Fantastic, so after you are done rounding up all the teenagers posting with attitude and skinheads, how is this system going to help find competent threats?

There was a case here a few days ago, where some teenagers who wrote in their diaries some fantasy story about blowing up their school were arrested and held in jail for some months and then tried as terrorists. Luckily they got a jury trial: the jury acquitted them straight away, and then took the trouble to wait outside the court to congratulate them on their release.

The next step for the authorities will have to be to abolish jury trials for terrorist offenses.

Actually, the metadata (program times, etc) can be downloaded for free, in machine-readable form, from one of the BBC's own websites: they also supply the data from all their rival broadcasters. So programs like mythtv get this data for free.

There's a disclaimer that it's for personal use only: I think they are at the same time providing the data feed free to everyone, and also selling it to Microsoft for use by their media player program. I hope they're charging Microsoft a lot of money for it.

Since most mammals manage to feed their babies without obvious breasts, it's generally accepted by biologists that human breasts *are* for waving around in public.

Having sold "unlimited" access at a fixed price, ISPs run on tight margins, so one simple email or phone call, plus the subsequent dealing with the customer, will wipe out the whole year's profit from that customer. So what in practice will happen if ISPs go down this route is that they will simply start blocking the ports for IRC and mail. And then the malware will move to another protocol, and that will be blocked, and so on.

I suspect the the law of unintended consequences will mean that we'll end up with ISPs that provide access only to http and https.

Absolutely. Thank goodness these people were caught and put in prison for talking about doing something. And thank goodness that their guilt was so obvious that a jury could be convinced that they were guilty after only only two trials for the same offence. Although I see that they are going to get a third trial, as they weren't found quite guilty enough the first two times.

Some might think that keeping on trying someone with different juries until you find a jury that gives the answer you want would be some sort of abuse of the legal process. But not us Brits!

There certainly is a political entity called the Republic of Ireland. Most people in Britain either call it that, or else call it Eire, in order to distinguish it from Ireland the geographical region, which is not a single political entity.

Of couse the name of the Republic of Ireland is just Ireland (or else Eire, depending on which language you are using). But all attentive readers of Alice Through the Looking Glass will know that there is often a difference between the name of something, and what it is called.

Yes, because it's really confusing when we get mixed up between (say) heroin, a wicked and dangerous drug, and diamorphine, a useful medicine. Or between medical marijuana and the addictive stuff. Or between codeine and cough mixture. Or...

That's right. All these prisoners who flush their medications down the toilet should be put in prison.
Oh, wait...

"Existing convictions will stand"

In other words "existing convictions will collapse as soon as they are challenged in court, but let's lie about this and hope that everyone believes us".

The copyright holders are now getting fines of about $100000 per illegal download, if I remember correctly. So if the Pirate Bay will pay this as compensation every time it slips up, it's going to have to be a rather expensive pay site, isn't it?

Not any more. Now it is:

"You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."

The reason for the change is that the "right to silence" has gone: if you don't immediately tell the police your defence when you are arrested, the court may ignore anything you say in your trial, and convict you anyway.

So, given the choice between a sonic system with the power turned down to 15 milliwatts, or a 75 gigawatt radar, we should go with the radar?

At last! Now I know why my tinfoil hat works!

A while ago Opera Software needed more servers
I think they still do.

No. there's a much better way to get legal immunity. Set up a porn filtering business and sell it to the government, like these people have done. Then you can spend all day "checking web sites", and you won't get locked up: in fact, you'll get paid for it.

I don't know about New Zealand, but in the UK you might even be in line for a knighthood from the Queen, for "services to the child protection community".