And you illustrate the exact problem I was talking about: in most situations like the one under discussion, there is simply no way to show intent, one way or another.

Really? Simply no way? You've never seen someone do something and had a strong conviction one way or the other whether they did it by accident or on purpose? I know I have.

So I'm pretty sure witnesses, character witnesses, what the person posted on their facebook page that day, or texted their friends about the incident, that individual persons history, etc, etc, etc all could add up to a pretty convincing picture.

If you simply acknowledge that public photography is legal, all these problems and ambiguities go away.

So what is 'public photography'? Is infrared camera ok? Can I in the not to distant future install a camera on an electronic ant, and then walk it up the insides of girls pant legs at the park?

What about photography taken from public spaces into 'private ones'? Is that ok too? Can I hover about your home with drones looking for angles to see in? Or use various imaging techniques to 'see' through the walls of your house? If I get an accomplice to throw the curtains open at a mall changing room, can I photo the women inside with impunity? I'm in a public place, right?

Don't try to regulate other peoples' behavior -- much less try to make it criminal -- based on your personal preferences at any given moment.

I have a reasonable expectation of privacy. We all do. There is nothing unreasonable whatsoever about protecting that.

If you simply acknowledge that public photography is legal,

If you simply acknowledge that taking photographs where a person or persons are the primary subject requires disclosure and consent solves the problem no less neatly.

It sounds like the hack was only possible because personal data that should never have been anywhere near a public website wasn't properly controlled, so I don't have much sympathy for them on that score.

As far as being hacked compared to continued careless releases, the latter seems to deserve a harsher penalty, and the fines here do seem to reflect that. Isn't this what we want to happen?

It's worth noting that the fine for the charity here relates to disclosing personal data about nearly 10,000 individuals, so it worked out around £20 per victim, even though the nature of the breach is obviously quite serious.

In contrast, the bank released a lot of personal data but only about a much smaller number of individuals (it seems to be only in low double figures looking through the ICO's information more deeply, via a series of careless errors rather than one mass leak) so the fine per individual victim appears to have been much greater here, probably working out to £1,000s per victim.

Is this a quiz?
Is it because South Dakota and the Carolinas don't have any corporations?

Or are you trying to make some kind of dumb non-sequiteur?

More actively than Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google in charge of machine intelligence? Very few people in the world are more active in AI-related fields than he is.

As if cops weren't already completely biased towards corporations and against individual citizens.

This is a move in the direction satirised by RoboCop (the original). Very bad news.

I can't comment on the game, as I can't play it. But from the photos, it look like a very small number of polygons, set in outer space. This is the kind of 3D we had in the early 1990s. Modern phones on the other hand are running modern 3D game engines, within full 3D environments with thousands of polys.

She could have done it intentionally just to get him in trouble with the law.

The law has endless cases where the difference between 2 crimes, or a crime and not-a-crime boil down to "intent", and what a judge/jury feel the intentions were.

If she did it 'intentionally to get him in trouble' and there is any evidence of that then it will count heavily against her case.

It matters as much as finding out that the person behind Groklaw was Pam Jones. As much as finding out about the life of Howard Hughes when he went into hiding. And as much as finding out who Banksy is.

It's not at all important, but it is interesting. But unfortunately people's interest is satisfied only at the cost of the privacy of the person who wants to remain hidden.

Who is John Galt?

Some fucking sad-sack libertarian survivalist hanging out in the woods with his guns.

ZTE Open is about the same as an iPhone 3GS. Although it has a 1GHz processor compared with the 600MHz of the 3GS.

Now low end, but not as low as the 3rd world devices they talk about.

And from the photos, Asteroid Mania looks very limited. Like a game from the 1990s.

I wasn't really party to that discussion. But for sure Java bytecode seriously outpaces Javascript.

Kurzweil's predictive powers are so incredibly wrong that he could literally destroy the world by making a mundane prediction that then couldn't come true.

For example, if Kurzweil foolishly predicted that the sun would come up tomorrow, the earth would probably careen right out of its orbit.

There's a big difference between "settled" and "set in stone".

"Settled" science can be challenged, but you just can't waltz into a field and say, "I have this data which proves that decades (or even centuries) of research are entirely wrong." You have to start with narrow claims and then gradually broaden them. You attack scientific consensus by patiently tugging at loose ends until the whole fabric of consensus starts to unravel.

Science is, in fact, open to the possibility of perpetual motion or intelligent deign. It just doesn't make it as quick or easy as some people might like to make such ideas a new scientific consensus. The value of scientific consensus largely lies in that it must be hard-won.

So to answer the summary's question, of course science can be "settled", but settled science can always be overturned. A "settled" hypothesis is merely one so well-supported that the burden of proof lies with its would-be rebutters.

Of course it all depends what you mean by low-end devices. You could both be right, but simply have a different level of devices in mind.

However, if Firefox OS were really designed for low-end devices, it would be using a lower level language than HTML5 and Javascript for apps.

They've even invented protocols for sharing information between themselves.