Oh well, I just won't bother reading it then. I will read www.bbc.co.uk or www.telegraph.co.uk or theregister.co.uk or www.zeit.de or cnn.com or slashdot.org or www.dailymail.co.uk or and the list goes on.

two tin cans and a piece of string?

that is odd, I was starting to think it was a British site. I keep on seeing a disproportionately number of stories about the UK government doing crazy oppressive fascist shit. Or may be there is another reason for that......

sorry can somebody pleas explain why you are not allowed a fully functioning fighter jet. I thought you guys were had a right to bare arms, what is the difference between a shot gun and a jet?

you forgot "execute mentally ill person" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/debates/6905283/China-executes-Akmal-Shaikh-was-the-execution-justified.html I find China deeply worrying on so many levels, I just wish when I go out to buy a new laptop of mp3 player I had a choice not to buy stuff from china. But I don't even more worrying.

This 'review' is complete rubbish alpha and beta builds are allays much slower than the production versions. They have all types of debug options turned on. I don' see how you can compare them. If one os has more debug options turned on than the other it would be slower. Surely....

Although I you are searching for English words in a Chinese search engine. I wonder what happens when you search for "tiananmen square tank" in google.com but _using Chinese characters_

I would agree with the above post, in my field (academia) one does see the world boycotting the US to a degree. The example I have is that it is _much_ harder to get people to attend conformance in the US than in Asia or Europe. One conformance I attended is usually over subscribed when it is not in the US, and when it is in the US numbers are very close to the break even point. I think this is at the subliminal level more than anything else. The general consensus is that it is a lot of grief to get in to the US, it is a long way away and why bother. I don't think it is political it is just slightly too much effort. The other point is that science is a truly international community. Therefore, to get all the top people in field together in one room means that they _all_ have to be able to get in to the US easily, not just the people from the visa waver countries.

Sure, I would acknowledge that may be a few lessons on religion would be fine. Much the way sex education is taught. But I think any more than that and it risks turning in to indoctrination. There are so many wonderful and useful things our kids should be learning about, that there is no way to justify spending more time on it. I find the growth in state sponsored religious schools (in the UK) a very worrying trend.

This is one of occasions where the French have it about right, they have separation of church and state. They do not even allow religion in schools in any form. I don't understand why people think it is ok to force their beliefs on me.

exactly, the spokesperson making these comments clearly has no concept of security. The worrying thing is though, that this is exactly the sort of short sighted rubbish that our government laps up and puts into law.

I just spent about an hour reading the discussion linked to on the above post [schneier.com]. It is truly insightful, and well worth reading if you have any interest in encryption.

Some thoughts, the most terrifying phrase in the abstract was "'What he is doing would be illegal in Britain and the United States". I find these laws are very unscientific, they are effectively trying to hide _the_ truth. Which in this case is that the GSM encryption algorithm is shoddy. Secondly as a brit I find it very worrying when people justify draconian laws by saying other people do it. On to more technical things, the above post mentioned DES and AES, as I remember did EFF not build a 250k$ DES cracking machine some time back. I thought triple DES had now superseded DES. As for AES, according to wikipedia weaknesses have been found quite recently in AES. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard. I don't understand how compromising these attacks are though (presumably very).

fantastic! you are a genius. However I think I can improve on it. Mandatory bacon sandwiches _and a free beer_ before boarding the plane. Everybody wins.

"He said that because Bing used more imagery than other search engines, it attracted more children. ..." translation: bing is for children who have not yet leant how to set the default search engine to google.