"It's good to know what people think, even if you don't approve. " This 12 words, right here, is why I love the internet.

I am 100% in favour of this. And I fully support backdating it quite massively. But then, unlike most of my friends, I'm not a graduate. But I find it hard to argue against the point that if it is now reasonable for society to ask students to pay for their education, then it must surely also be reasonable for society to ask those who got their education for free to give the money back? (Mind you, I think her educationally-privileged background is showing a bit in the comments thread.)

If you still make a distinction between "in the real world" and "on the internet", then frankly, you're probably quite stupid. Some of this article is hippy claptrap, but it captures something I've been thinking about for a while now, when faced with friends who say that they "don't like doing X on the internet", when what they really mean is that they "can't be bothered to develop the skillset to do X on the internet". It's *not* a separate conversation to the one going on in the rest of your life. The issues are the same, the information the same, if not better, and if you can't engage with them on the internet, then you can't engage with them properly in other areas of your life.

This is why you need to be careful with what data you hand to what websites, kids. You might well trust any given website website and the people running it today, but if something goes wrong, and the company goes bankrupt, your data is an asset that belongs to them. And as this article makes clear, the only thing that bankruptcy administrators are allowed to care about it getting the most money back for the creditors. Which means (at the moment, pending a change in the law to improve privacy in cases like this) they're ethically constrained from being picky about what happens to your data – if the highest bidder is a shit who is going to use the data to make everyone involved's life in some way worse, that's just tough for them, because they have to sell to the highest bidder in order to fairly represent the creditor's interests.

Interesting piece about predictions, singularities, and the tendency of utopians (and a lot of doomsayers) to predict paradigm shifting event to occur around the end of their own lifetime.

If they add some form of over-the-air syncing, then I'm sold.

Simple clean WP theme. Might be useful in the future, although I'd need to wrestle the type into submission first.

Soon, you will be able to level grind as you go about your daily grind. This is either genius, or bleakly depressing.

|I imagine a few of you have seen this, but still: a nobel prizewinning economist delivers his verdict on George Osborne's benefit. Now, I imagine that a few of you are thinking "well, he's obviously got a bias". Yeah, probably true. But he's also got a fistful of examples, and I don't know about you, but I was always taught that a persuasive point was one that was backed up with examples.

Good to see that the police in Romford have paid attention to their own guidelines on how to deal with photojournalists. Oh, no, wait, that's not what they've done, is it? They've done the other thing, haven't they? FFS.

Oi, writer types what read this: my friend Del is trying to put together a charity book to help Medcins Sans Frontieres. She is looking for submissions. If you have the time between now and October to write a short story on the theme of healing, you might consider doing so, and punting it in her direction. More details in the link.

I wouldn't like to suggest this is like me, or like anyone else I know. But I often have to do things I don't like.

Jesus fuck. It turns out that I, and many/most of my friends would not be eligible for employment at American apparel because we don't look "natural" (for which one might also read "bland") enough. Be sure to read this, and then click through to the stories about hiring and firing based on appearance. The level of angry fuck you this inspires is staggering.

I can't quite decide what I think of this. One balance, yes, I think I would like to have this calendar on my wall.

Alan Moore is performing live in London at the end of July. Just, y'know, in case anyone's interested. I've got tickets for the Friday night.

Strategies for designing a service, end-to-end. Useful