Estimates of civilian casualties from the 2003 Iraq War and its aftermath vary significantly, but many are of the same order of magnitude as the deaths caused at Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the nuclear weapons were used.

I'm not sure modern warfare is as good at avoiding collateral damage as you seem to be suggesting. The causes of those civilian deaths might not be the same mechanically, but it's no less a tragedy if an innocent person dies as a side effect of some military action rather than directly by taking a bullet.

Of course there can be no reasonable expectation that if you step outside your home then someone walking past won't see you, any more than they have a reasonable expectation that you would not see them.

However, technology lets us do a lot more than we naturally can, sometimes in very asymmetric ways, and potentially with very different implications. Saying we can't/shouldn't consider how much we want to regulate behaviour using those technologies is a bit like saying someone could climb up a ladder and peer through a small gap in the curtains at your daughter's bedroom window but we shouldn't do anything about it in law and your kid has no reasonable expectation of privacy when she gets changed at night. I think most reasonable people would disagree with that premise and think a law saying peeping Toms are unwelcome was appropriate.

So this is a chicken and egg situation. As a matter of fact, the law today may not provide for as much privacy protection as people like me would like it to, but saying that the law shouldn't provide those protections because today it doesn't so you have no reasonable expectation of protection is a circular argument.

Worrying about this does seem a bit silly, given that it's trivially avoided by turning off WiFi and that by flying you're already participating in one of the most surveilled activities anywhere on the planet. I mean, this is a field where for some reason a lot of people just accept behaviour like strip searches (of the virtual and/or physical variety) and/or pat downs that would get the patter classified as a sex offender under normal conditions and/or pretty much arbitrary confiscation and examination of any property they're carrying with them, not to mention all the pre-travel details you have to provide for checking against who-knows-what databases.

However, the argument that when you're out in public you don't deserve any privacy needs to die. The law in most places may not have kept up with technology and its implications, but this argument is about as sensible as "if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear".

Arguing that the historical privacy situation (if you're out in public, someone you walk past can see you) is like today's privacy situation (you're monitored by numerous cameras and sensors, using unknown automated recognition technologies, connected to unknown databases for future reference by unknown parties for unknown purposes) is a bit like arguing that the historical situation with carrying weapons (if the other guy has a sword in a dodgy area, letting you carry one yourself as well is reasonable) is like today's (where if you replace "sword" with "dirty bomb" then the results are on a rather different scale when someone abuses the system).

No, you don't. This has never been the case in most places. Even under the questionable patent system in the US, the recent trend has been away from allowing patents for that kind of "invention".

Um... Sorry, but I for one have a big problem with that.

Leaving aside legitimate questions about the role of incarceration and its effectiveness as a deterrent and/or for rehabilitation of offenders, a life sentence is the kind of thing you hand down for premeditated murder, deliberately taking the life of another human being.

It is absurd to suggest that the same sanction should apply to someone who merely hacks some corporation's network and messes with the office printer in an irritating but otherwise harmless protest against some corporate policy. Such a law would imply that physically harmless hacking of some corporate or government entity is many times worse than rape, killing someone accidentally through dangerous driving, defrauding an individual of their life savings, and numerous other very personal and very damaging crimes.

If you attack an industrial system and people get sick or die as a result then there are already plenty of laws to punish you, up to and including the likes of manslaughter and murder. There is nothing special about doing so via computer and no additional laws are required, nor is any "zero tolerance" style life sentence just because computers were involved a useful addition to the statute books.

And there would be -- if, in the judgement of a competent court, there was in fact real, measurable harm caused to the public. But this proposal as reported seems to be full of words like "deemed to cause" (by whom?) or "significant risk of" (measured how?).

We have mostly Tesco and Sainsbury's around here, and my experience has been quite different. They are aiming for similar markets, but their quality for own-brand goods, the kind of name-brand goods they sell, and their prices all fluctuate significantly over time. Right now, Tesco is clearly winning on all three counts for most of what we buy for my household. As little as 2-3 years ago, it was the other way around.

Not really. You might see the litre-based equivalent volume printed somewhere on the label, but every supermarket I know sells milk in 1/2/4/6 pint bottles, including at least one store for most of the big name chains.

Source: I just looked in my fridge. :-)

Yes, one of the most important things about choosing a currency is who else uses it.

In purely economic terms -- that is, ignoring politics and other factors -- it might make sense for the UK to share a currency with, say, Germany or the USA. These are all first world countries with well developed and reasonably stable economies.

However, it makes little sense for the UK to share a currency with somewhere that has very different economic conditions. In this case, what happens in the nation with the weaker economy will inevitably and adversely affect what happens in the nation with the stronger economy.

This is why, for example, the Germans took a hit they didn't deserve during the Euro problems of recent years. It's also why you'll see pigs flying past your window before you see the UK joining the Euro with the kind of variation we have across the EU today.

They'll make whatever you want.

It will still take those four and a half month, though.

Is that really what they are doing? I have a counterfeit Prolific device that "broke" after a driver update. I simply uninstalled the new drivers and installed an old version to make it work.

Admittedly, that's a different OEM, so they may be doing something different.

None of these analogies are correct.

They are not changing the device at all, they are simply making their drivers not work with the fake ones.

There is no reasonable analogy that can be made involving a Gucci product.

This is exactly correct. I've experienced this with a radio programming cable with a counterfeit chip supposedly from Prolific. The drivers that Windows automatically downloaded for it caused the device to not function. Rather than stuffing around with the supplier, I simply downloaded an old working driver, uninstalled the new driver, installed the old driver, and done.

Certainly not a job my mother could do, but also not the same as the OEM bricking devices, which would legally be dangerous for them as it could be argued that they were willingly causing property damage.

From a commercial point if view I think it is an appropriate measure, albeit perhaps not the most reasonable from consumers' perspectives.

Of course they are perfectly entitled to offer such a defence, and if they've got sufficient evidence to create reasonable doubt about their guilt then they should be acquitted by the court like anyone else.

Somehow I suspect that if this ever gets to a court, that will not be the case, however. If the reports of what's happening here are anything close to accurate, it seems that a significant amount of code has been written specifically to determine whether a component is a genuine FTDI one or someone else's, that the new driver is actively doing something that impairs the operation of only one of those types, and that anyone with the slightest experience programming in this context would readily know these things.

It would take an impressive lawyer to overcome those (presumed) facts, and it would probably be quite difficult to cover up the entire development process and related documentation to make this look like an accidental side effect if it was actually a deliberate decision.

Their EULA could say that if you use their software with something other than a genuine FTDI component they may send a hit man round, but I doubt that would stand up too well in court either. If they think they're going to get away with deliberately breaking someone's gear because of some weasel words in the EULA, they need better lawyers. Or they needed better lawyers, I should say, because if the reporting of what's going on is accurate then by this point I suspect they're already in serious trouble even if they don't realise it yet.