I can understand why the fresh out of Uni grads failed horribly; but it really depends on what you're looking at hiring those grads into. I've spent just over a year in a "grad scheme" (they called it that, but they'd never hired grads before and it wasn't really a scheme). But the point was that they were willing to hire people that still needed rounding off at the edges and training in the right domain, like you were after C/C++. With the right level of mostly hands off training, a decent bit of pairing and solid project experience the 2 grads they hired are paying off massively.

My C/C++ is pretty rusty simply because I've not had to do a load of work in it. That doesn't mean that I can't work with them, we did some fairly beefy stuff in C++ during the degree, it's just with the other 2 year's of non C++ oriented dev it falls by the wayside. Obviously if i was going for a properly advertised role I'd beef up my knowledge on pointers again, they're always a bit of a pain just because of the sheer experience factor. The EE grads often have the C/C++ experience but won't have ventured further in their degrees.

I thought I'd add the caveat that whilst it's quite common in Europe it's highly unusual in the UK, with only a few instances of a coalition government forming and even fewer where it has actually lasted a substantial period of time.

No idea whether the current one is going to ride the next year's worth of pain and come out the other side or not.

Whilst the crux of your argument is correct, that's not completely true. Thousands of these cameras are going to be in mainline rail stations, underground stations and plenty of other high-risk areas like the West End, Oxford street etc. Granted, we're still talking a few square miles in the centre of London, but no-one really talks about the suburbs much with these statistics.

Whilst the Dome was a huge waste of taxpayer's money the London Eye is a profitable private enterprise.

Yes, but Sky are also the major premium TV and content provider. Programmes broadcast on Freeview (free OTA digital terrestrial) are effectively free whereas you need to pay for Sky's TV, content and services. If people torrent programmes the biggest loser is Sky as you're less likely to subscribe, then the advertisers on commercial Freeview channels and the BBC who lose long-term DVD sales. If I can torrent a Sky-only show like House why would I be swayed to pay Sky £20/month for House with adverts?

Sky have an active interest in preventing people from torrenting, whereas most other ISPs are just ISPs and therefore have very little interest in restricting their customers. Virgin Media are another TV/ISP company and I remember them being fairly pro DEA too.

I'll admit I haven't gone through Wikileaks, although these leaks don't specifically affect/interest me there are others where I might be interested.

For example, The Telegraph got the UK expenses list and they happened to publish the (partially redacted) data, similar to Wikileaks. I took this as an opportunity to research my own MP's ethics. This was actually an unusual case where the whole leak was published, although they actually used crowdsourcing to try and analyse the data!

This particular leak is a bit more awkward for someone to pick through, it's hundreds of thousands of documents. But, over time, I do believe that it will be gone through. If nothing else, this does help reduce the ability for a reporter to take something completely out of context as the context can be checked. How many times have you seen someone accused say "it was taken out of context" and from there are unable to make any conclusions as the full context is never released? Have they just brushed it off or was it misconstrued?

Exactly, instead it will go back to the newspapers/TV news as being the main avenue for releasing leaked information. Once they get their hands on it there's no knowing what they'll do to it in the process of editorialising it and publishing their POV on the incident.

With wikileaks you are able to see the original documents, so even though there may be bias added to some of their reporting (many complained about the shortened & commentated video of the helicopter attack), the original source is also available.

I think the other important difference was that during WWI and WWII we were in "total war" with quite literally all resources being devoted to winning the war (or at least Europe was). In times like that, with daily bombardments by the enemy, censorship and the associated positive propaganda is quite important.

However this "War on Terror" hardly affects anyone back home, it's not a vital war by any definition for those that are fighting it now and we should be questioning whether it's valid to be there. In which case, censorship really isn't a good place to be.

I was trying to make that point, maybe it wasn't clear as some people don't want it to breed compromise.

Breeding compromise is good!

I voted for them but see the evisceration coming the other way (or probably both ways). The country's in quite a bit of shit with its debt and we need to make some nasty cuts.

If they side with Labour they won't have an outright majority and need a coalition of a load of smaller parties. You can't include the nationalist parties because they will "fight for Wales and Scotland", or summing up the SNP's party political, tell Westminister to fuck off if they suggest any cuts in Scotland. The only thing this loose coalition will be able to do is wangle through a vote on PR before collapsing in a massive heap in a very early election.

In the meantime, the markets will decide this barmy coalition of parties won't be able to control the deficit at all, certainly not in the long term. They'll destroy our credit-worthiness and increase the cost of borrowing / require us to print money to keep going in the way this coalition will want. In doing so they'll destroy the country and no-one will vote for the Lib Dems for being so stupid to put their "selfish" demands for PR above anything else.

Now this would be very different if Labour and Lib Dems had enough seats between them for the outright majority. They could actually form a stable coalition, have a fair amount of confidence and get PR through all at the same time. The problem is, the numbers don't add up.

Except multi-party politics breeds compromise. If another party comes along promising most of what you do but without the crazy you'll start to lose votes to them. The Lib Dems are left-of-centre, but are still in the middle, whereas Labour are on the left.

The 65% bitching about the 35% being in power are probably less disgruntled than the 48% bitching about the 52% in the US, because each side over there is so polar.

I agree, although i do need to read into all the systems properly.

The Lib Dems want something more proportional and call for PR, but I do fear the removal of the constituency link. The fact that a person represents ~70k people in a local area is a good thing and provides for accountability. If we remove this you could end up with some very unpopular people put at the top of each party's list resulting in them never being removed from power.

With the constituency link they would need to be able to find anywhere that would actually take them!

I think will is a bit of a strong word, however in the current example the Conservative party represent the one with the most stringent cuts proposed and the others may disagree enough to vote against it.

However the Conservative party is only 20 seats short, so they just need 20 people out of the other 344 to agree with them. It's called running a minority government, and depending on how much of a minority you are it may simply fall apart.

I don't get this argument. As soon as it becomes actively required, I don't see what would ever stop the US from using their nuclear weapons. You've spent hundreds of Billions on your nuclear arsenal and aren't going to be limited by a fancy piece of paper with a presidential stamp on it.

When was the US likely to use their nukes on any country that attacked them via conventional means anyway? As most people have pointed out, this is a nice PR stunt, but you've reiterated the sort-of known stance of the US since the end of the cold war, we've got nukes but we don't really want to use them.

Not only that, we knew that those were going to become obseleted as soon as the Conservatives or Liberal Democrats come into power. It was only the Labour party that wanted ID cards and it's (one of many) reasons i don't want them to win the next election.