I can't remember where/when, but there was some great story about some anthropologist getting put on (about sex traditions, I think) for years (or months) by some South Pacific barbarians. The anthropologist published, then someone else showed it was all false. The natives said "Oh, we just thought it was funny to pull his leg."

The native Americans have been doing that to the invaders for centuries.

These are people, just like any other. Every time they tell the story, it gets bigger.

Cellphones and supermarkets didn't make people less honest. People lied just as much a thousand years ago as they did today, and the handful who still live in the old style are no different.

Why did you ever go with Virgin in the first place? As UK ISPs go, they are quite poor; the rates are high and the service is non-existent. There are several good ISPs available anywhere in the UK that has ADSL service - Zen and the various Entanet resellers (adsl24, usfsn, etc) - so there's no good reason to use a poor one.

First, unfortunately, those accustomed to the standard length of yellow time will, by and large, become inadvertent "red light runners" as the result of their unfamiliarity with the abbreviated time, potentially with disastrous results.

I'm not sure about the US, but here in the UK the rules of the road are quite clearly spelled out. When you see a yellow light, you must stop if you safely can. When you see a red light, you must stop, it is not safe to continue. While it's relatively rare, if you carry on through on yellow when you could have stopped then you can be given a ticket (statutory fine for minor infractions, whatever that is at the time). It is equivalent to rolling through a stop sign without stopping.

You seem to be implying that the US rule is "a yellow light means that there's going to be a red light, but you can carry on so long as you get through in time, so hit the accelerator". If true, that's a dumb rule, since it encourages people to drive unsafely.

Given the above, the appropriate duration for yellow lights is determined by the speed limit of the road and the standard table of stopping distances (plus a small safety margin). Making it longer just wastes time, because you have to stop anyway. Making it shorter is obviously unsafe.

All these comments, and nobody's asked the obvious question?

Where is the source code?

There is no real excuse for a content-based site of any size to have bugs in its software. Any such site which is failing to co-opt its users into improving it has only itself to blame.

a car,motorcycle, bicycle, truck - even a skate board or roller blades has ONE operator.

Hate to break it to you, but multi-person bicycles are not new.

Most of the mass of a car is in the engine and assorted paraphernalia. Take that out, and replace the heavy interior seating with lightweight bicycle seats, and it probably weighs less than the people sitting in it.

To me, it looks like a massive number of people who do worry about climate change and want to reduce emissions have nothing to gain from it

I see them as primarily wanting to be seen as right at any cost - they are under the delusion that physics is a democracy, and if they can convince enough people to agree with them and do what they propose, then they will be correct. In other words, it's politics as usual.

There is a relatively small lobby with large resources who stand to gain financially on one side of this fight, but so far as I can see, most people involved are just acting out of religious fervour.

Sigh.

Some researchers investigated a theory by trying to find evidence that sunspot activity caused climate variations. They did not find any significant evidence. That doesn't mean that there isn't any, it means that they didn't find any. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The net result of this is that we don't really know anything more than we did before that study (except perhaps that pursuing this study further is probably not a good use of funding).

We still don't really know what's happening to the climate. There's a lot of posturing and loudly promoted hypotheses on both sides, and none of them have been able to ground their hypotheses in real science; about the best they have been able to do is use science to disprove the hypotheses of their opponents. However, we have learned a couple of things from the past few decades of climate research:

- We suck at creating models of the planet's climate. We can create plenty of (contradictory) models that fit the available historical data, but we've been able to do that for quite a while now, and so far none of them have turned out to be correct when new data was fed in. This indicates that our latest attempts at creating models by fitting the historical data are probably also wrong. There's something here that we don't understand on a fundamental level.

- Nobody is really interested in the truth. People don't want to find out how the climate is actually behaving, they just want to have their unsubstantiated claims vindicated.

I must echo the sentiment about the classic model M - it's damn near indestructible, you can pound on it with a hammer and cause no damage. Heck, you can use it as a hammer in a pinch, or bludgeon intruders with it.

Every time I find somebody who says they keep wearing out their keyboards, it turns out that they're paying less than £20 for them. You simply cannot expect quality at that price. You don't expect it from your desk or chair or carpet - why would cheap keyboards be any different?

My sweat destroys the labelling on pointing devices in a matter of months, but I've been heavily using this model M for almost ten years, and the lettering is still as sharp as the day it was made (according to the label, in 1985). It needs scrubbing with a stiff brush and abrasive cleaner every few years to remove the build-up of grime on the frame, but aside from that you couldn't tell that it wasn't brand new.

There's a flip side to this. On several occasions now I have had complaints from our users that the webmail system was "broken". After trying to debug the problem remotely, I eventually have to go over to their office to figure out what's going on - and what I find is that they're typing the name of the webmail application into google, clicking on the first link, and trying to login to somebody else's copy.

When I explain this, they just look at me blankly. They can't conceive of the notion that this wouldn't work. I end up having to create icons for them that open the web browser at the right page, because google has destroyed their ability to use bookmarks or URLs.

(Yes, the more web-savvy users can handle it, but that's not the point)

It's not really about him saying "fuck" - if it was just that, the judge would probably have just warned him off (once). It's more that he was persistently refusing to answer fair questions, and wasting the time of everybody involved. Judges are very busy people, and if there's one thing they really hate, it's people who waste time.

This does sound rather like "I was stabbed, beaten, and shot, but I'm happy because I talked them out of stealing my wallet as well".

So the US has been supplying them with the very latest in modern weapons to assault their neighbours, and their citizens are complaining because they don't have lasers?

Anybody else find this hilarious?

Tech supp are not there to be screamed at

So put somebody behind the phones who is there to be screamed at, like the idiot manager who is responsible for the problem in the first place. There is going to be screaming and somebody deserves it.

If the only people who will answer your call are tech support, then they're going to get all that stuff as well.

A few people have asked if you can sue the TSA for this kind of thing. The answer is effectively no: the TSA is part of the Executive branch of the US government, which has the "right" to decline to be prosecuted for anything it doesn't want to be, and has frequently demonstrated the will to use it where the TSA is concerned.

(This is a de-facto right that stems from the fact that the Executive is responsible for enforcing the rulings of the courts: the Executive can simply refuse to enforce any ruling made against it, so the courts don't ever rule against the Executive on this because they would be made to look powerless and silly)

The only thing you can do to the TSA, or any branch of the Executive, is to impeach the president and then try to elect one who will do things differently.

This is a bug in your government. Please fix it.

The problem with having illegal sequences of numbers that you aren't allowed to access is that there is no legal way to generate a list of them, nor is there any legal way to review such a list, because in order to do either of these things you would have to access the data.

It should therefore come as no surprise that all such lists are grossly inaccurate and incomplete - there's no motivation to improve them, since they can't be reviewed, and no real way to improve them anyway.

They have to keep the lists secret to stop people from noticing that their method is either ineffective or illegal.

Additionally, any investigation into this would have to be prevented for political reasons, since it would reveal a fundamental logical flaw in their proposals: their claim is that looking at this data will "turn people into paedophiles", so clearly this must also apply to the people who compile the list (if they actually look at the data at all, rather than simply making up a list of sites they don't like).

Woid, I think you've missed the point. ALL fair use appropriates -- fair use describes the circumstances under which it is permissible to appropriate.

("I have a store where I sell licenses to move your DVDs to your iPod; your DVD-ripper substitutes for my product.")

The first of those is the answer to the second - the creation of the DVD ripper does not involve any copyrights from the store, and in no way benefits from the existence of the store, so it doesn't need to be justified as "fair use" in the first place.

There are probably still thorny, subjective areas under this definition, that just isn't one of them. And deciding thorny, subjective issues is what we have the courts for in the first place. You probably can't have a copyright system without borderline cases that need to go to court; you can have a copyright system without rules so complex that pretty much every case can end up in court and nobody knows which way it will turn out.

Contrary to popular belief, the mushroom cloud does not indicate a nuclear explosion, but merely any big explosion. Their most common cause is volcanic eruptions.