Because everything is classified, when the system is inevitably used to achieve political ends, you most likely won't even realise it's happened. Your position is like someone in 2001 saying "but requiring banks to verify their customers identity isn't being used to manipulate politics, it'll just be used to fight the terrorists!" and then some years later WikiLeaks gets cut off. It is only possible because of the infrastructure laid down for other reasons. In that case the smackdown was clearly visible, but most attempts to fight The Man wouldn't even get that far.

These systems already protect themselves as their first priority. it's only a matter of time until a journalist working on a story about government abuse of power against a suspected terrorist suddenly discovers that their source vanishes. They'll never know that the US was monitoring all people that the journalist interacted with and was able to find the leak.

This is an impressive achievement, and interesting even if they report a relatively low (300) number of charge cycles. Too bad the article doesn't mention some other parameters:
- The article mentions power density "after 300 charging cycles". Is that the limit, or does it actually last for more cycles, and how fast does it drop off?
- How well do these batteries retain a charge? Li-Ion is quite good on that score; if I leave my cordless drill of the charger, it'll still be ready for use after a year.
- How well do these batteries deal with half-cycles (recharge when only half empty)? Is there a memory effect?
- What is the max rate of charge?

It is, but are you denying its truth?

Such data is gathered by the YouGov surveys, which happen very regularly. Here's the latest report. Unsurprisingly given the sort of policies associated with the coalition government, the approval rating of Parliament splits strongly down party lines. Overall the government is unpopular with a 25% approval rating, 61% disapproval and 14% don't know. However this average disguises the fact that amongst conservative voters approval is 75% and amongst Labour voters approval is only 5%.

These sorts of figures are what you might expect from the UK. The situation is not comparable to the USA where the approval rating of Congress reflects a more deep rooted feeling that corruption is rampant and all the parties are fundamentally the same. This can be seen in the fact that disapproval of Congress is almost identical regardless of voting intention. The problems in the UK reflect a strong north/south division every bit as strong as the city/rural division in the USA, where the richer and more conservative south tends to approval of austerity due to a less systematic dependence on welfare and public sector jobs. The post-industrial north is dominated by Labour voters who never made the transition to the service/knowledge economy and where quality of life is highly dependent on government spending.

I don't have time to find more precise stats, but I suspect if you examined UK voters beliefs more closely, people would not feel that democracy itself was particularly broken. Especially not over something as trivial as piracy - only in places like Slashdot and amongst the people who read it does piracy become some kind of moral imperative. Everyone else I know treats it as a naughty pleasure. They know they're breaking the law and won't get caught, but they don't have any desire to make a big moral campaign of it.

Copyright owners are hardly the "select few". Millions of people own copyrights and (attempt to) make money off them. Which is, whether you like it or not, an ability the law attempts to provide.

There are already 3d printers for food. Some are somewhat frivolous, some can print confectionary, some are serious. There's a company in the Netherlands teaming up with major food producers to produce printed steaks and vegetables. These printed foods are for older people who have to eat liquidized food which isn't very appetizing, and these people are often undernourished. The idea is to provide food printed from liquidized components that looks and tastes like proper food, has to be eaten with knife and fork instead of slurped through a straw, and has a little bit of texture, in hopes that it will make for a more pleasant eating experience.

Anyone who wants a gun, but gets told by their government that they can't have one, and can't / doesn't want / doesn't dare buy one on the black market, and doesn't have the skills to construct a zipgun. Like, anyone who wants one for home defense in the better part of western Europe.

OK, perhaps they won't want this particular gun. But the design has already been improved slightly and is very likely to be improved further. Of course you'll still need ammo to go with it...

So far I found Windows 8 to be a nice improvement under the hood. And a simple little program will give you back your desktop upon boot and the start menu, and you will hardly notice the difference with Windows 7, GUI-wise.

I tried a couple of their demos on a (recent model) smart phone on WiFi, and performance was good. Not lightning fast like a native app, but certainly not slow as hell either. It was decent on an iPad 1 as well.

Sucky Web 2.0 sites generally suck harder than "simple text webpages"; the technology gives developers a couple of new shotguns to shoot themselves in the foot with. But good Web 2.0 pages can be a vast improvement over Web 1.0 or pages of text. Don't knock the technology for mistakes made by incompetent designers. As always, it comes down to selecting the right tool, and applying it in the right way.

He's paraphrasing "The banality of evil", the title of a report on the Eichmann trials.

In the comments of TFA, one of the judges of the fair noted that the kid's presentation looked interesting. It was indeed a Farnsworth–Hirsch fusor -- and that the kid stated he wasn't related.

Bear in mind what Erdogan himself had to say about the democratic process: "Democracy is like a bus, you ride it until you reach your destination, then you get off". He wouldn't be the first dictator to be elected by popular vote, then use whatever means that lie to hand to stay in power. He has already made the first moves: go after the opposition, jail dangerous opponents (in Turkey, this means army generals who have a strong tradition of keeping the nation secular), and bring the press under even tighter control.

Not all Islamic nations are dictatorships, but most of them are. And almost all of them are distinctly unpleasant places to live if you happen to be a non-Muslim or a woman with liberal ideas. By the way, Turkey is not a Muslim country, not all of it. You'll see more headscarves and burkas in London or Amsterdam than some of the large cities in Turkey.

My employers' primary business has, until recently, been based on T1. We are now migrating to VoIP.

The customer experience is improved (if they notice the change at all), we're opening up new paths for future development, and we're getting away from obsolete legacy hardware that is no longer manufactured or supported. We're also saving the company oodles of money. What the telcos want for T1 these days just isn't pretty.

I'm 51, BTW. Old dogs can indeed learn new tricks.

...laura