One problem with leaving the UK is that assaults on civil liberties are happening in other Western democracies too. So instead of leaving the country, you should fight back.

One way to do this is to join the Pirate Party UK, which is focussed on defending your civil liberties from governments and corporations that want to destroy them. We're for freedom of speech (and therefore against people having their net access cut off), against ID cards, against software patents, and against the government snooping on your email and phone calls.

One objection is that campaigning doesn't achieve results. This is untrue: Pirate Party achieved 7% in the recent Swedish election, and since the Internet and issues involved are worldwide, there's no reason PPUK can't achieve similar results. In fact, we should be able to achieve an even higher vote share because:

• Every year, more people use the Internet, and they use it to do more stuff. There are an estimated 7 million fileshares in the UK today; in two years time there may be 8 million, or 10 million, or 15 million. That's more people who care about the issues we care about and the big parties ignore.
• Our support is concentrated among mainly younger voters who use the Internet as part of their native culture. Every year, another load of 18 year olds get to vote, and many will vote for us, if the Swedish example is anything to go by.
• the entertainment industry and the government aren't going to stop trying to take away our liberties. Every time they do, we'll get more coverage and support.
• Swedish PP support is skewed towards male voters. But women use the Internet just as much as men, and have as much reason to care about their liberties. Once we've cracked the problem of getting women to vote for us in equal numbers, our vote share could almost double.

I refuse to use KDE4, and still use KDE3 on my main Ubuntu box.

KDE4 is a bloated silly bunch of nonsense. If the KDE4 developers designed cars, they'd flip the positions of the accelerator and brake pedals on each model to be "innovative".

If like me you think this is absurd, let me suggest you join the Pirate Party in your country. We recently got 7.1% of the vote in Sweden, and it's likely that soon we'll be achieving this and more throughout the developed world.

In the UK, join Pirate Party UK; elsewhere look at Pirate Party International to find your national Pirate Party.

We should bring Neanderthals back to life to see how good they taste... anyone got any recipes?

If research embarrasses some politicians, it should be leaked, because it suggests that reality is not in accordance with those politicians' beliefs, and that therefore those politicians may make wrong decisions.

If research embarrasses all the politicians in Congress, it's even more important that it be leaked.

Meanwhile, Britain hopes to achieve 2 Mb/s across the country by 2012, only 500 times slower than South Korea. Go Britain!

If the tax REALLY meant that we were free to download whatever we wanted, and the RIAA / MPAA extortion tax had already been paid, we could do away with all the ISP torrent throttling / shaping, and all the frivolous lawsuits (which lets face it, we pay for anyway in terms of other taxes).

Unfortunately that's not what the government intend. This proposal is to set up a new agency that will pursue filesharers on behalf of the RIAA/MPAA MAFIAA. Why this agency needs £20 from everyone in the entire country is beyond me.

If the UK does have a broadband tax, a better idea would be for it to fund creative works such as music/film/books/software/etc and where each taxpayer decides what sort of works their tax goes to fund. I've written this proposal up in more detail:

One possible solution would involve the creation of a series of Content Compensation Funds. A CCF would be a special type of legal entity that would be authorised to spend the money raised by a broadband tax. I envisage that legislation would be needed to create the legal basis for CCFs.

A CCF might be an existing entity repurposed to the task, such as the big four music companies, performance rights organisations, and TV companies such the BBC or ITV. Maybe the Free Software Foundation could act as a CCF to fund software. Perhaps an authors' society could fund money towards authors. It may be that new organisations are created to be CCFs. I envisage that there might be between 20 and 100 CCFs.

A CCF would be authorised to spend its budget funding content creators either for works that've already been created (the "funding post creation" model) or commissioning new works to be created (the "funding pre creation" model).

The clever bit is how the broadband tax would be distributed among CCFs. Everyone with broadband would be required to pay a monthly broadband tax. This might be a fixed amount for everyone (e.g. £5 a month) or it might vary according to the size of the broadband bill or the speed of connection. But either way, each taxpayer would decide which CCF or CCFs their payment goes to.

So Alice who likes music might channel 100% of her payment to a music-based CCF. Bob, who likes TV programmes and computer games, may channel 50% of his payment to an audiovisual CCF and 50% to a games software CCF. And Carol, who likes reading SF, may channel her payment to a science fiction CCF that commissions new science fiction works (which may be books, films, etc).

It's often said, particularly in the USA, that the newspaper industry is dying. That may be true of newpapers printed on dead trees, but there's still an important role in organisations that gather news. One can imagine newspaper CCFs (perhaps based on existing newspapers) that perform this role. They'll be web based, and their output won't be restricted to text and still pictures.

Because there will be lots of money in the system (if 15 million broadband subscribers each pay £5 a month, that's £900 million a year) there is the potential for fraud and waste. The "payer decides" system minimises that: if a CCF gets a reputation for being corrupt or for wasting most of its income, its income stream will quickly dry up. (Payers will be able to easily change the allocation of their payment every month via an Internet-based system). In this way CCFs will be responsive to market forces.

There would need to be other safeguards against people trying to game the system. For example a CCF might offer to give a taxpayer a reward of £2.50 for every £5 channeled their way. Any such inducement would have to be illegal. More broadly, a detailed record of a CCF's accounts should be public and on the web (because essentially all large transactions are done electronically, this could be done without extra administrative cost, because it would be built into the accounts software the CCF uses). If a CCF knows their dealings are public, they will be less willing to commit fraud, and more likely to be caught if they do.

Another safeguard against fraud is that all CCFs would be monitored by the relevant government department. To set up a CCF one would have to pass various requirements. They shouldn't be enormously difficult, but nor should they be absolutely trivial. The more CCFs, the better, because it gives payers more choice in where to channel their broadband tax, and makes CCFs work harder in attracting payers' money. But also the more CCFs, the worse, because the more of them that there are, the harder they'll be to regulate; in the eaxtreme case if everyone is allowed to set up a CCF what's to stop Alice setting up one and paying her £5 a month to it? Or if that's banned, Alice and Bob could do a deal where they each pay into each other's CCF. Where to draw the line between between too easy creation of a CCF and too difficult is something that would have to be determined by trial and error.