Well, to be technically accurate the government didn't actually "pass a law". Doing that in secret would have been extremely difficult but not needed as the relevant legislation already existed. It was simply necessary to persuade a judge to sign the relevant documents. Super-injunctions have been used before, but not for issues of this nature.

More interesting is whether the foreign press - who would not be subject to UK law - managed to report about this. I certainly didn't see it mentioned in Slashdot but perhaps they didn't know. Did anyone see any mention in a none-UK news site prior to yesterday?

Won't this problem automatically fix itself? Surely, if fewer children are born then the population will decrease. Therefore, through the basic economics of supply and demand the cost of houses will go down.

As I understand it, the issue is almost entirely about the danger - real or perceived - of fireworks starting fires.

Now, I've never been to California and I don't suppose that I ever will, but from what I've seen and heard I strongly suspect that California in July is significantly more "flammable" than the UK in November.

At the end of the day it all comes down to employers. If everyone - or at least practically everyone - is getting AI to do all their college work for them then the college degree basically becomes worthless because it is no longer any measure of knowledge or ability in whatever subject it is supposed to represent. If employers wish to identify capably potential employees for any job other than operating AI then they need to test the candidates themselves. Further more they need to physically do this in person by bringing candidates in and testing them face to face with no phones allowed.

Presumably this will lead to an "In the land of the blind the one eyed man is King" scenario where most candidates know practically nothing about their professed subject and any student who has done even a modicum of actual real study will appear to shine!

If colleges want to retain any real purpose at all in education then they need to adopt the same approach and only award degrees to students who can sit in a real physical room with their lecturers and provide cogent answers to questions asked!

Actually, this isn't entirely true. Whilst it is the case in the UK that you have to submit a tax return if you earn over a certain threshold (currently about $66,000 equivalent) there are other reasons why you might need to. The most common ones are: none-salary income such as rent from a lodger and being self-employed. I believe that about 30% of UK adults fall into one or more of these categories whilst the rest of us simply have it all worked out by our employers and the government and get the tax deducted directly from our pay. All of the figures are available for us to check if we think that there might have been an error.

I am nearing retirement age and I have never had to submit tax return but my wife has to submit one each year as she is self employed. She can do this entirely online via a gov.uk website and it typically takes her about half an hour once a year - although her submission is very simple and she is able to leave most of the boxes blank. I suspect that for someone with a more complex business it might take a couple of hours once they have gathered the required information from their accounts.

I will admit that I find all of this American fretting about the costs and complexity of filing your tax returns very funny!

Did I miss it, or does the article give no indication at all of how big this contrivance would have to be in order to produce useful amounts of electricity?

What nightmare?? My daughter is 21 and in her final year at University and she still needs some help from Mum and Dad and that is just fine. When I look back over the last 21 years, I can agree that there were a few times where my daughter was rather annoying, but they are a tiny minority. The great majority of the time my wife and I spent raising her was the most enormous and infinitely rewarding fun!

Now, we are comfortably middle class and can afford a nice house with a big garden (yard) so perhaps I shouldn't judge the situation of other people who might find things more difficult, but here is what I wonder. If you go to an old people's home and ask the residents whether they have any regrets about having their children, what will most of them say? "Gosh, I wish I'd skipped the whole nightmare!"? Perhaps not. What will it be like in old people's homes in places like Korea and Japan in 50 years time? Will some residents have children and grand-children to visit them whilst the majority don't have anyone? How will the childless group feel? Will they have regrets?

I think you're probably correct here. Reading the article again it looks like it is all about accurate time-keeping rather than navigation as such.

Well, that article is as clear as mud. Nowhere does it explain how a more precise clock can eliminate the need for satellite navigation which, it correctly points out, is vulnerable to jamming. If I put an extremely accurate clock inside a box and then move it to the other end of the street, how would it figure out (without external jammable signals) that I have done so?

Perhaps more accurate clocks on the satellites would help, but I get the impression that current GNSS inaccuracy is dominated by atmospheric propagation errors rather than clock accuracy. However, the article seems to imply that these wonder clocks will be deployed on the thing which needs to do the navigating (tank, ship etc). Some of the other points are also rather suspect, for example:

Enhance the accuracy of advanced weapon systems, like guided missiles, which rely on accurate timing to calculate trajectories and coordinate attacks.

Just how well damn coordinated do these attacks need to be? Surely, current clocks can organise for your missiles to arrive at the target sufficiently close together?

...especially in areas like cyber warfare, where milliseconds can make a difference.
Surely we already have clocks that can remain accurate to milliseconds over the duration of a typical war?

Here in the UK, my daughter has a student loan from the government. Any remaining debt will be automatically written off 30 years after she took out the loan. The government has recently extended this for new students to 40 years. If someone dies then their loan is automatically cancelled.

Calculations by people who look into these things suggest that most students won't repay the loan in time (repayment rates are fixed and depend on income) so most loans will eventually be written off.

Well, that is of course the big question and reading the report I was left unconvinced on this matter. The "It was the radio waves what did it" mechanism is only really proposed on the basis that the committee couldn't think of anything else, but I have serious doubts about their ability to assess this as some of their arguments seemed rather suspect.

I'm a professional antenna engineer and I was dismayed by their extensive discussion about whether or not the cables might have had an earth connection which would be required to allow the current to flow. This is nonsense! At the UHF and above frequencies used by Arecibo there is no requirement for an earth to allow current to flow in the cables. Cables suspended in a RF field will behave rather like antennas in which currents can flow perfectly happily without any external connection. If you suspended a short metal rod over Arecibo on a length of string then plenty of current would flow back and forth through the centre of the rod even though both ends are open circuit. Antennas work like that!

This basic lack of electromagnetic knowledge reduced my confidence in their entire RF currents thesis. Of course, this doesn't mean that it isn't true and without such a thesis the failure of a such a reliable joint technology remains mysterious.

The report makes it clear that even at full power the current in any particular cable would be very small and certainly not enough to significantly heat up these huge connections. The sun and tropical climate will already do far more heating.

If you took the trouble to read the report (and the earlier one from the engineers who assessed the failure) you would observe that zinc spelter socket cable connections such as were used and failed at Arecibo have been very widely used in this sort of application (e.g. bridges and such like) for around 100 years. The original builders and subsequent maintainers were therefore using a well established cable termination mechanism with a good reputation. This of course just makes the failure more peculiar.

Well probably they didn't know anything about their locations. Remember, pagers are receive only devices, no-one, including the network operator, knows where they are or even if they are switched on.

Really? You know how pagers work? It's just a broadcast network. Every pager message is broadcast through every pager transmitter using a simple modulation scheme which anyone can monitor.

I would suggest that the advantage of pagers is that they can't be tracked. They are receive only devices so no-one, including the network operator, knows where they are or even if they are switched on.

I suppose that a supply chain attack could possibly add a transmitter which might somehow broadcast the location (although what receivers would it transmit to) but this is likely to have battery life issues. Pagers have small batteries (mine used to have two AAAs) which last for months.