The Lib Dems, stick to their election promises? What's today's date again? 21/12/12 by any chance?

Encryption of your files is worthless when you can be arrested for failing to give up passwords as per the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. (Which would be more accurately named the Irregulation of Investigatory Powers Act, as it pretty much declares open season on those under suspicion.)

Now I see why the Brits constantly write Orwellian-dystopia-type fiction. They have every reason to be scared of their government. And there I was thinking that Labour had been overly surveilling at times. That said, I'm fairly certain that I read that BT logged calls anyway, so this simply pushes it out of legal liminality.

The main problem with new file formats is adoption. JPEGs have been the main image type online ever since the world realized that GIF sucked. Boards that allow image posting allow JPEG, social networks etc. which allow profile pictures allow JPEG, image search engines catalogue primarily JPEGs, almost every site's design utilises JPEGs. Offline it's the same; every OS which allows background images uses JPEG. Every image viewer and editor works with JPEGs. JPEGs have been an integral part of the internet for so long that I heavily doubt that any new format, superior or otherwise, will supersede them for a long time.

In the instance that this does happen, Clarke was only a year off. Stay away from Europa.

I'd noticed that Wired were increasingly anti-WL; now I know why. Thank you.

I don't see the problem with Wkileaks, frankly. All sites have downtime; people simply mock the famous ones when they are down. I hardly think that downtime is "falling into disrepair".

Think of the kind of playground "grassing" that was so common. Miss, he's stolen my jacket! Miss, he's stabbing me with his pencil! Miss, he's put my shoes in the toilet! This will be an online version of that. An eternal hell of kids thinking other kids are pedos and reporting them for the slightest offences. Facebook will become like Club Penguin. As for CEOP, it's on some sites already and the people who run it are incompetents, and widely known to be. Any kid with a brain blocks the offending person and LOICs any hate sites. Apart from anything else, Harman is a gynosupremist bitch. Feminism's one thing, incriminating every single male in existence is another. If she was male, she wouldn't even be in. Although I'm British, I hate the bias of British politics.

Finally, humans are coming close to having access to appropriate treatment for Parkinson's etc. Now hurry up and do the same in the other states, otherwise we'll end up with a Gunnmesque blackmarket for stem cell treatment!

Although I agree with Zombie Ryushu in that in principle the PP's ideals are far better than in practice, I do not agree that copyright should "go back to what it was around 130 years ago". Instead, copyright should be entirely optional. Indeed, perhaps copyright could be sold by the govt; if the creator of something wishes to copyright it, he must make a one-time payment to the govt, and perhaps they could sell the copyrighting rights for certain things to private bodies as well. That way, copyright would exist but most things would not be copyrighted and the state would keep money, and so the country would prosper.