Only in Nevada

You must hand it to them - they walk their libetarianism like they talk it.

They have decriminalised marijuana, legalised prostitution and gambling. It's also home to gun ownership laws which stop just shy of allowing juveniles to pack tactical nuclear weapons.

Now driverless cars - excellent!

It's also one of the States with the lowest population density. Perhaps it's just as well.

Still it's high on my list for a fun holiday. See you at the Burning Man maybe.

No gravity well - but asteroids are moving targets

To exploit asteroid resources wouldn't one have to bring the asteroid into Earth orbit and/or mount the mining gear etc. on the asteroid and fire the products back at Earth?

Either of those would be technically (and energetically) challenging..... I can't see the economics squaring up on this in any practical timeframe.

Let's hope they do btter than the NHS

CSC have taken billions from the NHS in both real money and opportunity cost ...

http://www.ehi.co.uk/news/EHI/7666/csc-and-dh-talks-will-drag-on-to-june

Like Accenture they were seduced by iSoft in the procurement stages... that worked out really well

http://www.ehi.co.uk/news/EHI/7688/isoft-trial-told-of-%27forgery-kit%27

Only CSC were so impressed they subsequently bought the company....

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240105223/CSC-closes-acquisition-of-iSoft-ahead-of-NHS-IT-contract-renegotiations

There is however b*****r all to choose between the big management consultancies.

Basically IMO - if the answer is BT/Accenture/CSC/HP/Capita/etc - you're asking the wrong question. Unless the question is "how do I advance my personal PHB career from a undeserved six figure salary in the upper tier of the Public Sector into seven+."

Did Browsium realise..

.. that by winning a UK Gov contract they are thereby obliged to give highly paid jobs for an unending stream of failed ministers and clueless senior civil servants.

But how many 1980's papers were wrong?

There are large numbers of predictive models and a relatively small range of plausible outcomes (i.e. a trend of at most a few degrees C either way over decades or nothing). Inevitably, in retrospect, some are bound to have been 'right' whether their model was valid or not.

[No axe to grind here either way. Personal opinion is that C02 is smoke not the fire. If we could seal the excess CO2 in a box and magic it away we still have to address f*****g the planet with over-populatation, pollution, over-exploitation, deforestation etc.]

re: Tor, PGP, VPN etc.

So everyone will be using these then?

No they won't be, because the use of encryption etc must inevitably be made a criminal offence also.

Won't happen eh? It's already an offence not to know the password any encrypted file (or maybe just a file containing random data) found on your computer.

Whoever you vote for, Sir Humphrey always gets in.

Wot - no ribbon?

Be thankful for great mercy.

No future for RDBMS in the Cloud?

I think that would imply a major limitation of the Cloud rather than RDBMS.

Maybe it's not because GP's are crap...

Perhaps GPs oppose it because they realise that iGimmicks aren't what keep people out of hospital.

At least not until they can get people out of bed, give them their medicines, wipe a**es and share a cup of tea with them.

Also - just like in hospitals - each gizmo will raise false alarms, run flat, fall off the patient etc n times per day. Only instead of the nurse walking ten feet down a ward to switch the thing off - he has to drive out to the patient's house.

Still - offering glitzy high tech but futile NHS services gives great press releases to politicians. Plus we'll need to appoint more NHS admindroids to support them and pay management consultancies to roll them out. So trebles all round eh?

Smart TV=PC?

A desktop PC is smarter than any consumer TV is likely to be.

Am I the only person in the World who doesn't bother with a "TV" per se at all any more? TV cards and DVD playback on PCs has been around since the 90's.

Caveat - small apartment renders massive flatscreen pointless - albeit that doesn't stop most people in our neighborhood squatting 20 inches from their 80 inch status symbols.

Coercion not hacking the main threat

For non-celebs IMO the main security and confidentiality risk faced by patients is being forced, cajoled or fooled into disclosing records to people who do not have their best interests at heart.

Dodgy employer - "If you keep throwing sickies you're going to have to prove you're really sick."

Jealous partner - "If you really loved me you'd show me your medical record"

Bullying parent - "You're on the pill you little sl*t. If not show me your medical records"

Impatient heir [How much bloody longer has granny got?] "Granny - we need your medical record login or you won't get your pension"

Electronic voting over the web is a crap concept for the same reason: only we never hear it!

Ethernet...

No problem. Showing my age I guess.

Mine's the one with the Cat 5 cable in the pocket

You can't buy publicity like this.....

.. or maybe you can.

Has no one heard of product placement?

The OPEC in the room

Perhaps the European Union should look into

1. something important

2. something not beyond living memory

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries for example. Won't happen of course - but the fine could bail out the PIGS twenty times over.

Only half a billion flushed? Luxury!

NHS National program for IT - 6 billion plus in. No sniff of cancellation and failing for all the same reaons.

Fantasy specifications drawn up by clueless apparatchiks to satisfy the vanity of their political masters. Cue cynical management consultancies - contracts go to cheapest bidders - inevitably the ones with the least experience. Dishonest second tier vapourware suppliers duly signed up. Zero engagement with end users. Spin doctors promise more as the delivery dates slip.

Pockets duly lined. Responsible parties move on to bigger and better jobs. And people complain about bankers. Half a dozen fewer of these projects and there would be no deficit :-(

Hydrocarbons <> Fossil fuels

Battery power is not the only 'marginal' becoming more palatable as fossil fuel prices go up.

It will soon be cheaper to run your diesel on organic extra virgin olive oil than paying up at the forecourt.

I'd bet on alternative hydrocarbon sources becoming viable ahead of battery power.

Can anyone find anything definitive on the theoretical limits of battery storage?

Yes - I have Googled it and become lost in a storm of venture capital seeking guff and <50% improvement hopes/claims where >500% is plainly needed.

This is the best I have done so far

http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/kurt-zenz-house/the-limits-of-energy-storage-technology

Re: The Bank of England has a duty to keep inflation to 2 per cent a year

In case no one has noticed, inflation indices are running at around 5%, interest rates on savings are being held down and we've printed GBP 200 BN plus in the past two years.

The new policy is to inflate away government debts (by/while) devaluing pensions and savings.

One might expect some debate about the wisdom of this policy - but it seems no politician is owning up to this being what is happening. There is cross party consensus to conceal this and the media by and large support the conspiracy of silence.

The Bank Of England is patently not independent of the Government of the day - it held interest rates artificially low in the noughties so as to support Gordon Brown's profligate spending (e.g. the illusion of 'cheap' PFI schemes), fuel the housing price bubble and consequent 'feel good' factor. They had the responsibility to (and could have) headed off the banking crisis by earlier intervention.

If we're lucky (and the UK doesn't beome the next Argentina, Zimbabwe or Weimar Republic) we shall be paying for that political short termism for the next twenty years.

In (partial) defence of M$

Reading the original article perhaps a wish to [ahem] integrate user's experience across the entire MS estate (e.g. single login to multiple Microsoft sites etc.) led to frustration with conventional browser cookie limitations....

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6715

Thinking about the security and privacy implications, telling users about these, opt outs etc. never happened.

No excuse - but an explanation other than white cat stroking.

Ah the irony

NewsCorp presumably failed to recognise that monetizing social media depends on (ab)using the confidential personal data of lusers.

Clarke != Nu-Labour

Sorry I'd take this over Nu-Labour. Clarke is still on the side of 'all your data are belong to us' ...

>Plans to tighten the access to data for law enforcement agencies could affect the way Governments tackle terrorism and serious crime, he warned.<

However that seems a more moderate position than "we need to store everything you read, write or say on a big database or Osama Bin Crackdealer will eat your babies"

Another significant difference is that Nu-Labour would have fought for instituting the most-draconian and intrusive regulations uniformly EU wide. So this is even better news if you don't live in the UK.

Armageddon?

These look too big for Bruce Willis to deflect if one floats our way.

Oh the humanity!

Tim Berner-Lee's free lunch

It may be "more expensive to store [data] somewhere private" if all you're doing is sticking say an Oracle dump file somewhere on disc.

However to actually publish data in usable form one has to re-format it. It will also need to be sliced and diced in ways one would not if it were just sitting on your local database. It also needs version control and/or updates too. Above all it must be documented.

Then you need to set up a library and indexing system. (Google isn't going to help much with a few thousand gigabytes of delimited text files sitting on your Open.Gov FTP site).

Not looking nearly so simple or cheap now is it?

TBL is probably used to hordes of eager undergrads and PhD wallahs doing this for free in his World. Well the Civil Service isn't cheap labour and probably can't, aren't or won't be doing it anyway.

So here's another rich vein to be tapped by the usual suspect management consultancy vampires. I'd like to be a bit more certain what benefit will accrue beyond another Government PR stunt.

PDS

PDS is the personal demographics 'service' - name, address, DOB, GP registration etc.

PDS more or less works and contains the data of every patient registered with the NHS (GP or hospital). The main problem from an accuracy viewpoint is that many people will be multiply registered.

There is no PDS "opt out."

The personal demographics service is totally separate from the Summary Care Record. (Fewer than 10% of patients have the latter).

Other cooling options

1. Scoop up sea water using a bucket dangling underneath a helicopter

2. Empty bucket in general vicinity of laptop

South Korean spammer resistance to strike back?

Given the endless barrage from South Korean botnets of our websites with SQL injection attempts, comment spam, scraping, e-mail harvesting and the like, they are capable of mounting a major counter-strike if so inclined.

But did she check her tampons?

OK I was leaving anyway

re: The wave of privatisation

>>Either the NHS survives on similar budgets in which case stick with a public NHS, or private businesses increase costs thereby ensuring higher taxes or additional outgoings on medical insurance.<<

I disagree.

The drive towards 'consumerism' and away from paternalism in the NHS has led to it becoming unsustainable.

The 'worried well' want their slices, so crowd pleasing gimmicks like NHS Direct proliferate; sexy day case surgery for all the simple stuff expands etc. Meanwhile the elderly, disadvantaged, chronically sick, mentally ill etc go to the the back of the queue. Who cares? They don't vote anyway.

No UK government ever had the guts to raise the issue of rationing directly. They can't tell middle England that emergency appointments for sniffles, free nips and tucks, infertility treatment etc aren't in the package. So waiting lists, post-code lotteries etc ARE rationing by another name.

That is the reason the middle classes will need private insurance within the decade.

WTF indeed

"Still even at £600 the iPad is expensive given it's essentially just a phone minus the phone and the camera."

FFS this webpad has a grown up OS, a camera, a 32gb SSD and {gasp} a USB port even.

The big question - is the OS too grown up for it? But if this thing can manage any kind of performance it's not leaving Apple any room for complacency.

In fairness to Vodafone (and Egypt)...

Blah blah corrupt regime. Blah blah immoral company ...

How long would it take Downing Street to shut down communication services under similar circumstances in the UK?

I'd wager we were within a few hours of Blair making that call in the Fuel Protests of 2000 for example.

Paranoid

Black Sabbath

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Black_Sabbath_-_Paranoid.jpg

The bad, the ugly, the bad and the ugly?

Rarely in the field of human conflict can such an unappealing set of combatants have entered the same ring. In no particular order...

Murdoch Empire

Grauniad

Divers crooked governments

Assange

At a pinch I'd still back the underdingo - but wish rather they would all just annihilate each other in a puff of hadrons.

And this week on Blue Peter..

.. we'll be fixing the Space Shuttle's fuel tanks with sticky back plastic.

Nu-Labour's enduring legacy

Whoever you vote for the floating voter focus group always gets in.

If you're not paraoid they will get you

Who'd have thought that a proxy service (paid or unpaid) could monitor and/or tamper with the data it forwards? Colour me amazed.

The default assumption must be that any proxy server (especially an anonymising proxy) is a honeypot: if not directly run by LEA or criminals then at least with a hotline to (or hackable by) them.

The best one can expect is your information will be sold on to 'benign' marketing companies.

More thought crime

We confiscated your PC but found no presidental candidate e-mails, files which might be encrypted or Tony the Tiger mpgs.

However we might have found these if you hadn't run routine maintenance on your PC.

Remember not to pick up the soap sonny.

Flowerpot?!

Flowerpots would be top of my list of cultural artifacts shared between human and dolphin.

Paris? Maybe one of her home movies next.

Upgrade apathy

Am I the only one that greets browser upgrades with as much enthusiasm as most receive a new Windows OS?

I am plainly unique in not needing animated fairies gambolling in high-res along my themed toolbars. Neither do I run weather prediction models coded in JavaScript.

I stick with Firefox for the plugins. It's done pretty much everything I want fine since early 2.n

Paris - because she upgrades boyfriends at roughly the same frequency. Each time they're always bigger and sometimes dumber. Otherwise you can't tell the bloody difference.