Ecuador can appoint him as their representative to the United Nations. The UK then doesn't get to choose whether to recognise him as a diplomat - they are required to under the rules of the UN. This is a variation on the loophole that was used by Robert Mugabe to attend conferences in the EU (where he is subject to a travel ban).

Yes but it was policy laundered to some extent. It was originally effectively a UK policy, but politicians thought they needed the cover of EU rules to be able to sell it to the public.

So you mean none of those things happened before the UN was founded in 1945 and none of them could happen without the UN? I don't think so. Those things happen because people or governments individually decide that they want to cooperate to make them happen. Often they actually don't happen because individual nations decide they can't or don't want to (or don't want to pay the price in blood and/or treasure to do so).

Here's a good example: telephone connectivity between Spain and Gibraltar was severely limited between 1969 and 2006 when the individual governments (UK, Spain and Gibraltar) decided to do something about it themselves. One of the few areas where you would have thought the UN would actually have a genuine advantage, where there is a geopolitical dispute which was impacting on a technical/day to day level, and it proved useless in the face of that small challenge.

If you ask me, the main thing the UN does (outside of the big geopolitical stuff) is to allow the people who work on that long list of things you mentioned not to pay tax when doing so. Which is very nice for them. I don't really see how it benefits anyone else though.

I would agree with that but 5-10GB/day is easily possible, especially if you don't weed out the bad ones before syncing. RAW files can easily hit 30MB each from a modern DSLR. For that volume of data, anything online is unlikely to work well when travelling.

Add + and a label to your email address before the @ sign. Filter based on this (maybe forward to an email list or some such). I honestly don't understand why more people don't know about this. Or go and create your own mailing list with its own address - again possible with minimal hassle.

CertificatePatrol offers 80 percent of what this extension will do without the requirement for server participation. Given how many SSL sites don't even support the newest SSL/TLS protocol, it would seem to be more valuable. I get that adding offline signing keys which are supposed to be invariant helps but I can't see most sites going to the hassle to be honest.

In a civil case it's only a "more likely than not" (preponderance of evidence) standard of proof in the England and I can't imagine this wouldn't be met in this case. Damages would be the issue... I would guess they would be limited to something like any actual out of pocket expenses specifically incurred - e.g. lawyers costs or searches etc - and I somehow doubt that this went that far.

You could make an argument that this does amount to fraud under English criminal law (since it's not merely wasting time but actually pretending to do one thing in order to get something rather different) but it would probably be hard to get this to stick. I suspect the CPS would decide it wasn't in the public interest to prosecute, and even with a private criminal prosecution (which is expensive) you run the risk that the CPS takes over the prosecution and then discontinues it (which they have a right to do).

One might posit that weak politicians (of all parties) who are unable to stand up to civil servants are a bigger part of the problem. Somehow the skills that seem to be required to get elected (and, as importantly, selected by a party to stand for a seat) just don't seem to include this skill set.

Apparently three men dived into an emergency cooling reservoir to fix sluice gates which had malfunctioned. This then allowed the water to be released to mitigate steam explosion risk as the reservoirs were located directly under the core. It was not a suicide mission in the sense of H2O2 oxidising their skin - all 3 returned and one even subsequently spoke to the media. There are reports that they did all subsequently contract radiation sickness and two died.

Actually the original incitement to racial hatred laws were passed under Thatcher. Blair made it worse though because his government indeed did extend it to cover religious opinions.

The real problem is that it's *drivers* who are insured, not cars. Hence checking number plates will always generate issues - this is why it is ridiculous that we are now using ANPR for this purpose. It works for tax because the car is taxed not the driver. A car can legally not appear on any specific insurance policy yet as long as the driver is insured and it is physically road-legal (tire-tread depth etc), it is be legal to drive (and conversely, if you breach the terms of your insurance, even though it is in the database it won't be legal to drive). This is useful - most fully-comprehensive policies give you third party cover driving any car which isn't yours as long as you have the owner's permission.

Years ago, it wasn't that uncommon for thieves to siphon fuel out of someone else's petrol tank in the middle of the night. This led to central-locking fuel caps in cars which were harder to break into. I wonder if this will just incentivise people enough (who, let's face it, are already criminals by definition if they are driving uninsured) to overcome the resistance this created...

Unless what matters is the detail and not the "big picture". Like in literally ANY mathematically-based subject. If anything, the fact that this technique would work seems an indictment of the level of academic rigour in many subjects in itself.

Actually I find this less of an issue. Check out grepmail and mboxgrep. I use these pretty regularly and they're very useful for doing e.g. grepmail 'foo.*bar[a-z]' ~/Mail/mbox.gz >/tmp/messages; mutt -f /tmp/messages

As others have said, the headache you will have if you do want to come back (potentially years later) to that one email you know you had only to find your attachment-stripping program has foobar'd the whole archive up (or that you need the attachment after all) probably isn't worth the hassle for saving 500MB per year this year (even taking into account reasonable growth rates - I'd note that bandwidth per $, which will be the factor limiting your email size, has been growing rather more slowly than storage capacity per $ over the past decade and things are likely to continue that way).

If the problem is that you have significant duplication between emails (e.g. the same attachment being emailed several times), gzip and bzip2 may well miss the opportunity to de-dupe this because the distance between duplicated sections is large. One solution to consider if this is an issue may be to use something which is better at compressing over long distances. I would suggest trying something like lrzip to compress tarballs of the annual sets of mbox files before archiving those.

Of course, if you just have lots of attachments which *aren't* duplicated (which is probably more likely), that won't really help much.