>Scotland can now refuse (to honor all debts contracted in their names),,,

Indeed it could. And the rest of the UK could in retaliation destroy bridges, roads and other publicly-funded assets to an equivalent value if it wished and impose an excise duty on all Scottish exports to collect the interest.

Both would be equally senseless and neither will happen.

This isn't really to do with BGP or IPv4 as such, it's an inherent problem in the way "The Internet" regards addresses.

You might be able to get some efficiencies in IPv6 by incorporating formerly-unrelated address allocations under a single prefix. But that doesn't solve the problem of a continuously growing network, increasingly complex (and commercially controversial) peering arrangements, the fact that IPv6 addresses are actually larger and the fact that you're going to have to support IPv4 anyway in parallel with any IPv6 transition (I don't personally believe it will ever happen, but that's a different story).

You could, however, get rather more efficiency in core routing tables if network addresses only had a very transient existence and were related to the source/destination route to be employed (eg: look up a domain name, do some route pre-computation, allocate some addressing tokens that make sense to the routers on the path, recalculate the route periodically or in response to packet loss). That's not IPv6, though. IPv6 has the same order of dependence on every router knowing about every destination network as IPv4 does (give or take the slightly greater prefixing efficiency).

TL;DR - The Internet is getting bigger. Buy more kit.

I suppose it's inevitable that people who are writing code for their own interest, and not because they're being paid to do it, will spend their time doing the things that they find most rewarding - and documentation is never going to be high on the list. However, I do suspect the motives of some people who make their code publicly available - it's not about demonstrating how clever you are, it's about sharing the solution to a problem.

And there is definitely an element of the FOSS community that wants to preserve the mystique of the brotherhood - they rail against the iniquities or proprietary software yet behave as if they were members of a medieval crafts guild. That's the only reason why anyone would refuse to spend a fraction of the time they would otherwise spend patronising the uninitiated writing a simple explanation.

In 2004, the Court of Appeal in England ruled that it was OK to admit evidence obtained under torture into English trials, provided that the torture had been carried out elsewhere. David Blunkett, the Home Secretary at the time said:

"We unreservedly condemn the use of torture and have worked hard with our international partners to eradicate this practice. However, it would be irresponsible not to take appropriate account of any information which could help protect national security and public safety"

The Appeal Court ruling was finally overturned by the House of Lords the following year.

However, given the enthusiasm of the original judges and the Home Secretary of the time and the ever increasing use of the "because terrorism" excuse, I'm not sure that there would be similar hope of justice prevailing in the future. It's not just privacy on the line.

Indeed. Look in awe as the honest citizens of Greece and Italy pay their taxes without demur.

I think you'll find that the concept of "country" and "citizen", insofar as it applies to people and not capital, is what got us to this point.

>You should not be allowed to just arbitrarily decide which countries laws apply

It's a long-established principle that you should be able to decide, as part of a contract, how disputes relating to the contract should be resolved. That includes things like alternative dispute resolution (arbitration, clerical courts, spinning a bottle...) as well as a national jurisdiction.

However, this only applies to the two parties.

You can't arbitrarily decide how a third party (such as the government of the country in which the contract is effectively executed) should treat you. Google, Apple, et al, can shift their earnings around the globe because of international accounting regulations to which governments, including that of the UK, have subscribed. Partly, they did that because they hoped that by competing with each other to offer favourable tax treatment, they could get international companies to relocate and make up in volume what they were losing in margin by dropping rates.

Surprise, surprise, small countries which get the greatest proportional benefit from headquartering multinationals are able to offer the lowest rates.

Blame your politicians, not the companies they are actually encouraging to behave in this way.

Don't worry. IPv6 will solve the problem by ensuring those end-of-line internet-connected systems aren't internet-connected any more...

No. Not in UK law, I'm pretty sure, though IANAL.

The Data Protection Act (DPA) means you have to be able to opt out of this kind of intrusive data harvesting and if the disabling of advertised functionality isn't covered by the Sale of Goods Act, it would seem that the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations would apply. The DPA applies to your relationship with the data processor (LG) while the functionality of the TV is the responsibility of the retailer.

The correct remedy would be to return the TV to the retailer and demand a refund or a "repair" and to go to the small claims court if they refuse. LG won't be happy when retailers start pushing back.

You could certainly argue this where the legislation, as in this case, has passed through a legislature.

The way this would play out in the UK (and appears to have happened in the US) is that you get invited to a meeting in a government office and some people whose exact role is not clear will explain how important they feel it is for you to co-operate in the interests of national security. They might hint at the unfortunate consequences of being unco-operative or of letting anyone know that the meeting has taken place. You then leave and do as you're told.

When the government's policies (and, indeed the laws) are secret, you can't blame the voters, because they don't get to find out what the government is actually doing, as opposed to what it says it's doing. There is an elected government and an unelected shadow government - which, by means of a similar process of nods and winks, makes sure that no-one who stands for election is a threat to them.

These are just avatars in a game. Someone actively decided that certain rules would apply to their interactions - there was no necessity to impose any societal values on those interactions, players would simply have applied those values they felt appropriate for themselves. In other words, the developers decided to impose their own vision of societal norms when there was no real need to do so.

This is a very similar issue to the "emoji racism" campaign - someone actively designed the almost-exclusively-white characters, even though there was no functional or other requirement to exclude black faces. It almost certainly wasn't concious racism - they just failed to think beyond their limited personal experience and reflect the wider world.

That's a reasonable thing to call out.

Actually, up until 1976 it was a legal requirement for taxi drivers to carry hay in case their horses got a bit peckish. It's an area in which regulations seem to change very slowly.

There's been a (decades-) long ongoing war between black-cab taxis (which you can hail on the street) and minicabs (private cars you book by phone) and this is merely another phase of that battle.

There is a genuine issue of ensuring standards (for example, disabled accessibility to vehicles), but these are things taxi drivers have historically resisted themselves. As taxi drivers tend to be one man bands in London their earnings are also somewhat opaque and I'm sure they're not only concerned about competition, but also about a growing expectation that your journey can be recorded by a third party llike Uber whose records might be available to the tax authorities.

I did buy a Blu Ray player, because it was being heavily discounted and had streaming built in (and, more importantly for me, it was at the time the cheapest way to add BBC iPlayer to my TV). I've never bought a Blu Ray disc - the cheap ones seem to be forgettable Hollywood potboilers and the films I might want to watch I already have on (ripped) DVDs and I don't personally see the value in reacquiring them for the modest increase in quality that's possible in the averagely-sized living room. In fact, I've barely used the disc drawer. And I'm hardly "younger people"...

Additionally, a chunk of those end users who still have XP machines and obey the call to replace them are going to go out and buy iPads or Android tablets because they'll do the job well enough and be a lot less trouble. You'd think Microsoft would have an interest in keeping people on planet Windows until they're ready for their next fix.