You misunderstand. You *agree* an overdraft of 20 pounds. That way, when you go 1 pound overdrawn, you don't get a penalty charge at all. Simple. Not as simple as you, but pretty simple.

If someone is overdrawn by £2 and then the bank charges a £35 unauthorised-overdraft is "fair"

It is excessive. I wouldn't sign up for that deal. If you signed up for that deal, and didn't arrange a small overdraft at the time (say 20 quid, which would almost never be refused) to cover precisely that contingency, you're not competent to deal with your own finances. Seek professional advice.

The Supreme court got involved and funnily enough ruled that this was not the case which now means banks can charge what they like.

No, they can charge the customer agreed to when they opened the account. What the Supreme Court said was "If you don't like the charges, don't open the account. Don't expect the courts to bail you out on something you agreed to."

And this is good for two reasons:
i) Personal responsibility is a good thing.
ii) My banking is free, because people who pay unauthorised-overdraft fees subsidise it.

Proposals to suspend the internet connections of those who repeatedly share music and films online will leave consumers with a bill for £500 million, ministers have admitted.

I know that you're a USian and I have a policy against attacking people who do not use English as their primary language but "proposal" does not mean "signed into law".

The particular irony here, is that in the rest of the article, no minister admits any such thing. Hell, no minister is even named in association with such a claim. There's no support in the article for any of the claims in the headlines/opening, or the slashdot article here. It's a non-article, based on a heady mix of supposition, exaggeration and invention.

Obeying the law is not a loophole.

Of course. It is: that's what "loophole" means - something that is within the law, but allows someone to avoid something to which, morally the should be liable.

then opening up the data and the algorithms to analyze the data would only bolster his case

Knock yourself out, dumbass.

No scientist would ever - ever - delete raw data, at least without a gun to his or her head.You're aware much of this data was on punch cards, right? And the deletion happened more than 20 years ago, right? This raw data was not generated locally, but copied and collated from external sources. Data storage is cheap now. It wasn't then. Given the sheer space required to store it, care to reconsider your hilariously 21st century view?

Not saying this is what happened to the climate data...

It is. The unprocessed data was on tape and punchcards, and then the climate unit moved to a building with less storage space, and the unprocessed data got chucked in the landfill. Of course, all this was in the mid-1980s, a fact the conspiracy nuts have a tendency to omit.

Healthy skepticism is a sign of maturity and intellectual involvement.

This is "healthy skepticism" in the same way that believing that God created Man and Woman within the last 10,000 years is a "healthy skepticism about evolution". Skepticism requires an awareness and weighting of the evidence. Denialism and dogmatism don't.

As for the results of the CSU climate research, they're not in any doubt. Every criticism of them has been answered, and there are other studies that agree with the CSU results. So attack the scientists for being human if you must, but the science is sound and must be heeded.

But science is hard to understand, and human weakness and temptation is something everyone understands all too easily. So, the fact that the science is right is lost beneath the crowing of the right-wing bloggers, and the truth gets lost beneath the "truthiness".

The media has told us that popularity is truth, and so as more people who take the easy "global warming is a conspiracy" line, that is treated as if it invalidates the science. Media coverage of science is almost uniformly terrible, and no-one has the slightest, because scare stories and conspiracies are easy to package than nuance and subtlety. Fortunately, scientists have rarely needed popular acclaim, and have never received it, so nothing will really change.

They obviously had an agenda, and they threw out raw data, keeping only their "massaged" data.

They threw out the data 25 years ago -- long before the majority of these scientists had any agenda at all, besides getting laid, because it was on magnetic tape and punch cards, and they were moving buildings. But hey, don't let a few facts interfere with your conspiracy theory.

Lately, I just see a bunch of power-hungry assholes doing their utmost to discredit intelligent thought and dumb-down the world around them, so they can continue on an unimpeded path toward greater assholism.

You're right. That's why technology has stood still since 1968. Obvious, really.

Really? You think the government suggested added a rider to funding that it should be used to predict global cataclysm? Why is anthropogenic climate change a good thing for government? Given the choice between a government funded scientist and an industry funded scientist, which one do you think is more likely to produce results that upset the fundee? And, in that case, which scientist's findings are more likely to be spiked?

Good God man! the American Petroleum Institute have accepted the truth of anthropogenic global warming: the only informed dissenters are are right-wing media talking heads, political bloggers, a few member rogue Republicans and about half-a-dozen scientists (each of whom is now making a good living as a professional sceptic). Polls merely reflect these dissenters high media profile.

You're trying to start an intelligent and informed debate on copyright? Based on the premise that some copyright is quite reasonable?

On Slashdot?

Good luck with that...

And in France at least, there is an unspoken understanding between the press and the government. You don't say anything to embarrass government officials, and you get to keep your job

Right, whereas the "Free Press" in the USA is reknowned for its pioneering investigative work into Government. Oh no, wait, they're pretty much lackeys to the White House Press Office (and have been since Reagan). You can slander the non-US Press if you like, but at least they told the truth about the rush to war in Iraq.