Cool - I can just imagine the question "So, how did you get into politics"... "I replied to a posting on Slashdot"

So are the Pirate Party seriously looking for candidates? I live in Edinburgh North & Leith.

My MP is this chap: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/mark_lazarowicz/edinburgh_north_and_leith

Not a big majority and in a seat that I suspect will have a lot of strong feeling on this topic (particularly students). For £500 it might be worth standing as a Pirate myself..... :-)

I had been contemplating voting Liberal Democrat as they seemed to have at least one MP who actually has a clue (Vince Cable) - which is one more than the other parties can muster. I'll go and read up on this and if they did table this then that's my vote going somewhere else... of to check the Pirate Party site to see if they are going to have a candidate here at the next general election.

I don't think that Opera the company would ever intentionally abuse this situation - but what about if their servers are compromised, digruntled employees etc. Would I check my personal email this way? Yes. Would I recommend to someone that they confirm multi million pounds transactions through this route (and I do know people who do this daily) - probably not.

But it's not an end-to-end encrypted connection - there are two, one from the server to Opera's servers and another one from their servers to the browser. Would I trust Opera Software to be an intermediary in all transactions I did online with visibility of all of my secrets? In all honest, probably not. But that might not stop me using Opera - it would just stop me from doing anything that I want to keep reasonably secret on it.

Indeed, and guess where the encrypted connection terminates when you access your bank website?

And if someone had made him up nobody would have believed it.

I don't think there is such a status as "Royal" in the UK system - either you are a Commoner, a Peer or the Sovereign.

Indeed, the High Court (actually High Court of Justiciary) is the senior criminal court in Scotland, civil cases being in the Court of Session.

I did a Computer Science degree in the '80s and there was very little attempt to be vocational - quite rightly so in my opinion. Of course, we did a lot of programming, but that was rather incidental to the fact that we were being educated about a subject, not trained as programmers. There is actually very little correlation in my experience between "knowing your stuff" in an academic sense and being an effective developer in most organisations.

Finally, a decent reason to have a manned space program!

OK Here is mine: OpenShapes - an Open Source Framework for Editable Online Diagrams at http://shap.es/docs Main features:

• In browser Editing and viewing of diagrams
• All important stuff is done using Javascript
  • Particularly the definitions of individual shapes
  • Easy to add new classes of shapes
• Shapes in diagrams can be connected together
• Loose coupling to any particular graphical display platform
• Free Open Source with an MIT License
• Simple XHTML based format used for diagram data
• Straightforward application integration
• Support from linking from Shapes in Diagrams
• Alpha stage.

Some sales guys really can't say "No" to the question "Does your system do this?" - I wouldn't have believed how surrealy awful this can get (at least from the perspective of the poor sod responsible for delivering the final working system) if I hadn't attended so many of these meetings over the years.

A bit like most of the definitions of "quality" that I have seen - doesn't matter if it makes sense or not, all that matters is that you have a process and that you follow it.

Well, it could happen somewhere like here in the UK where the NHS does provide most of the health cover that most people need - but there is still a fairly significant private healthcare industry here for the things that the NHS won't provide (e.g. most cosmetic surgery) or for people who want treatment faster than the NHS will do it (e.g. I had to wait 4 weeks to get a CT scan of my sinuses, not a big deal to me) or for something, perhaps, like making enhanced people like your normal Gattaca employee.