According to reports in the Associated Press, the setting up of China's Confucius Peace Prize was intended to protest the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize award to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.

This year will witness the third Confucius Peace Prize since its setup. However, the previous two award ceremonies of this prize didn't go very well. The laureates selected never showed up nor even cared about receiving such a prize.

Some observers saw the affair as a complete farce. The award was given to a terrified small child, supposed to represent Kuomintang Honorary Chairman Lien Chan at the first ceremony and two Russian hotties, supposed to represent Russian President Vladimir Putin, at the second, which just added to the entertainment value.

The current TSA measures create an even greater harm: loss of liberty. Airports are effectively rights-free zones. Security officers have enormous power over you as a passenger. You have limited rights to refuse a search. Your possessions can be confiscated. You cannot make jokes, or wear clothing, that airport security does not approve of. You cannot travel anonymously. (Remember when we would mock Soviet-style “show me your papers” societies? That we’ve become inured to the very practice is a harm.) And if you’re on a certain secret list, you cannot fly, and you enter a Kafkaesque world where you cannot face your accuser, protest your innocence, clear your name, or even get confirmation from the government that someone, somewhere, has judged you guilty. These police powers would be illegal anywhere but in an airport, and we are all harmed—individually and collectively—by their existence.

Brist på kritiskt tänkande. Högskolan har blivit en gigantisk sysselsättningsarena för ungdomar, ofta med tveksamma kurser i alltför lätta ämnen. Samtidigt vill många ­högskolor få universitetsstatus. Kanske borde de göras om till gymnasieskolor i stället, skriver professor Mats Alvesson.

Suppose I could offer you a choice of two technologies for watching TV online. Behind Door Number One sits a free-to-watch service that uses off-the-shelf technology and that buffers just enough of each show to put the live stream on the Internet. Behind Door Number Two lies a subscription service that requires custom-designed hardware and makes dozens of copies of each show. Which sounds easier to build—and to use? More importantly, which is more likely to be legal?

Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country's industrial might.

So, for the moment, let’s put aside the question of whether Obama’s drone assassinations are justified. Shouldn’t we all be able to agree that the power to order people executed (including U.S. citizens) is far too extreme and dangerous to vest in one person without any checks, review, oversight or transparency?

Guess what, compatriots? The gap between

the richest and the poorest among us is now wider than it has been since we all nose-dived into the

Great Depression. So GQ sent Jon Ronson on a journey into the secret financial lives of six different people on the ladder, from a guy washing dishes for 200 bucks a week in Miami to a self-storage gazillionaire. What he found are some surprising truths about class, money, and making it in America.

At the end of the 1990s, Korea developed its own encryption technology, SEED, with the aim of securing e-commerce. Users must supply a digital certificate, protected by a personal password, for any online transaction in order to prove their identity. For Web sites to be able to verify the certificates, the technology requires users to install a Microsoft ActiveX plug-in.

...

It forced consumers to use Internet Explorer because it was the only browser ActiveX plug-ins were compatible with. By default, Web developers optimized not only banking and shopping Web sites for Internet Explorer, but all Web sites.

Unsurprisingly, this later caused all sorts of problems. And this, kids, is why "standardizing" on a vendor-specific solution, as opposed to an actual open standard, is an idiotic idea.

In 1989, the Emperor Showa was buried at the Musashino Imperial Mausoleum in the Hachioji district of Tokyo, with the structure alone costing Y2.6 billion (£19.89 million).

Acutely aware of the nation's perilous financial situation – Japan's national debt stood at 229.77 per cent of GDP in 2011, the highest in the world – as well as the need to raise funds to pay for the reconstruction of large parts of the northeast of the country that were devastated by last year's earthquake and tsunami, the imperial couple have apparently taken it upon themselves to be less of a burden on the nation.

What does this mean for you? Well, if need be, the government can read your email, Facebook messages, forum postings, web history, pretty much anything you’ve ever done on the internet. You may believe that as you’re not a terrorist or child pornographer, the government should have no reason to, but the problem is the language in this bill is so loose, they can access your information for almost any reason at all. Ever visited a torrent site or watched an unofficial YouTube video of copyrighted material? Ever reposted a picture without the explicit permission of the rights holder? Well, you’re now tangentially related to a cybersecurity crime, and your entire internet history is fair game for careful examination. And don’t think Google Chrome Incognito mode will save you.