It's semantics really. IUPAC woul say that they are the lanthanides plus yttrium and scandium. I've encountered the term being used more generally (i.e. by non-chemists) to mean anything that's 'down-there' on the periodic table.

I think technically the analogy would be "three different kings of road vehicles called automobiles" (you might think the actinides also counted as rare earths) - but the substantive point that the language is clunky still holds.

This doesn't seem such a huge advance - we've been making elemental maps in STEMs for ages and combining several in false colour images for like also ages. As far as I can tell the new thing is that they're doing this by actually imaging selected portions of an electron energy loss spectra (rather than just recording the spectra point-wise) - I guess this makes it slightly faster to generate the image - but there's not really any new science in this.

So what's the bets that GCHQ is busy helping Apple close all the holes that the FBI is busy using to hack into iPhones....?

Yes well, you'll be asking for carbon free diamonds next I suppose.

No, but it is a unit of electrical charge - and since it's what bateries are conventionally quoted in, it's not a completely stupid thing for a company to quote when announcing a new battery product.
Not knowing the output voltage is not really an issue since you can always stack the cells up in series if they don't give you enough emf - just like you do with pretty much anything that takes more than one AA size battery!

The problem is that if you don't give lots of people the opportunity to find out if they can program, then you tend to miss lots of the fraction that could program to a reasonable degree. People like me in their 40's grew up with 8bit micros and a large fraction of us were exposed to programming - both at school and for many at home (even if that mean typing long listings of BASIC out of magazines and cursing because there was a misprint that resulted in lots of syntax errors). That sort of elementary introduction to programming has gotton lost - now I teach programming to Physics undergraduates and only a tiny minority come to us with even a rudimentary understanding of what programming is about.
The difficulty the government has is that it is easy to make policy and announcements - actually delivering it is rather more complex....

If a skill set is sufficiently rare then it's not very cost-effective to advertise for it on the open market - but that doesn't necessarily mean it's not a very valuable skill set.

So, given a reasonably small country with a population relatively well concentrated into population centres and good connectivity, turnout for voting does not seem to be strongly limited by access to polls.... yes, well, perhaps the solution is not addressing the real problem ?

This is all true, and in particular, most Universities in my experience (based on a representative sample of directors of research, research support IT types and tame academics like myself at research intensive UK Universities) are incredibly bad at managing the inter-departmental billing. In my institution even for the big-ticket items like electron microscope, the technical support people spend more time chasing down bills than actually supporting users on the kit. Any cost-benefit analysis conducted by people who actually known how a lab works quickly shows the whole thing to be a complete waste of time and money.

Even for catching the idiot users who've broken something it can be difficult to make it pay. So you catch gormless post-doc whose just crashed a microscope stage into a sensitve detector, shorted out the HT and blown several boards in the back of the instrument. What happens - the HR people won't let you recover the costs from the salary (on the grounds that the post-doc would be destitute), the PI whose post-doc it was will refuse to pay because they've not been allowed to factor a charge for gormless post-docs into their grant application. Neither the host department nor the user's department will pay and will dispute liability (on the grounds that your system should have been interlocked against gormless users). You can ban said gormless post-doc from using the instrument again, but that's rather academic as right now nobody can use it all.

In more industrial/manufacturing evironments one can lock down the processes which reduces this sort of mayhem, but in academic research environments that's much harder. If you can keep the userbase small (10 users on any bit of kit) you can jsut about manage to sport the gormless ones before they do damafe, but when you go to larger userbases it just gets to be a hard problem.

I think you'll find that the UK Government (or GCHQ at least) are responsible for more than their fair share of the spying. There's been pretty much a free flow of traffic between GCHQ and the NSA by all accounts.

I'll stick with the rattling MS's cage to see if some discounts shake loose theory. I very much doubt the cost of retraining and stripping out customised solutions built on top of MS Office will be less than the savings moving to Open Source.

What is more interesting is the Cabinet Office banning (excpet under 'expcetional' circumstances) all IT projects billing more than £100M - in order to stop them being locked into a few big integrators. You never know, perhaps they'll start delivering IT projects that are semi-functional and only a factor two over budget - that would be a real improvement.

\pedantry{In Asimov's fictional universe the three laws were a fundamental consequence of the underlying mathematics of the design of the robot 'brains' rather than simply a result of legislation.} but that doesn't change the fundamental point.

I think it's easy to be too hard on Asimov - one has to remember that in the era in which he concieved the three laws, computer science was still very much in its infancy and the prospect of minaturising computer processing power to the point that a freely mobile device could make autonomour decisions about anything was, well, science fiction. The fact that the laws don't actually work is not surprising at all. The fact that Government agencies (such as EPSRC) and serious academics feels the need to point this out is perhaps more so.

And in most juristictions you could sue them for wrongful dismissal - but most places you'd only be able to claim the 2 weeks worth of wages in compensation which is probably not worth the hassle. You might be able to get something for the damage of having been 'fired' on your future prospects, but I suspect that would require relevant case law to get anywhere. Still it's a cheapskate and mean spirited employer who tries it on just to save a couple of weeks of pay bill.

This is trivially not true.

Not owning a gun now does not imply never having owned a gun and neither statements imply not knowing how they work let alone the even more general statement about knowing nothering about guns.

I suspect the number of people who know nothing about guns (at least counting those people who would qualify to vote in most democracies if they were citizens) is very small. If you want to make an argument that those proposing such legislation lack sufficient knwledge of the subject to do so competantly then that's just fine but making wild statements that are trivial to disprove doesn't exactly lend credibility.

I suspect that's 30500 people who have done a CS degree ever, not just the ones who graduated last year. CS is a small and relatively low status degree in the UK compared to the US, Canada, Germany... Most of the folk working in IT will have non-CS degrees, primarily science, technology, engineering and maths degrees. But the UK doesn't actually graduate enough of them either to fill the demand for science and tech jons one would expect to have when the economy wasn't being trashed. Importing workers is a little tricky right now given the Government has made a big thing about cutting immigration below 100,000 (and yes, that is crazy when you have unfilled high-tech jobs).