If the parts in question are sold through any of the dozens of commercial electronic components suppliers around the world (like Digi-Key in the USA or RS Components here in the UK) and the number of parts required is modest (assuming perhaps one per cruise missile) then I think it will be very hard indeed to keep them out of the hands of the Russians.

Anyone with a credit card can buy components from these suppliers so all the Russians have to do is get some of their diplomats or agents in various countries to buy some and then forward them in a diplomatic bag.

The article is all about how phone image quality will get better because of better sensors and better processing. But, why can't exactly the same sensor and processing technology be applied to new DSLRs?

Surely, a phone is always going to have smaller lenses and sensors than you can have on a DSLR. Therefore, if you have a new phone and new DSLR both of which have these wacky new sensor and processing technologies then the DSLR is still going to have the advantage in areas like long lenses, low light performance and depth of field control.

This seems to me to be the classic fallacy that my product is going to beat the opposition because mine will improve whilst they just sit and twiddle their thumbs.

I don't dispute that for very many people modern phones provide all of the photographic capability that they can imagine wanting, but that doesn't mean that there won't be plenty of customers for new - presumably mirror-less - advanced DSLRs.

I'm very sorry but I'm not convinced that the risk is anything like as dreadful as you suggest. It is small dams that we are discussing here. A large dam can presumably afford the expense of operators.

A few miles from me as a stately home with a large ornamental lake maintained by a dam. I would guess that it has been there for about 200 years. It is about 90 metres wide and perhaps 10 metres high. I get the impression that this is precisely the sort of modest dam which is being considered here.

A few years ago they installed a small scale hydro system. There is a modest pipe which runs from the lake to a small brick building at the bottom of the dam. Inside is a turbine and generator together with a remote control valve to regulate the flow (there is an information board with photos which is how I know this).

Most of the time the valve is fully open and even then some water still flows over the dam weir. During dry weather the valve closes to maintain the water level in the lake although since the pipe inlet is clearly only about one metre below water level it wouldn't drop much even if it didn't.

So, how exactly is your cyber terrorist going to cause death and destruction in this case? The only thing he (or she) can control is the valve. Clearly two options are available:

Fully open: Well, that's the case most of the time anyway. In dry weather the lake level might drop by one metre over several days in the unlikely event that no-one noticed. Perhaps this wouldn't be much of a blow to the civilised world.
Fully closed: Hmm, no electricity until someone notices so a modest financial loss, but the excess water will just flow over the weir exactly as it did for the 200 years before the hydro system was installed.

Perhaps you have been inspired by watching "The Dam Busters" and I can't deny that it is a truly excellent film and that the damage to the German dams did indeed cause widespread death and destruction. However, you might notice that this involved the use of large quantities of high explosives. If your determined terrorists turns up with such things then (a) one old man in a hut isn't going to stop them and (b) the attack will be just as easy if the dam hasn't been converted to hydro.

None of what the authors conclude is particularly surprising. Twisted pair is basically a variant on the standard two wire transmission line and they demonstrate that if you can make a decent broadband balun then you can get energy in and out of it.

However, it seems to me that the paper has demonstrated a theoretical possibility whilst overlooking a range of practical problems.

• Whilst they discuss the losses in the FR4 dielectric used to make their balun, they are rather quiet on the dielectric losses of whatever material is used to insulate the conductors.
• Terminating the cable at each end whilst maintaining the required characteristic impedance will require more complex and expensive connectors than those currently used.
• Real cables have splices, kinks and other irregularities which will become much more significant at the higher frequencies which they propose.

So, in summary, the devil is in the detail!

In March this year, fully electric cars represented 16.1% of total sales here in the UK and in many other European countries the percentage is even higher. I wouldn't call that a "blip", particularly when you include plug-in hybrids (6.6%).

I do of course agree that the vehicle population takes about 20 years to turn over, and as a result EVs currently represent only a small percentage of total vehicles (perhaps small enough to be described as a 'blip'). Clearly, even if EVs represented 100% of new vehicle sales the percentage of them on the roads would only grow by about 5% a year.

The article states that this software is only really free if your tax affairs are simple, but if they are simple then why do you need any tax software at all? Couldn't the IRS just have a web site where you enter the required information?

Like most UK adults, I don't have to file a tax return, but my wife does as she is self employed. We don't have any tax software and don't see the need. She has a simple spreadsheet to work out her income and then she just logs into the UK tax authority (Inland Revenue) and enters a few key values into a web site. She gets an email saying how much tax she owes which I pay through a bank transfer. The entire process takes about an hour once a year.

My wife's tax affairs really are extremely simple and she only needs to fill in about 10% of the boxes on the online form but I deduce from the presence of the other 90% that it can cope with tax payers whose affairs are significantly more complex. I understand that there is tax software available in the UK, but I get the impression that it is mostly for businesses and those with very complex tax affairs.

Why? I keep reading that objects which aren't particularly bright (after all, the star in question is too faint to see with the naked eye so there are plenty of brighter ones) are still too bright for this telescope but I can't find any explanation of why. To my photographic mind, if an object is too bright you reduce either aperture of exposure. I can see that you can't reduce the aperture in this case, but why can't Webb just take a shorter exposure?

Two more questions then come to mind:
* Does it matter if a star this bright is in the field of view when Webb is trying to image a nearby fainter object?
* Does this problem of "Too bright a star" also affect Hubble and large ground based telescopes?

Perhaps the politicians actually don't think that it will work! After all, what they actually require are newspaper headlines about how they are cracking down on porn and they get those no matter how many people eventually find a way around the trivial blocks.

I remember this case and wondering why Land Rover needed all these detail - like when the doors were opened and closed - in the first place. Presumably they didn't install the feature in order to catch murderers.

Another mystery (at least to me) is who is paying the mobile phone companies to transfer all this data. I'm sure the total cost, even for all the recent Land Rovers in the UK, isn't very much for a car manufacturer to bear, but do they really intend to keep paying this charge for cars they sold years and years ago? Or, is it actually an ongoing charge on the owner, in which case what happens if you stop paying?

Well, I guess that these are good points, but the debit card I use almost all the time is linked to my secondary bank account which normally only has a few hundred pounds in it. If it gets stolen then my main savings aren't affected. Actually, I have a feeling that I do have a credit card linked to my main bank account, but I never use it and I'm not sure where it is!

At the end of the day I suppose that my avoidance of credit cards is a personal thing in that I really don't like being in debt to anyone. I paid off my first mortgage when I was about 30 and have recently (I'm in my 50s now) paid off my second one. I now don't owe any money to anyone and I'm very much hoping to stay that way for the rest of my days. I absolutely accept that this might not be the most rational financial approach.

If I had a credit card then I'd worry about forgetting to pay it off each month so I'd probably organise for that to be automatic. By the time a noticed a fraud, the money would probably have gone out of my account anyway.

1 - I don't have any credit cards, only debit cards.
2 - My bank (I'm in the UK) supports 2FA whereby they send a one time PIN via SMS when I make a larger transaction.
3 - I have two bank accounts. A main one where my salary goes and a smaller one to which I transfer regular amounts of money. I use the debit card from the smaller one for most physical transactions and all on-line ones.
4 - My cards had a three digit Card Security Code printed on the back which is required for all "customer not present" transactions. I scraped these off and keep them separate thus defeating eagle eyed shop assistants and waitresses.
5 - The bank allows me to disable various functionality on my card via on-line banking. I have switched off overseas transactions. Obviously I will need to remember to log on and re-activate it if I ever go abroad again!
6 - If a web site offers me the option to retain the card number for future transactions then usually I decline.
7 - Some UK merchants (mostly smaller ones admittedly) allow payment via bank transfer. You click "Checkout" and they send you an email with their bank details, an order number and the total due. I log into my bank and make a transfer using the order number as a reference. I then get another email saying that my order is being processed. The downside of this scheme is that you don't get all the protections which the banks provide for debit card fraud so I only use this scheme with suppliers I know are real (perhaps because a friend has used them) and for modest amounts of money.

I'm in the UK and registered with the online tax system (although like the majority of UK adults I don't have to submit a tax return) and used it recently to register for a tax credit due to working from home.

I don't remember the original sign up process which I did several years ago, but I'm sure that it didn't involve any sort of web cam or other live facial recognition. When I log on now (which I only do very occasionally) I use a password and a security code which is sent to my phone as an SMS.

My wife does have to fill-in a tax return (she is self employed) but the sign in process is exactly the same for her.

Perhaps there is some corner of the gov.uk site which requires "Selfie IDs", but I've never come across it.

Any by "modern" we mean any plug made in approximately the last 40 years. I think that I might have at most two or three of the old unshielded plugs and I suspect that most houses don't have any at all.

I'm slightly surprised that Japan has only just come up with this arrangement as I believe that we have had something very similar here in the UK for decades. Patent applications which meet certain military security requirements get stopped part way through the patent application process. No patent actually every gets issued (for the obvious reason that patents have to be publicly available) but the applicant is compensated in some way for any losses which they might incur as a result.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but surely if you watch a video at twice normal speed the speech will be incomprehensible? I often watch recorded TV programmes at 10% faster as I find that it makes no difference, but faster than that and the speech starts to sound like it comes from chipmunks on steroids!

Another factor which the article doesn't seem to address is that of foreign language comprehension. Does this speed-up only work if the lecture is in your mother tongue? My wife, who speaks excellent English but isn't a native speaker often finds it easier to watch TV programmes at 10% to 15% slower as it makes it easier for her to follow the dialogue.