How was the Minister supposed to know that there were security issues? If they had ignored advice to spend money on security testing and auditing then they certainly would be responsible, but in general it is the responsibility of the IT contractors producing software to advise the client on what is required.

To be honest, there is a major problem with the understanding of security issues in the IT industry. Even a basic understanding of networking, a healthy dose of distrust and attention to the flow of information can drastically cut the number and severity of security vulnerabilities.

I don't think we're anywhere near good enough yet and if we don't get it, we can't rely on clients to be able to do so either.

I should clarify my main reasoning behind this - defending yourself with lethal force is only acceptable when you are attacked with lethal force. The presence of a gun in a situation immediately escalates it to the lethal force level, regardless of who holds it.

No, I don't deem self-defence an immoral act. I deem it immoral to carry or store weapons with the intent of using them on people, and don't consider self-defence to be an acceptable reason for doing so.

There's something deeply wrong with a country's attitude to privacy when its people have to turn to the US for better protection.

We can accept that things that we need or use can have a dangerous side. A car is dangerous, as is a gun intended for hunting. What I really find unbelievable is that people living in a modern country would keep guns expressly for the purpose of using against other people. It isn't OK to have a gun for "defense". An implement of death increases the chance of everybody in its vicinity dying, regardless of who holds it.

Hah! I've just come up with a new trick, though I doubt I'm anywhere near the first to think of it. To protect content you could just disguise the encrypted files as DRM-protected media. It receives much better protection in most places nowadays than any other encrypted content and media files can plausibly take up a lot of space. Big brother may not hesitate to bully you but they'll think twice if they think the /..AA/ might get involved.

Who cares what the cause is? We know the greenhouse effect exists and is capable of increasing the temperature. Whether the temperature is increasing because of that or for any other reason or any combination of causes, it's still a good idea to cut back on the things we can control.

Of course there's no correlation between the daily high temperatures for a year and the CO2 emissions for that year. The whole point is that the effect is cumulative - it's easy to pump CO2 in to the atmosphere and it is naturally removed at a slower rate. It's the CO2 level that is important and the daily highs aren't really a good measure of temperature either.

It's really easy to fail to find support for a hypothesis by looking in the wrong direction.

Seas rise, drought increases, for both reasons farmland disappears and the world's already excessive population begins to starve. Of course the rich nations will probably survive, but people will experience even worse problems in the countries where life is already hard.

Atmospheric quality is a global commons and damage to it is an externality of many industries. Unless we have world-wide coordination to set standards and maintain air quality it will always be the situation that nobody will pay for it.

Tom Lehrer

LaTeX is plain text and whitespace-insensitive so it works really well with conventional software version control systems. It may be advantageous for organisation and navigation to split the text up by chapter / section, etc. It just makes it a bit easier to navigate and work with in the presence of many people changing things. That handles the tech side - now you just need good communication.