There's an opinion on-line that the UK is turning in to some sort oppressive totalitarian state. It seems like this summary was written with this view in mind. It makes a number of errors of omission.

The article says it's opt-in! It only applies to that web-site too. That's obviously a huge omission to make from the summary. The summary seems to imply that the government would snoop on all traffic of a job-seeker and it was mandatory.

Finally, people who are claiming Job Seekers allowance are requesting support from the government while they look for a job. It's not totalitarian to suggest that we ensure that they are actually looking for a job!

As a taxpayer and a liberal democrat, it's something I support!

God is quite capable of using DNA and RNA and quantum mechanics and other theories which we have yet to learn about to make people and the world.

Why would he though? He's God! He can just zap us in to existence! Surely, that's better than having distant cousins eat each other just so they can survive. We've defeated evolution to some degree. Evolution in its pure form is unimaginably brutal.

The religious suffer from a cognitive bias where they assume that any contradicting evidence is more proof of their man in the sky. The point of the Origin of Species was to give us a mental framework that required no man in the sky!

Science shows that your God tries very, very hard to look like the null hypothesis; which is, complete and total none-existence.

Evolution has been operating over hundreds of millions of years.

If we didn't need a foreskin, we wouldn't have one.

I live and work in the UK and I cycle everywhere. Part of the reason is precisely because it's difficult for the government to interfere with your business. The way I see it, the fewer interactions I have with the government the better.

If you take public transport, you're on CCTV everywhere. Naturally, you can be subject to searches when leaving train stations or even in bus stations.

If you drive a car, at some point you're going to get pulled over. You're going to get a ticket of some sort with high probability.

With cycling, there's no tax to pay. No fuel to pay for. There's no real way to be stopped and searched on a bicycle.

Often, it is faster than a car journey anyway.

Cycling is probably one of the only remaining modes of transport that is truly free in both senses of the word.

Neither this law, nor the original version of it, would have retroactive applicability; in other words, you can't make something illegal today, and then prosecute the guy that did it yesterday

It also wouldn't apply outside the US either, which is sort of a problem. What's to stop a Wikileaks clone starting in say, Iran, and doing the same amount of damage as Wikileaks?

It's weird in a way, I thought America came out of the Wikileaks cables pretty well. America acted, for the most part, in private exactly as they acted in public. It's everyone else that looked like a bunch of douche bags.

As a Brit, it's done more to repair the reputation of the US than, say, the election of President Obama. I've actually surpised myself with that sentence, but it's actually true!

Mass bends space-time, right? So why not define it as a certain amount of curvature - say the mass needed to bend a light beam in vacuo by some measurable amount, divided by a chosen constant to give 1kg according to the theory.

That would couple the kilogram to G, which we know less _much_ less precisely than the current kilogram.

A better, but equally flawed, solution would be redefine the kilogram in terms of the electron. After all, we can measure its rest mass to a great degree of accuracy. But then usuable amounts of mass would be inaccurate to the level of precision given to Avogadro's constant.

It's a harder problem than it looks.

What part of this does the US legal system not understand?

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

And I say this as a Brit!

A test suite that guarantees 100% coverage is called formal verification

While I agree with most of your comment, that part is not correct. Having 100% statement coverage is not enough to achieve a formal verification.

There could be:

1. Missing code - e.g. an exception that isn't caught that leads to the crash of the program in some circumstance outside your test cases (see Ariane 5).
2. A sequence of calls that leads to a problem. e.g. A procedure has three upstream callers, and you got 100% coverage using two of those upstream callers. The third one doesn't satisfy the pre-condition and "boom."
3. The code might actually be incorrect with respect to some edge case. For example, a 30 year old bug was recently discovered in a sort program because it used 32-bit ints. It failed to correctly sort a list larger than four billion items.

In short, you can never test you way to perfect software, unless you can prove your test cases constitute a formal verification. It shouldn't surprise you that this is as hard as simply verifying the program.

Those who ride longer distances/more strenuous routes seem to think it is worth wearing even when having to put up with ribbing/heckling from people like you, so apparently the benefits are noticeable enough to make it worth their while to pay the extra expense of cycling gear

I cycle 13 miles to and from work every day wearing Lycra. I know I look like an idiot but wearing that stuff gets me home about ten minutes faster than wearing t-shirts and shorts.

I'd rather have 50 extra minutes with my wife a week than Kowtow to the hecklers. Besides, most of them are throwing stones in glass houses anyway - they're hardly supermodels are they?

How do you compile a compiler written in the language it compiles...

Enjoy

Would this ever happen here in the US (you know, the home of the free)?

A month ago we were the laughing stock of the world. Every (learned) American knew the UK as the place where the nightmare of 1984 was coming to pass. The slow drip, drip, drip of authoritarianism would erode one of the world's oldest democracies.

Then came the election and the hung parliament. Suddenly the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats joined together in to a machine that seems to be greater than then sum of its constituent parts.

Overnight, the country has gone from a 1984 wannabe dictatorship to a liberal paradise. They even have a plan to pass an act that prevents unnecessary criminal statues. WTF?

If this works like the Parliaments act in that the same legislation must be passed in two Parliaments for a criminal statue to become law, then this would be a giant constitutional innovation. Forcing there to be a general election between criminal bills would prevent some of legislative diarrhoea that we saw towards the end of the last Parliament.

I feel proud to be a Brit again!

Simon

Which is why I don't like push-button ignition. If my car ever goes into hyperdrive because of a stuck throttle, I take comfort in knowing I still have a kill switch, and I grew up driving tractors and cars without power steering or power-assist braking, so I can cope.

If you gas pedal ever got stuck down, the solution is not to turn of the engine. This can cause all sorts of additional problems.

You put the car in to neutral. This disconnects the engine from the transmission allowing you to stop safely. I believe even automatic cars have a neutral gear, so this technique will work for those cars too.

This technique should be taught as part of learning to drive, whereever you live. It takes ten seconds to explain and could save quite a few lives.

and thats just the problem, they rely on models, which are hopeless (i write software that produces resource industry models for a living, so i know some of the pit falls). let me put it to you this way - the weather man can't predict the weather for the comming week. but for some reason you think they can predict the weather 100 years into the future accurately?

Are you surprised casinos make money? After all, I can't predict every spin of the roulette wheel, every throw of the dice, every card that comes out. Even so, casinos do in fact make money! They do because over many iterations the games are balanced in favour of the casino.

The weather is much like the individual spin of the roulette wheel or the throw of the dice; it is inherently unpredictable. However, just like the casino games, the overall *statistics* of the weather is not unpredictable at all. We call these statistics "the climate."

So not being able to predict the weather has absolutely no bearing on whether we can predict the climate. The two problems are entirely separate.

However, it is obviously much harder to model the statistics of climate than it is to model the statistics of the roulette wheel; and the accuracy of such models is currently what is under scrutiny.

Simon

That's why so many sites are adopting OpenId.

I'm not sure why people are adopting OpenID. It requires all this extra overhead of going to and from an additional authentication server. It's a complicated protocol and complexity breads insecurity.

If I use OpenID I've gone from one point of failure (the compromise of my computer) to two points of failure (compromise of the OpenID provider and compromise of my computer). There's actually a third potential point of failure in that the OpenID protocol could be flawed in some way, which compromises all OpenID providers.

What's wrong with entering a entering a username, the site replying with a challenge token? I then sign the token with my PGP key and access is granted. You could make this extremely painless by making a browser plugin that handle most of the leg work.

Now I'm back to a single point of failure and the security of the login authentication has been substantially improved. With OpenID I've created a separate point of failure and I'm still stuck using crappy password authentication.

OpenID is a pretty crap solution to this problem.

Simon