That presumes, without good reason, that "recognising oneself in a mirror" is consciousness or related to it.

It's not illegal, but you do have to pay £10 per day to do so.

Economically, stopping the flow of gas would hurt Russia more than Europe. The problem, however (and why the EU is perhaps unlikely to impose sanctions on the gas supply) is that it would hurt Germany worse than France, Netherlands worse than ... The EU often ends up requiring consensus to act, and when something has an uneven impact on different EU countries, getting that consensus becomes a big painful political negotiation ("Well, if we're taking most of the pain on X, then we want concessions from you on Y in return, otherwise we won't agree to do it..."). As the EU has expanded, this has theoretically become combinatorially worse.

The EU finds it hard to act, and we end up with this painful political talk about "Strong action and strong sanctions" that so far have been trifling limitations on a handful of people. NATO finds it easier, but Ukraine isn't in NATO yet.

It all looks like a rather horrible disaster in progress. With worrying echoes of the beginning of WW1 and the treaty status of Belgium.

I have to disagree with this. Journals and conferences increasingly allow the author to make a "pre-print" (a PDF as submitted, without the publisher's layout work) publicly available, to meet open access requirements. When reading conference papers that I might wish to cite, I find there is very little advantage in reading the publisher's laid-out version over reading the author's pre-print. The layout might look fancy and attractive, but unlike regular publishing and journalism, science publishing is not driven by the glossiness and beauty of the printing -- it's driven by us just needing the content to know what our colleagues and competitors have done so we can cite them.

To borrow an old car insurance quip "I didn't know which way to swerve, so I ran him over". While it is generally obvious that we are having some effect on the climate, there is enough confusion in the lay community about what, how precisely we should be able to predict the outcome, and about the impact of different strategies (skepticism about unintended consequences of carbon taxes, especially when the carbon production can simply move offshore to a lower tax regime taking jobs with it), that I am not surprised there is intense skepticism in the public at large. To the point of preferring to believe there might not even be any effect.

We may think our science is good, but in communication we're coming across as over-insistent snake oil salesmen, as we (or those who agree that the models are the best predictions we have) get louder and louder about how terrible it would be if you don't buy our expensive product (green taxes) and more and more acid about how anybody who disagrees with us must be a terrible person.

Opinions of Snowden aside (I don't think he should be expected to dedicate his every action for the rest of his live to a privacy campaign just because he once blew a whistle), I think we can presume that the question was only asked because Putin and his aides wanted it to be. They had a prepared answer, information about Russia's eavesdropping is not in the public domain the way the west's is, and this let them thumb a nose at the US at a time when each is trying to portray the other as the bad guy over Ukraine.

Snowden doesn't trade on his reputation -- his whistleblowing was a release of the government's own documents, and did not rely on his reputation at all (indeed the public hadn't even heard of him before he released the documents). He's not a career campaigner, just someone who had been working in the business of eavesdropping on all of us and decided that it had gone too far. That he's now effectively in exile is a cost he clearly decided was worth paying, but that in itself doesn't mean that his every action for the rest of his life has to be about a freedom and privacy campaign. Now in exile, he needs to find something to do for the rest of his life. Taking on the media celebrity role that has landed on his shoulders (and essentially being a tv presenter) is a way of doing that. It doesn't mean he has to metamorphose into a hard-bitten incisive journalist. Just let him get on with the rest of his life -- he's sacrificed enough of it already to open up the privacy v security debate to the public in western democracies. There's no need to demand the rest of it off him too.

To coin a corollary, because "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (Raymond), in practice "given enough eyeballs, each eyeball will all assume the others have inspected the code, and even shallow bugs can remain."

This bug wasn't some deep complex intricacy. It was an incredibly simple and straightforward blunder that went unnoticed for years. If it had broken requests that should succeed, those many eyeballs would have felt some pain and been prompted into finding the bug. But because instead it let you do something you shouldn't be able to (a security hole), people using the library normally did not feel the pain of things breaking. And so, it seems, they weren't motivated to review the code until much later.

The big problem, as consumers of libraries, is that reviews cost. If every update of an open source library means its users then need to review the code change (in case it's brought in a heart bleed like bug that the committers did not check for), then free software becomes more expensive than it used to be. As programmers, each of us uses a lot of free software in most of our projects. And I suspect on average we read less than 5% of the code that is brought in (dependencies can have transitive dependencies... have you reviewed the entire code of the web framework you use plus all its supporting libraries and all those libraries' supporting libraries...?) We are all deeply dependent on some of the other eyes having looked because we simply can't afford the time to look at it all ourselves.

It's not a distinction between open versus closed per se. But as open source has become ubiquitous, so too has a disclaimer of liability. Almost every library we (collectively) use is licensed "AS IS, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING... FITNESS FOR PURPOSE". In other words, we live in an era where for pretty much every software product, either itself or at least one of its dependencies, carries an all-caps notice that it might be rubbish, unfit for purpose, burn your house down, set fire to your cat. This runs completely counter to an idea of building in safety -- instead, we just disclaim away liability for unsafety.

Here we could perhaps divert into alarmist analogies ... fire extinguishers labelled "WE DO NOT GUARANTEE THIS IS IN ANY WAY SUITABLE FOR PUTTING OUT FIRES" and potentially containing flammable foam? Building industries with no planning, certification or inspection requirements, and where the only requirement for the structural engineer of a skyscraper is that the untrained interviewer thought he answered that brainteaser about how many marbles you could fit in a space helmet very eloquently. But that would be being provocative for its own sake.

More realistically, we're in a world where a very large amount of software development assumes that it is non-critical and that breakage is minor ... even as it runs more and more of the economy. And pretty much everyone does it because we're all so economically optimised that it's the only way we can afford to get anything done.

I guess it depends whether their interest in it is limited to "we need something to write Chrome using, and GTK isn't doing it for us any more" or whether they will later be saying "come write apps for Chrome and ChromeOS using NaCl and Aura". Google has taken on their own UI stack -- is their only interest in it really to write just one application? If it is instead another step in the direction of encouraging developers to write apps that only work in Google's browser, that would be interesting to hear.

But I haven't looked into it closely.

While I'd long suspected that Slashdot comments were becoming the community for the irretrievably disgruntled to vote up each other's misanthropy, it's a bit anticlimactic that the community's last and most vehement rant is not about privacy, nor those old favourites "the evils of proprietary software", "the terrible patent system", or "if Microsoft did something today, it must be wrong", but the much more disappointing "how dare the website owners redesign their UI".

And so they marched on Washington, pickets waved in the air, and cries of anger filling the wind, not at the government's policies, nor at its governance of the economy, nor at its honesty or care for the most vulnerable, but at the inferior design of its latest brochure.

The class you've described doesn't sound particularly healthy -- a culture of competition rather than cooperation ("the competition was intense. If you weren't smart enough or fast enough you washed out") and where grading is not based on whether you're objectively able but just whether you're better than each other ("The grades were always on a curve"). While those might be good for motivating a subset of somewhat ego-driven highly competitive students -- such as perhaps yourself, and also me when I was a student -- they're actually counter to what we're trying to teach. Computing is inherently collaborative, so heavily prioritising competition over cooperation when we teach it is probably quite damaging, and there is no good reason (that I've seen) for a competent course to grade on a curve. As I see it, your grade should not be higher just because you were in a poor cohort with uncompetitive fellows (the curve pushing you up), nor lower because you were in a cohort of very able students (the curve pushing you down) -- your grade purports to be a straightforward and objective assessment of your understanding and performance in the subject, so that is probably what it should be. If, as you've suggested, your whole CS program was a grade-curved culture of relentless competition, then educationally and culturally, that's actually probably not a good thing. Even though you and I might have done very well out of courses like that.

I have read TFA, and the paper isn't much like the news article at all -- or like the second part of the paper's title. The result is not a general result of "cooperation beating selfishness" -- indeed the algorithms they tested were out-survived by selfishness as well as being out-survived by cooperation. It's a mathematical paper, with a set of simulations, showing that a peculiar set of recently discovered stochastic strategies (ZD strategies) that have a curious mathematical property aren't evolutionarily stable after all. In the paper, ZD strategies are shown to be out-survived in a game of "prisoner's dilemma" both by selfish strategies and by (theoretically weaker) cooperative strategies.

But "this curious class of stochastic strategies you'd never heard of anyway turn out not to be stable in large scale multi-agent computer simulations of the prisoners' dilemma" makes for a rather less gripping headline.

The headline (and end of the paper's title) are spun from the fact that these quirky ZD strategies fail because they fare especially poorly in match ups against themselves in a population. But that is not a general claim that cooperation beat selfishness.

Trademarks are limited to particular goods and services, but for the Sky trademark this includes "computer aided transmission of messages and images", "home computing services", "computer programs", etc. As BSkyB are also a broadband ISP in the UK, it seems reasonable that they've registered the mark to include those goods and services.

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/tmcase/Results/4/EU000126425

While it's true most early MOOC courses are a bit limited in interaction, pedagogy, assessment, etc, they have already had an interesting effect on universities.

I've been working on smart teaching tech on and off for nearly 10 years, including on an older project by some of the people behind edX at MIT. More recently I've been looking to bring online into the lecture theatre. For most of the time I've worked on teaching technology, I've often heard the reaction that's all well and good but no-one really cares about teaching because academics are promoted on their research and teaching is just something we do to bring in the cash. (There's always been some academics and centres who are very interested in teaching innovation, but it's seemed to me like they've not had as much attention from the rest of academia as they should have.) In the last year or so that seems to have changed. There's a lot more attention been drawn to the idea that yes now is the time to make some changes to how teaching is viewed and done in universities.

I've been working on the tech for that for a while. (Plus in-class interactivity to incentivise using it.)

And I've just reached the point where I'm looking for some other teachers to help try it out. (Forgiving early-adopters to begin with, of course) Get in touch if you're interested!