This is just the latest occasion when I have wished that /. editors would, you know, do some editing. The story is interesting; the attempt by the submitter to spin it as evidence of a particular viewpoint adds nothing.

All legal jurisdictions are having to come to terms with the fact that groups of people in social networks now have the ability to publish (mis)information on a scale that was previously limited to mainstream media outlets. This effort from the UK authorities is (in my opinion) a reasonably balanced one, that does a good job of extending the existing British consensus on where the line should be drawn between free speech and criminal irresponsibility into the modern era.

What do these devices have that couldn't be implemented as an app on a general purpose smartphone or tablet?

s/are/were/

GPS is a question?

Police in the UK use TETRA, an encrypted radio system.

Why does any organisation need a PR department?

To be fair, this is two staff from the PR department doing the tweeting, not front-line police officers. Given the publicity they've received in return for those two person-days of effort, it seems like pretty good value to me.

Take a look at the excellent parodies too.

Are those American ("English") gallons, or British ("Imperial") gallons? There's a 20% difference...

My highly advanced clothes-line technology comes with an implicit display of its power consumption - zero.

I think it's a bit more complicated than that - Bloodhound *is* direct competition for Eagle, but not necessarily vice-versa. So whether or not they're in the same race depends on your perspective...

Yes of course, it's the people who signed up for first-generation ID cards whom we should feel sorry for here. Poor dears.

This is the DoE - how about Mushroom Cloud computing?

It seems to work fine for me.

If /. had run this story yesterday, many more sysadmins would have been appreciated...