...but not necessarily humanity. While I agree that the solution to global warming can only come from improved technology and not from somehow persuading everyone to huddle in caves eating locally-grown lentils, I'm a bit wary over the author's optimism.

Its a classic game theory square - Global Warming Catastrophe True / False versus Prepared True / False. The four cases are True / True, in which case we've got a chance of fixing the problems before they become too severe, False / True, in which case we've wasted a good amount of money, True / False, in which case we have to do panic research and implementation in a very short time (which is usually ruinously expensive and not very good) and False / False, in which case most people are happy. For me, the risk of massive numbers of lives lost in the True / False situation (eg coastal cities flooding) outweighs the concern about money possibly spent needlessly.

Of course, the long term solution of getting into space via elevator / active structures like fountains / bolas) and performing most of the really nasty industries (metal refining and smelting, energy generation, some forms of manufacturing) helpfully above the atmosphere would be nice. A man can dream!

Delegating control?

If you wrote a web spider that followed HTTP (and being a responsible person, it would follow standards eg robots.txt) I suspect that pointing at Google would be a fairly good defence...

Well, like throwing bloody fish in the water draws away the sharks anyway - if the new prey kills the shark you dont have to worry :)

The tiers system is one of the best - I only have 3 tiers at the moment (Banking/Financial, Email/Personal, Forums/Etc and a semi-4th of disposable) but if I ever really catch on to the whole social networking privacy disaster, I'll add a tier between E/P and Forums (social networks tend to accumulate personal info, but not at the same rate as email).

B/F has a long, semi-random password that is changed often (sub-weekly).

E/P has a long, semi random password that are changed less often (weekly-monthly).

Forums has a random choice from 3 passwords, with FF password manager remembering which one I used. If I reinstall, most sites give you 3 choices, so security isn't exactly assured, but it gives a crooked forum op a 2/3 chance of failure on a different board that he knows I am using. Its changed rarely, but has been changed several times (average is probably under yearly, but only just).

As illustrated by this article, you can use trusted accounts to extract money from other members of the community. However, I suspect most forum members aren't sufficiently friendly to part with $3500 to a random member! (I hope so, anyway - if you know any forums where this isn't true, please contact my colleague DR MASABA HIRATA, who has a business offer for these TRUSTWORTHY people - his email address is available in your spam folder).

Not the UK - immigrate here and we'll take your DNA, your retina, fingerprints, hell, we might just get you to roll over in a puddle of ink then roll on this bit of paper - it might be necessary later!

Oh, sorry, you're emigrating from the USA? I meant, of course, rose retals at Heathrow and an invitation to No10. Sorry.

Well, as long as you aren't worshipping the wrong god of course (hint: if your god is Money, thats fine; if it is a God with a Capital G and a complex about other deities, fine - don't consider declaring the 3rd religion of the Book unless you have ample supplies of KY and an attractive customs agent).

Oh, and if you make it through customs without giving the gov your soul, wait until you drop a bit of litter...

"GNU/Linux does a far superior job of hardware drivers"

"I can install any linux distro and have a good chance of having working drivers for most hardware."

All I can say is that you are very lucky - I've had a go at installing two distros recently, both of which failed due to poor driver support (Fedora and Ubuntu). My RAID card doesn't function with any kernel higher than 2.4 (cheers, Hitachi!), and installation of the ATI drivers is hardly as userfriendly as Windows.

"Do you need driver disks or CDs Ashley for windows?"

Occasionally, yes. And when I do, I pick up the driver disk and 5 mins of pointing and clicking and a reboot later, the hardware Just Works. If the hardware is sufficiently new or just something Linux doesn't recognise, getting it working is a nightmare.

Yes, the manufacturers of the hardware are to blame. Does having someone to blame make the pain go away? No. Go convince the manufacturers to support your toy, or stop whining about Windows driver installation.

Windows - the Ow starts Now!

Linux - get back to us sometime around 2015 - we'll have it working by then.

See? Windows is good for productivity - you can have your virus outbreak, help knock Estonia offline, lose all your data, restore from tape and be over it before you've got it working on your Linux machines :D

I guess I'll have to find a new excuse for why I can't remember last nights curry then!

Chris - the drums *diameter* is 0.7m - the distance across the drum. The cable would normally be wrapped around the drum, so we use 2*pi*r = pi * diameter to work out the length of cable reeled per revolution.

Given its a GCSE question, the fact that this works out at around 2.2m therefore each trip in the lift takes pretty much exactly 1 minute acts as a bit of a confirmation.

7 mins was what I got too (GCSE maths 1998, grade A*, but back from a pub lunch).

The only methods of heat transfer are convection, conduction and radiation. Conduction - well, there isn't anything cold touching the spacecraft (unless they are really unlucky with a comet!). Convection involves the bulk movement of a fluid, so again not useful, which leaves radiation - which is not that easy to maximise (better call Panorama!)

Nik,

1. Why not use a Swiss-like system in which you are not eligable for any benefits of being a citizen for a certain period of time? If you can survive with no benefits apart from the NHS for a few years, I'd suggest you are a pretty good citizen.

2. No argument form me - get the troops out, and ideally jail Blair for sending our troops to die for a lie.

3. The reason we don't have public consultations is because nothing would get done - for any proposal, you can find someone who would disagree. Instead, get the experts together and give them a free rein to improve stuff.

4. The NHS has a load more money poured into it. It doesn't need more. It needs managers who know what they are doing, processes that work (look at the private sector for inspiration) and a change of culture away from waiting lists and towards caring for people.

5. Do you mean renationalise the infrastructure or the operating companies? Both? British Rail wasn't exactly a utopian paradise.

6. Pride in our nation? I think you realise why there isn't pride in our nation - internally we have dodgy healthcare, lousy transport and an unaccountable government. Externally we have illegal wars, pushing biometric scanning for everyone through Europe, data retention for years at ISPs expense and the most heavily surveilled (is that a word? It should be) population in the world. Pride?

7. Homes and families are the business of the family in my opinion. The government should not be interfering in my home life, thank you very much.

8. I like the "None" option, but I'd expand it - if "None" gets more votes than the rest of the candidates, the voting should be reopened with new candidates until someone acceptable is presented.

9. Power generation isn't done by the government - its done by private companies. If you want green power, there are several providers who use only renewable energy (or use carbon offsetting).

10. Education, Education, education. That was the pledge, just before they introduced £12k of fees to do a course at uni.

I'll give you back your soap box now.

With the Internet becoming 99% spam, fake blogs and link sites, I think we'll end up giving up the pseudoanonymity of the Web for a system of authenticated users, possibly with a sort of reverse walled garden - a "walled chaos", where the things that require anonymity can go on (basically, posting information that someone somewhere doesn't want to be posted).

In the end, what we need isn't more services that give us an unrealistic sense of anonymity. We need a strict framework detailing what info a company can collect, and how it can be used, and how it can be displayed to and amended by the end user (including deletion of the data held). We need to stop trying to make individual threats to privacy illegal, and make privacy invasion as a whole regulated.

Wow, an advanced weapons research lab computer system thats still experimental - thats just what I want my tax money to fund. Hell, I'd rather they spent the money providing coke to journos - at least the news would be more interesting. Saying that, journos seem to do alright themselves...

Does the govermnet spend so much time in its own fantasy world that it can't work out what is real?

If we are banning cartoons because they influence people in the real world, the first step has to be getting rid of Tom & Jerry, Road Runner and Wacky Races cartoons - extreme violence, nudity (yes, its a cat and mouse - remember that when they go after the furries!) and they are being watched by kids! ("the defendent, Chuck Norris, claims not to know how old the Road Runner is, or indeed why he drew a dangerous predator stalking the Road Runner, licking his lips, on multiple occasions")