"The last thing we need is awesome tech only spies and generals possess (weapons of mass destruction/contamination being a notable exception). "

Just curious - why do you exclude these (weapons of mass destruction) from your definition of technology=good if everybody has it? It suggests you are declaring that the declaration that technology should be accessible to all is qualified by value judgements - who gets to make the judgement call? you, me, random person in Afghanistan/Bolivia/Estonia? the UN?

If nuclear weapons are not ok, how about large aerial launched bombs/missiles? How about hand grenades? or hand guns? wonder what the qualifying point is and how you came to it.

The quote came from a commercial corporate journalist, not a government source. Blame the private sector for this one.

Poor slashdot article summary, the In Serbia magazine explains more clearly why this was done: the authors did it to ridicule the "hyperproduction of quasi-scientific works by Serbian professors that are published in the magazines of dubious quality" - they are having a pop at Serbian professors knocking out poor quality rubbish with more concern for volume than quality, and to where ever they can get them published. That said, I'd say this implies there's some definitive criticism at the low editorial quality of the Romanian publication for taking the article without identifying it as a hoax, and probably some commentary on the pressures of being a Serbian academic, looks like their universities or national funding bodies put them under pressure to produce volume and don't look too carefully at the quality when deciding how to fund their researchers.

And the WW2 dazzle patterns were used by European navies in WW1 before that....

Indeed. When you buy a house in the UK that's pre-1940s and in an urban area you check to see if there's historical bomb damage: often places got patched up quickly with available materials and 70 years later the substandard fixes can be decaying, cracks opening etc.

I often wonder if this is one of the reasons people in the USA seem so much more enthusiastic about going to war than Europeans - we can still see the evidence around us in the architecture and people are still alive who have frightening memories of how it affected them at home. Next time you're in London check the front of the Victoria and Albert museum, you can still see the shrapnel damage to the stone work.

19th century housing here is just standard for lots of people.It's waht you rent when you're a student. I prefer it to modern places: the latter are mainly wood built and thrown up quickly. I know the place I bought (late C19th, typical urban red bricker starter home) has been through two wars and hasn't moved in 130 years so it's likely to outlive me :-)

Ha ha, well said both.

When I was a junior postdoc I was renting a house built in 1729 with bits from the previous build still showing, early 1500s sections of wall and doorways. And our friends thought we were insane coming in to college 8 miles each day. Me and my mates thought it beat living in the modern Victorian rubbish (houses built in 1880s) which were closer.

Give us a call after your first 500 years or so, I am sure you'll have some fun stories to tell the grandkids by then as well!

And don't even start the geeks on Guy Fawkes, him of the anonymous mask that they all wear made in Chinese state run factories, a Catholic royalist who was up for replacing one king who claimed his divine right with another just of a different religious flavour. Nothing in there about helping the poor/women's votes/ anarchism/open source data formats.

When the Romans ran the show there, it was called Brittany.

Started as "Insulae Britannicae" referring to the islands, then the part which became a Roman province was known as Britannia, and later divided into Britannia Superior and Britannia Inferior.