Codecs designed for conversation are limited in how much they can compress because they can't use as much correlation over a long period - to avoid long latencies. The Intelligence agencies have probably designed their own compression algorithm focussed on offline storage. My guess at the reasons that low-bitrate codecs are export controlled are 1) submarines and 2) covert channels.

Feel free to pay to have that done. the algorithmic versions (PESQ, POLQA) are proprietary, and doing it with real people is also pretty expensive.

We don't need the google translate version, there is an official one: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/george-church-explains-how-dna-will-be-construction-material-of-the-future-a-877634.html

Yes, EXCEPT it's not just the servers' IPv6 connectivity that has to be reliable - the clients has to as well.

Knuth says no to email. You think that means his views should be discounted as well?

Strachey was also the lead programmer behind the programming language CPL, the great-grandfather of C (via BCPL and B). CPL was too ambitious and was never completely implemented - it tried to do everything; a bit like Perl 6 really.

The overview paper:http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/6/2/134 is quite interesting; sadly it is now behind a pay-wall. There are some features of the language, such as type inference, which have not become common until recently. It also has some obvious poor decisions with hindsight - the same character starts and ends blocks; all lower case letters are single-character variable names; multiple-character variable names must be capitalised (this is done to allow implicit multiplication, ie, xyz=x*y*z). I suspect it could be implemented without huge difficulty with modern tools. Unfortunately, the full definition was never published, and only exists in a few copies of 'The CPL Working papers' archived in university libraries. Perhaps one day google will scan it.

No, this is a common mistake.

There are two councils, one ('the European Council' consisting of the heads of state, which meets rarely. The other, the 'Council of the EU' consisting of representatives of the national governments 'with ministerial authority', is in session for long periods and is part of the EU legislature. This is who we are discussing; they modified this legislation. I believe they should be directly elected. This does not require changing anything to do with how the heads of state are elected.

Demand that your countries council representative be directly elected. This exactly how the US Senate became democratic early last century: Campaigns in Oregon and Nevada forced those states to elect their Senators, and once they had, the rest had eventually to follow suit.

Once a large EU member or a few small ones do this, the same will happen in the EU.

Another reason why this is the best way to reform the EU is that doing it this way does not threaten further integration: the representative would be a creature of national law, not EU law. A 'Top down' reform like the proposed constitution is always difficult because raises the spectre of further integration, but this would not require a change to the treaties.