\pedantry{In Asimov's fictional universe the three laws were a fundamental consequence of the underlying mathematics of the design of the robot 'brains' rather than simply a result of legislation.} but that doesn't change the fundamental point.

I think it's easy to be too hard on Asimov - one has to remember that in the era in which he concieved the three laws, computer science was still very much in its infancy and the prospect of minaturising computer processing power to the point that a freely mobile device could make autonomour decisions about anything was, well, science fiction. The fact that the laws don't actually work is not surprising at all. The fact that Government agencies (such as EPSRC) and serious academics feels the need to point this out is perhaps more so.

And in most juristictions you could sue them for wrongful dismissal - but most places you'd only be able to claim the 2 weeks worth of wages in compensation which is probably not worth the hassle. You might be able to get something for the damage of having been 'fired' on your future prospects, but I suspect that would require relevant case law to get anywhere. Still it's a cheapskate and mean spirited employer who tries it on just to save a couple of weeks of pay bill.

This is trivially not true.

Not owning a gun now does not imply never having owned a gun and neither statements imply not knowing how they work let alone the even more general statement about knowing nothering about guns.

I suspect the number of people who know nothing about guns (at least counting those people who would qualify to vote in most democracies if they were citizens) is very small. If you want to make an argument that those proposing such legislation lack sufficient knwledge of the subject to do so competantly then that's just fine but making wild statements that are trivial to disprove doesn't exactly lend credibility.

I suspect that's 30500 people who have done a CS degree ever, not just the ones who graduated last year. CS is a small and relatively low status degree in the UK compared to the US, Canada, Germany... Most of the folk working in IT will have non-CS degrees, primarily science, technology, engineering and maths degrees. But the UK doesn't actually graduate enough of them either to fill the demand for science and tech jons one would expect to have when the economy wasn't being trashed. Importing workers is a little tricky right now given the Government has made a big thing about cutting immigration below 100,000 (and yes, that is crazy when you have unfilled high-tech jobs).

One has to be careful about exit polls. In the 1992 UK general election, an exit poll of 10% of the voters turned out to predict the wrong result by more than could be explained by pure statistical chance. It turned out that a significant proportion of the electorate had "forgotten" which way they voted and said that they'd voted for the other party. It was an interesting evening watching the BBC's swingometer swing past the margin of error as the actualy results came in (being a country with a high population density and a simple voting system means we get the first fully counted official result within about 45 minutes and it's only if there are tight recounts that there are any results going much past breakfast the next day). Needless to say the exit polls now include a weighting factor for "too embarassed to admit who you voted for..."

Ok, so I know that a magnetic disc around 100-200nm in diameter will have a vortex domain structure (actually - I don't magnetic nano-rings tend to form onion states, but we'll leave that one for now). I know I can set the vortex state by hitting it with a high intensity laser circularly polarised laser pulse and apply a small +-z magnetic field to set the in/out state. But reading it needs some fancy focussed magneto-optical kerr effect kit and a lot of patience and re-writing the data is tricky - you have to de-magnetise the nano-disc and start over.

Seems a lot of effort for only a factor two increase and a technology that still requires moving parts to move the data element and read head into alignment.