skying about what he wishes he had, without regard to how that would affect people?