Or maybe not leveraging debt on the assets of a privatised national resource to pay huge bonuses and dividends, and instead using some of that money to upgrade infrastructure, build reservoirs, and fix leaks?

Peter Watts in his science fiction novel Blindsight makes an interesting case for the idea of consciousness not being necessary for intelligence. And yes, I'm aware that this was largely lifted from John Searle's idea of the Chinese Room, but it's still an interesting take on it.

Make a rule so that they can only charge for things that they can list. They'll soon figure it out.

I was thinking about exactly that question. Best I could come up with is that papers are usually written as a series of drafts with information added, removed and edited over time. If students use college controlled cloud storage (which they're encouraged to do so they have backups), then that process can be tracked. If on the other hand a file magically appears, word perfect and ready for hand in, then that might merit further investigation.

As regards picking up new languages, what you say is true to a certain extent but apart from SQL all the languages you mention are imperative. It's one thing learning another language using the same paradigm but I think you'll see a disconnect if you started to play with functional languages like Haskell or Clojure. Also even languages like Rust can have quite a learning curve with the concepts of ownership, borrowing and lifetimes. I agree with you though that it's understanding underlying theory that counts, not being able to write "hello world" in whatever language currently happens to be flavor of the month.

Agreed, but yesterday before the launch the story of the upcoming launch was all over the BBC talking about a great British success and the dawn of a new age for the UK space industry, how important the satellites being launched were, blah, blah... Strangely it's all gone a bit quiet now.

I've been programming in various functional languages for over 30 years. Depending on the application area they can have big advantages or be a real pain to work with. Proponents have pushed a number of features over the years that continually resurface in slightly different forms, two of which are their suitability for large scale concurrency and formal correctness proofs. Both of these are possible using non-functional languages. I would still use a functional language, or at least use the functional features of other languages, if I have the choice because I believe it allows me to write better code in terms of correctness and maintainability.

As long as they understand shibboleet.

Just wondering how this would work if the person being tracked was based in an area with poor to no signal coverage of which there are many in some of the nicer parts of the UK.

Something shared by all dictatorial regimes seems to be their reliance on police / paramilitary forces to quell popular dissent. These forces acting together can be used effectively against demonstrations even when heavily outnumbered. However the individuals that make up these forces usually live within the communities they oppress. This makes me wonder why the personal information of these people (names, addresses, mobile numbers etc.) does not seem to be a high value target. After all, it's one thing beating up innocent protesters along with hundreds of your thug friends, quite another when those same people know who you are and where you live.

I hope that Rogozin's words are given due consideration, and thought given to the thousands of Russian scientists and engineers who will now be looking for gainful employment. Just a pity that the West doesn't have a shortage of such skills and wouldn't be happy to welcome them with open arms.

So data must be stored within the country. I'm guessing encrypting the data will be fine? After all, this is just about protecting your citizens and you want everything to be as secure as possible, right? Of course the actual processing of the data can be done back at HQ where the encryption keys will be held, or is there some other reason you want the data stored within control of your courts?

where at least healthcare is free and you don't have to worry about how much treatment costs. Or whether or not it's covered by insurance. Or whether you have insurance. Still, I believe health care can be quite good in the US, as long as you can afford it.

Slashdot seems to be getting more US centric with time. I guess I need to remember that when I see a headline containing "the nation" I need to translate it into "the US".

> voltage and circuits aren't 'flashy' enough.

This is usually a "good thing" :)