It is a likely event (look at the % of people who get divorced!) and I fail to see why either pretending like, or actually, believing it couldn't possibly happen in your own case is the wise course of action. My view on a pre-nup would depend largely on the reason and fairness of contract rather than it existing.

London's Tube Drivers are extremely militant - it's normal to have a couple of strikes per year (sometimes over "normal" industrial disputes like pay, sometimes because, I suspect, they just want to remind people they can do it).

And it's worked for them so far sadly. They have an incredible deal compared to equivalent workers on other networks, regularly shake down the government for more by threatening not to do their job during major events, and continue to whine incessently. I'd pay more for my travel if it meant getting rid of drivers sooner because they're a liability to London's public transport.

You're right. In my experience American dicks are bigger, and far more common; you can barely swing super sized soda in the US without hitting a obese dick

How do US authorities feel about foreign nations hacking into US military and corporate computers?

As absolutely wrong as their position is ethically I don't think there's quite the hypocrisy being claimed. I doubt the Chinese are punishing the people hacking into American servers for them either, warrant or not. In theory a US warrant shouldn't even be valid for a server in the UK, so the FBI is commiting a crime in Britain by hacking a machine that is located there without a UK warrant. The question is whether the laws of the country the server is in make what the FBI did criminal, whether the country is willing to take it to court and whether they can do anything about it anyway.

The American soldiers in the Revolutionary War, the same; they may have resorted to some guerrilla warfare type tactics, but against British soldiers

Learn a little history before lecturing people on it. There were plenty of appaling crimes against laoyalists by patriots during the revolutionary war. It's naive to think that the biggest difference between terrorist and freedom fighter can be found in semantics. Hell the US support of the Taliban followed by all out war against them should make a mockery of any attempt to pretend the labels are anything more than political these days.

To some extent, our Human Rights Act here has served a similar purpose in recent years, but of course the Tories want to get rid of that as well.

Those Tories that you decry for wanting rid of it are the same party that were extremely influential in drafting and spreading them across Europe. As long as you, and so many others, see politcal parties through such a biased lens we'll continue to make poor politcal choices. The ECHR is a small group of unelected individuals, they just happen to align better with your (and my) opinion than the conservative party on human rights. Should we have joined the Euro to take economic policy off the small group of lawmakers you think we can't trust and hand it to the EU who you claim have our interests closer to heart? Or have you arbitrarily decided that Europe will protect human rights correctly but won't protect our economy correctly for some reason...

I've come to the conclusion that we have to protect our own freedoms. The internet gives us a unique opportunity to do that with strong cryptography that even the government can't break.

I'm not so optimistic. We're already seeing hard push back against Apple's decision to design its device encryption in a way that stops it (and thus government) from being able to decrypt it. You can already be compelled by law in both the US or UK to give up encryption keys. If you travel through a UK airport you can be detained and and questioned, without the right to legal representation, under laws that make refusing to answer the question a crime. Governments could block encrypted communication between 'non-certified' parties, where they certify, which would make your self-protect by encryption idea implausible.

As long as a majority of the population is either uninterested in, or against encryption/privacy etc, then there is very little those of us who are bothered can do to protect themselves. Yes I can send my mundane day to day emails encrypted and no one will care, however if I ever did anything that drew attention (supporting a group the government doesn't approve of) then chances are all the steps I take won't stop them.

Until most 32 systems are retired or until Windows simply cannot run well on 32 bit systems, it makes no sense for Microsoft to drop support

There's a difference between dropping support and not supporting it on a new OS version. I doubt the cost of maintaining Win 8.1 32 bit for an extra couple of years, but making Win 10 64 bit only would be more work for them. If there are people still running Win XP on 32 bit devices after Win 7 and Win 8.1 then how many of them are plausibly going to want to buy Win 10 anyway.

It's exactly the same, just an especially pointless variation. You need to get these OTP to someone in a way that is completely secure from interception (which begs the question why not send the message itself that way). Most people aren't going to take up an encryption mechanism which means sharing USB pens loaded with OTPs to everyone they communicate with.

Besides which, talking of splitting hairs, given that I said "I accept it is encryption" how exactly was I claiming it wasn't?

They should also provide each user their own 'custom' canary.

Unfortunately that's entirely impossible in the current situation. The canaries that are currently use, or used recently, have to be very carefully constructed to avoid removing it breaching the laws regarding the secrecy of the orders. Apple's view, at least until recently, was that disclosing that they hadn't received any, for anyone, was generic enough as to not breach secrecy. Doing it for individual users would be about as legally sound as phoning the user up and warning him that the Feds are after him.

My issue with calling OTPs encryption in this sense, although I accept it is encryption, is that it's really more like giving someone half the message than almost any other type of encryption. If I said I could encrypt the entire Bible to "1" by having a key that contained enough data to produce the contents of the bible then people might take exception to how useful my scheme was.

Which is different to anything in the past how? If the police in 1920 turned up at a lawyers and threatened to break his knees if he didn't give them all of a client's paperwork they'd have everything in minutes. As long as law enforcement can use force it can get this information.

There is however a big difference between a world in which they can get all that data secretly behind the scenes, and one in which they have to overtly threaten/force people to hand it over in person.

Except that there are benefits to society as a whole by having these people live in rural areas.

There's an argument to be made that if that's true then the value they can charge for providing that benefit and use the proceeds to pay for things.

No. It's that and the fact that they only released the feature after lining up a shit-ton of major retailers and banks to support it, as well as a near frictionless method of using it (w/ iTunes and Passbook, etc) and marketing to back it all up.

They got people lined up to support it because they're huge. If Guatamala tried to bring in a new method for passport control do you think they'd have the same chance of it being adopted as it would if the US did? I'm not knocking Apples implementation, I just don't see anything remotely amazing about what they have managed to achieve; yet there's endless fanboys banging on about just that. Give me one example of the marketting for Pay that's so impressive it's worthy of note.

You regularly use NFC for payments?

Just bought my lunch via NFC. When I'm in London at the weekend I shall be paying for my transport via NFC. I'll be the first to admit that NFC has taken far too long to develop, that it isn't widespread enough and that Apple getting in on it is likely better for everyone as it will force progress.