Sadly, even if the show is complete garbage, the Whedonista will still try to save it, squandering whatever credibility still remains in fans' outrage campaigns.

There's only so many times you can point to Star Trek as an example of a cash cow saved by the fans...

I can vouch for the fact that Sydney, Australia pedestrian buttons not only work, but are fairly sophisticated microcontroller devices.

They have a microphone to detect ambient noise, so the audible signal (for blind pedestrians) is loud during heavy traffic but quieter in the dead of night.

They also have a vibrating panel for deaf and blind pedestrians, but I do wonder if they should really be out crossing streets unaided...

Oh, and only one press is recorded. Repeated pressing does nothing except satisfy the impatient or the OCD sufferers!

We had issues with ADSL connection when we moved house earlier this year and spent a few weeks on dial-up. Shudder.

For email and basic web browsing, it was bearable. Not fun, but bearable.

File sizes suddenly changed, though! Files that were usually "It's only a few meg, I'll have a quick look at it" became "OMG, it's MEGABYTES! I'll skip that!"

torrents trickled in overnight (and needed to be stopped to do anything else) and we became really, really good customers at a local cafe with wireless broadband!

I did some TM and found it a useful technique for relaxation, but got a bit jaded as I was introduced to the more woo-woo facets of it.

To me, the clincher was being fed all the statistics about the amazingly positive effects of having the sqare root of 1% of a population being meditating masters (I forget the terminology for the people who'd paid the big bucks to get the inside knowlege.)

This guff was meant to be proof to sceptics.

I said "Let me walk around underneath a levitating yogi and check for wires. If you really can defy gravity, that's more bloody convincing that any amount of statistics!"

Strangely, yogic flying doesn't seem to work if anyone's watching...

I bet Ian Anderson could make even this thing sound wonderful!

I was diagnosed with Type II diabetes about 6 months ago and changed my lifestyle as a result of not wanting to go blind and digit-less!

I'm managing it very successfully with extra exercise (hard to do less than I used to...) and reducing my carbohydrate intake considerably.

The Glycemic Index (www.glycemicindex.com) is a very useful indication of which carbs are going to be turned into blood sugar quickest, and which ones will give you longer-lasting energy. There's some surprising results in there; not all "complex" carbs are slow-release!

Peter Garrett, Australian rock star and now politician, tells a similar story of getting a call on his unlisted home phone from a fan who, as a public servant, had casual access to Garrett's details on a database.
This was about the time that the "Australia Card", a centralised inter-departmental database was being debated...

I think they evoke the imagination that's an essential part of using Lego blocks.

I didn't have many of the fancy special-purpose bits as a kid, but in my mind, my clunky creations cast an image in my mind's eye as real as the shadows cast by the blocks in these posters.

Sounds like a version of an old Isaac Asimov story "The Dead Past", doesn't it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Past
Viewing the past without a lower limit is just like looking at the present, as Jake said.

If the privacy aspect of the probable cause legislation is considered important, then there needs to be a legislated minimum period where "history" begins.