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Someone once asked G.K. Chesterton what book he’d most like to have on a desert island.

He answered, “Thomas’s Guide to Practical Shipbuilding.”

“It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in five years.”

– John von Neumann, 1949

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Officers were last night accused of abusing their powers after it emerged just one per cent of around 124,000 “suspects” targeted in 2007/08 were arrested – and only a fraction of those were for terrorism related offences.

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Members of the public were stopped and questioned by officers more than 2.3 million times last year after a rise of 26 per cent.

It is the equivalent of one in every 20 people being stopped, although that proportion plummets to one in ten for the black population.

Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, said: “People will be highly suspicious about the scale of stop and search under terror laws.

“This will only serve to reinforce the view that many anti-terror powers are being used for unrelated purposes.”

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As the World Health Organization raised its infectious disease alert level Wednesday and health officials confirmed the first death linked to swine flu inside U.S. borders, scientists studying the virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza — at least in its current form — isn’t shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics.

In fact, the current outbreak of the H1N1 virus, which emerged in San Diego and southern Mexico late last month, may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu outbreaks that occur each winter without much fanfare.

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Mr Curran said that the Microsoft Windows team had been poring over every aspect of the operating system to make improvements.

“We were able to shave 400 milliseconds off the shutdown time by slightly trimming the WAV file shutdown music.

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The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.

My guess is they’re not being taught the words of Jesus when they’re in church.

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There was a lot of controversy over the past few months concerning an attempt to change copyright law in New Zealand. After tremendous uproar over the fact that the law (a version of three strikes) basically would declare people guilty based on accusations, rather than proof or conviction, the government finally agreed to dump the plan with plans to revisit it. However, it looks like now the government has decided to completely start from scratch, and to recreate copyright law anew. This is quite surprising. Historically, changes in copyright law tend to be patches. Every time a new technology changes things such that copyright law doesn’t make sense, regulators duct tape on some “patch” that tries to deal with that new situation. Yet, New Zealand officials seem to be recognizing this, and want to see about rewriting copyright law from scratch:

The Copyright Act was written in the pre-internet age, and does not address any of the complexities surrounding file sharing, format shifting, and other modern issues such as DVD copying — problems the last government was attempting to fix in a piecemeal fashion.

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The Obama administration added Canada Thursday to a notorious blacklist of countries where Internet piracy flourishes, reflecting a new, tougher line in Washington over the Harper government’s chronic failure to deliver on promises of new copyright laws.

“Canada has never been put on the priority watch list before,” said Stanford McCoy, assistant U.S. trade representative for intellectual property and innovation as he released Washington’s annual report or offenders.

Canada now joins a group of countries designated as being especially lax in protecting intellectual property, including Algeria, China, Russia, Pakistan, Indonesia and Venezuela. No other advanced Western democracy is on the list and Canada is regarded as a lawless hub for bootleg movies, ripped-off software and pirated chips that bypass copyright protections.

Sounds like a ringing endorsement of what must be a sensible Canadian law to me…

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Police in the northeastern Achterhoek region have begun using an unmanned miniature helicopter to track down the illegal cultivation of cannabis, which often takes place indoors. The so-called “canna-chopper” is fitted with cameras and a sniffer to take air samples out of ventilator shafts and chimneys. A dedicated gas analyser is able to recognise traces of weed smell in the air samples.

Police say they are not breaking the law because the samples can be taken without entering the building. The unmanned dwarf helicopter can stay airborne for a maximum of eight hours. It was designed and built by Dutch police engineers.

This is probably confusing to all foreign readers who think cannabis is entirely legal over here. It isn’t. The Dutch have made a decision not to prosecute small time offenders. This means, a blind eye is turned to possession when the amount is very low (personal use amounts). They also grant licenses to owners of ‘coffee-shops’ to sell cannabis with some fairly tight regulations. I believe the idea behind this is that, as has been discovered in basically every other country on earth, people want to smoke a joint from time to time, and it is better they get it from a regulated (and more importantly, taxed!) business, rather than some guy on the street who will almost certainly try to push the more addictive stuff on to the customer for higher (tax free!) profits.

However, what is not tolerated, is massive scale, cannabis farming which is then sold on for huge profits (without tax being paid, are you spotting a theme here?).

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Queen’s Day celebrations in Apeldoorn ended in tragedy, with five people killed and 12 injured, five of them seriously. Just before noon a man deliberately drove his car at high speed into a crowd watching an open-topped coach carrying the Royal Family.

The driver is a 38-year-old Dutch national, who is an unemployed security guard. The public prosecutor says the man told police the target of this attack was the Royal Family, a crime punishable with a maximum jail sentence of 30 years. The public prosecutor has ruled out terrorism.

The car missed the royal coach by 15 metres and came to a standstill when it crashed into a well-known monument. The driver was injured and had to be cut from his vehicle. He was arrested and taken away for interrogation. He is in hospital and his condition is critical.

The man had made an earlier attempt to cross a safety barrier and was turned away by police. By the time the man approached the royal coach, his car was already heavily damaged. Together with a bomb disposal squad police searched the vehicle. The National Anti-terror Coordinator helped launch the investigation.

Oh, and the guy who did it died last night…