Good laws aren't based on beliefs - or more to the point they have a justification that lies outside any belief system.

Murder is against the law because if it was not, it would be an acceptable solution to lots of life's problems, and would leave a lot of people significantly worse off either materially or emotionally.

If the only justification for a law is a belief system, then that law is automatically bad for those who do not subscribe to that belief system.

I dunno - a box with a couple of Tileras in it and a good Btree implementation ought to be able to handle it - chuck a couple of hundred cores at what is after all a layer 7 routing problem, with 8 x 40 GB interfaces, and plenty of RAM, and 1ms should be achievable.

Well, with the Baltic Dry Index (which is a measure of shipping costs) being at a 10 year low because there are more ships touting for business than goods to be shipped, you're not going to see bunker oil replaced as a fuel any time soon.

Much like jet fuel, this source of pollution is inviolable in the eyes of the political class, because it is too important to the way the economy works. They'll push gasoline to $10 / gallon (diesel is already almost there in the UK) before they even consider making it more expensive to move goods or fat, well paid arses around the world.

+1 - and I'm speaking from experience.

Hell, I'm nearly 50 and still can't quit cigarettes, but quit a smack habit 30 years ago with only a couple of weeks of sweating, random limb movements and generally feeling like death warmed up.

Now if we could find a vaccine against stupidity, maybe we would be able to kick the "war on drugs" habit.

Hell, why not?

It's not as though "chemical castration" was used as a "cure" for homosexuality only a few decades ago, and contributed to the suicide of Alan Turing, is it?

A far better solution to heroin addiction is providing clean, known strength heroin by prescription to those who choose to indulge, while giving them help coming off the stuff.

This vaccine is a pretty neat trick, but until it's been studied and tested then prescription heroin is the best solution, followed a long way behind by methadone, and with the "war on drugs" being the absolute worst.

Someone tried to take Labour to court over manifesto pledges.

The response: "Manifesto pledges are not subject to legitimate expectation".

Read out by Gordon Brown's lawyer in Brighton Crown Court, 7th Feb 2008, in answer to a case brought over a referendum on the European Constitution.

I'm pretty sure that the Labour placemen still infesting the police and the security services would love you to believe that this is all the idea of those nasty Tories.

After 13 years of statist poison, our institutions need a good purge, but that hasn't happened. If the buggers thought they could get ID cards back on the agenda, they'd try.

Brecht had it about right - it's a pity we still aren't listening.

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

If it were only £200 million, that might be an acceptable price for keeping our freedoms.

But given the history of UK government IT procurement, a few billion is more likely.

Not if you're using a Commodore Pet....

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

OK - I'll take a stab at answering your non-hypothetical question. Bear in mind that my grandfather was a coal miner, so I'm well aware that coal dust is pretty nasty stuff, but there really wasn't much of an alternative back in the 1920s when he started.

Put very simply, if people are exposed to toxic pollution from a coal-fired power station, they should be allowed to sue for the damage caused by that pollution, and make it obvious to others wishing to operate such plants that not cleaning up their output will incur costs when they in turn are sued. Not as instant a solution as regulating the hell out of them, but since it hasn't been tried, there's no evidence that it's a less useful solution.

The reason this has not happened is (in my neck of the woods) that the power producers were at one stage nationalised and immune from legal sanction, and are now heavy donors to both main parties so are still immune to legal sanction for all practical purposes.

Another, massive reason why nothing has been done about coal here in the UK is that energy production has moved away from coal, in a short sighted rush to burn all our natural gas, while our nuclear industry has been neglected and allowed to wither away because of the noisy greens who fail to see that the alternatives are unsuitable (coal because it pollutes, natural gas because it will soon run out, wind because it is useless as a base load supply, tidal because some sea birds might move a few miles, and so on).

Oh, and a proper libertarian is only willing to accept artificial scarcity in the form of "intellectual property" if that is strictly limited both in scope and time - I think you'll find that most libertarians tend to agree with Stallman rather than the RIAA or the patent trolls on this matter.

We can start with tax breaks for clean energy research, mini-hydro, solar and the like (not the ridiculous subsidy schemes we have now, which are great creators of bureacracy and merely shift the cost to consumers).

We can make it clear that *if* sea levels are rising and flood plains are likely to be less safe places to live, no subsidies for building on low lying land prone to flooding can be expected, and recommend that those likely to be affected either move or make their own provisions for dealing with effects that are at least partly within their own control.

We can offer incentives for people to study science and engineering rather than the liberal arts or other non-productive subjects at university, so that we have more trained minds ready to build the solutions that we would need. It's pointless spending money educating PPE graduates and lawyers (let alone English / History / Media Studies) when what is needed is a technical and not a legislative solution.

It's not that far away from the current approach - it's just based on incentive rather than taxation, on building solutions rather than imposing preconceived (and ill conceived) dogma which serves only to strengthen bureaucracy at the expense of freedom.

Oh, and sack the IPCC, especially Chaudri.