I see what you're saying, but here's how I think that would actually play out.

If this gets further than Slashdot and Reddit, the government's PR will point out the nature of the mistake, and there will be articles on the BBC News about how a blogger got it wrong and the whole thing went viral before anyone checked any facts. Which is absolutely true.

But next time - when there really is some censorship, when Amnesty International really is on the blacklist - the government's PR will say that once again, it's a mistake, and once again, the bloggers are looking at some ISP's opt-in whitelist rather than the real thing. Meanwhile they can quietly correct the blacklist before too many people notice, making it look like (once again) the Internet has cried wolf.

However this goes, they win. The best thing for us to do is take the high ground, and be absolutely truthful about what's going on. Yes, obviously, this on-by-default filtering idea is stupid, staggeringly bad even for the Tories, but we're not going to deal with that by playing amateur PR against resourceful people who do it for a living.

That matches my experience with a similar Vortex x86 CPU. It was 486-compatible, but Pentium-specific instructions such as RDTSC were illegal. I had to compile a custom kernel, and make sure that all the userspace libaries and programs were 486. But this was no big deal. You always have to do things like that for embedded development, and it's usually a lot more hassle for an ARM-based platform because of the higher degree of variation.

I'd also expect it to run older versions of Windows, though XP may be a stretch.

Gladly: More crime. Poorer grades in school. Higher unemployment, lower employability. General decline in public health and living standards. The emergence of neighborhoods where nobody would choose to live. Large numbers of cases of child neglect handled by the police and social workers.

Not good things. But these are the results of non-enforcement of drug laws. If you look for the evidence you will find it, and if you really want specific examples of places to look, then I can tell you about those. Really, science is not on your side here.

"Legalize heroin to prove me wrong"

Some proof. It would not be a controlled experiment - the results would not be useful.

We would simply end up arguing over the statistics. You'd say that fewer people were dying of overdoses - your criteria for success. Whereas I'd point out that society was damaged in other ways by the large increase in drug use that would inevitably follow legalization. Nothing would be proved either way.

Case in point is, well, anywhere that any drug has been decriminalised. Some people say things are better, and others say they are worse, and both groups have some evidence to support their claims. Personally I would recommend not forcing radical, uncontrolled and potentially dangerous experiments on living people without their consent, particularly when the results are worthless, but then I'm one of those awful people who thinks that drugs should probably not be legalised, so my opinion hardly matters.

Ha! Very good. I think you're making my point better than I did. If I ever decide to become an evil dictator, I'll recommend you for a job at my propaganda ministry, so you can share this sort of thing with a wider audience.

That would be a flaw in the plan, if the plan were to kill people. But it isn't. The plan is to turn them into passive supporters of the regime, unwilling to offer any resistance, and quite possibly unable to comprehend why resistance might be important.

Now you mention it, "the ravings of a drug warrior" actually is a pretty good description of Huxley's "Brave New World"...

As an evil dictator I would not particularly care which drugs people took, or what they believed about the safety of those drugs. From my perspective, the effect would be the same - the people who might otherwise have resisted my power would happily stay at home instead.

Not mutually exclusive. As an evil dictator, you can do both. Take away real liberties and real rights for "security", and simultaneously grant the freedom to take drugs. It will be easy to fool the people into thinking that they are getting a good deal here.

Hmm, seems to me that an oppressive government would probably start by legalising drugs. How better to control the population than by limiting their desire and ability to rise up in revolt? The best sort of slavery is voluntary. Why imprison the people, when you can get them to imprison themselves?

As an evil dictator, your first move should be to legalise as many drugs as you can get away with. This will win you a lot of popular support in the short term, and in the long term, the people who might have become well-educated and clever opposition leaders might instead end up as poorly-educated drug users with severe mental health problems. You may commence your evil laughter now.

Well, I thought I was a Peter Jackson fan, but I guess I'm not, since real fans don't criticise.

I don't recall getting bored during the book at all. But I was bored during the film. It really dragged on. It's not so much the plot development and the story - those are fine. It's the action sequences. They are repetitive and interminable. Some of them could be cut out completely, while others could be significantly shortened, and the film would be better for it. There is a tradition of "fan edits" that make bad films better, c.f. "The Phantom Menace", and "The Hobbit" is in dire need of that treatment.

"The Hobbit" needs a fan edit to bring it below the two hour mark. This should be easy for part 1, though the real editing challenge would be to do it for the entire trilogy. Tricky, but possible, because it's not a long book.

I much preferred the LotR approach of releasing shorter versions to theaters and then releasing long versions on DVD for dedicated fans.

No, that's not quite right. Let me refer you here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Establishment

The BBC certainly is part of the Establishment. But it is not part of the government.

I mention this because it's an essential part of understanding how our power structure works. Authority and privilege does not flow downwards from government. There is something above government, something more powerful than it, something which ultimately gives the government the authority to government. This we call the Establishment. It's the word you were looking for. But I don't know if this helps the argument you were making.

The word you are looking for is "Establishment".

The Establishment includes both Houses of Parliament, the Cabinet and the Civil Service - collectively, these are the government.

But it also includes the monarchy, and all the major national institutions - hospitals, courts, police forces, national broadcasters, unions, national newspapers, universities... All of these hold some authority and influence over the nation, though this power may be informal and wielded indirectly. For instance, the BBC's main power is its ability to command public opinion.

Mr. Dawkins doesn't go around beheading people for having different beliefs.

No, instead he merely calls them "uneducated, ignorant, probably stupid, too". And: "You've only got to talk to people who call themselves creationists to realize they haven't the faintest idea what the evidence is, or indeed, what evolution is."

Now, I am personally aware of a number of highly educated and intelligent people who also happen to be creationists. Each one of them can explain exactly what evolution is, and what the evidence is for it. They're not convinced. They have good reasons... reasons which I personally have trouble with, but which I can nevertheless respect.

But Dawkins has no respect for their dissent. He will call them stupid simply because their interpretation of the world is different to his own - as if he is omniscient, and in possession of all the facts. Is this not the height of arrogance? Is it not, in fact, intellectual bigotry?