Exactly my experience. A lot of my friends were very pro the idea of Google+, until they found out it had a "real names only" policy. For someone who has been on the net more than ten years, their internet nick is their real name - or one of them, anyway. The inability to use the name by which they were usually know to their net-friends meant they didn't want to be there. And therefore their friends didn't want to be there. The people who felt excluded may only have been a minority - but they were a hard core, net-savvy minority who tended to be at the centre of circles. If they weren't there, a lot of people didn't want to be there either.

One of the referenced articles referred to the strong constraints of the two rivers,

The point in TFA was that the structures were not planned. The 12 year old gamer was not involved - nor was there anybody else making a conscious system design decision. Despite the obstacles of "you cant do that here", similar topologies evolved.

Just as it is trivial to make a spherical lump if stone, it is interesting that nature sometimes manufactures perfect spheres without a designer. Likewise, it is would not be interesting if these efficient subway designs had been created by a master designer. It is interesting that efficient designs evolved without a designer. I bit of an answer to the Intelligent Design camp: purely short term decision can come up with a system with large-scale efficiency.

I think Plato did have a lot of sense mixed with his nonsense. But the sense has become so much part of our common knowledge that we don't realise that it was, in his time, original. Of course, the nonsense has remained nonsense.

A bit like the woman leaving a performance of Hamlet, who said "I don't know why they think Shakespeare is so great - that was just a load of well known quotes tied together."

The trouble is that most such "X causes cancer" statements come from the media themselves, recklessly shortening research results saying "consumption of X correlates with a positive increase in cancer", where the nature of the correlation is unknown and the increase is very small. So it is all to often not an accurate prediction of the research. Particularly, there can often be a chinese whispers effect, where the researcher publishes a paper, the University PR department publishes a precis edited for PR purposes, a popular science journal then reports with its own bias, and it is then taken by mainstream media and truncated again.

A particular example, as often reported b y Ben Goldacre, is the Daily Mail, which seems to summarise everything into causing or curing cancer, and will report the same substance on both sides within days.

No - you charge people to get in, as a deterrent, but let them out free for humanitarian reasons.

(My wife is Welsh, so I know).

Which is fine, provided when you quote it, you say that it is a fragment, not by you, whose source you cannot recall. But the standards for scientific papers are higher than the standards for poetry. Poetry stands on its own: either it is good in its own right, or not. But a scientific paper is a record of work done or ideas correlated. If it is data or concepts from elsewhere, you should say so, Otherwise it should be your work. And if you cannot say where you got something from. you cannot include it.

It is unusual to copy it verbatim, or nearly so, without knowing what you copied it from. If you copy, you have a duty to attribute. Even if you are only copying into your notes, you should copy the attribution in case you put it into a paper. Both out of respect for the original author, and for readers of your paper who may legitimately ask how you knew what you state. We don't want scientific papers where the answer to "how did you know that?" is "I read it on the web somewhere".

Thank you. I think you just stopped my brain melting. I now have a smidgeon of a fragment of a trace of a clue what the article is about.

I wonder why a SCADA system needs a direct connection to the wild Internet. Surely it wold be better to have a separate interface system connected to the Net, which one could upgrade as needed, sending commands to an isolated SCADA system using a protocol other than IP? That way, IP sent over the Internet can never under any circumstances reach the vulnerable system.