When I was in high school my dad's office had a couple of TRS-80 model 2s (cassette tapes!) and a model 3 (8" floppies!) and after school I'd go to his office and spend ages playing The Asylum (see http://www.trs-80.org/asylum/) It was awesome. Even more so than the school's sole Apple ][, the "trash 80" introduced me to programming and I taught myself z80 assembler in an effort to write my own version of Scramble (see http://www.arcade-gameover.com/scramble.asp) as I quickly realised that BASIC was never going to cut it. I ended up nearly failing year 12 because I spend most of that year writing a text adventure game I called The Cave. I was forced to abandon it eventually and get my grades back up so as to get into university. I also spent a lot of time playing Taipan on the model 3. (see http://cymonsgames.com/taipan/)

I moved on to the Apple ][ after that, and then, at uni, the PDP 11, and then the Mac in 1984. Messed about with BBCs, Acorns, Apricots, and a bunch of other machines I can't even remember the names of but never left the Mac since then. Friends had Vic-20s and Commodore 64s and Ataris but I never really got into those. Nice to see there are TRS-80 emulators for the Mac at http://sdltrs.sourceforge.net/

People have a sex, not a gender. Words have genders.

You are of course ignoring the myriad of industrial processes involved in growing tobacco (fossil fuels being burned for transport, fossil fuel based fertilisers, etc) and the manufacture of cigarettes; not to mention the industrial scale energy use involved in the healthcare required to keep smokers alive. The parts of the plant that are not burned typically rot and release methane which is 24 times more potent a greenhouse gas than is CO2. Also it's wrong to assume that the burning of a cigarette releases pure CO2, it does not. Cigarettes don't burn very efficiently and the papers themselves are ingrained with gunpowder to assist the burning process. That releases all manner of GHGs, beyond the CO2 originally absorbed by the plant.

Wow who'd have thought that eating too much would cause people to put on weight. Glad it took a mathematician and a bunch of complex modelling to work that one out. I might now go write a paper on how standing up makes one seem taller.

Possibly this is just Apple and Dropbox's dating before they get hitched. Dropbox would make an awesome inclusion to Apple's iCloud service which currently has no iDisk like function that MobileMe had. iDisk ends pretty soon so a deal could be struck quickly for the benefit of both Apple and Dropbox. One would hope that if such a deal came off they'd not drop the Android, Windows and Unix versions though.

but just wait, as this idea takes off, engine sounds will be the new ring-tones. Sure it's stupid; but so are most ring-tones.

Early April fool perhaps?

I mean “ 'Ice cream is about the only thing I can think of that tastes good on a plane,' says Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health” — seriously?

Food tastes crappy on planes because it is crappy. The food in business class tastes better because it is better. It's still for the most part closer to crappy however than better, but it's better than it used to be I think.

In 2002 my home in Amsterdam was invaded by gun-wielding criminals who tied me up, blindfolded me, threatened me with torture and death and who stole almost everything of value from my house. When I eventually escaped to a nearby friend's house I called the cops who explained that I needed to go and report the incident in person at a police station rather than over the phone. So I went to the nearest police station and, after spending 20 minutes trying to get someone's attention, was told I'd come to the wrong police station and I need to walk down to another one. I did that and was told by those cops that I was still at the wrong police station for crimes in my area and I needed to go to the one closest to my home. I pretty much lost it at that point and the cops drove me to the right police station where I spent 6 hours filing a report that they then promptly lost.

A few days later I went back to my home and found a hoodie that had been worn by one of the criminals. I took this down to the police station and they explained that

1) the officer who took down my details had moved to another station,
2) they had lost my report of the incident, and
3) what did I want them to do with the hoodie anyway?

Naturally they showed zero interest in catching any criminals, or indeed doing any work. Lazy and incompetent don't even begin to describe the dutch police.

There is a series of 10 interlinked fantasy novels by the late (and great) Hugh Cook that all are titled The W* and the W* (The Women and the Warlords, etc). I've only just managed to get the whole set again (alas by differing publishers) having read them as a younger man and lost them all when I lost most of my other books. They are fantastic.

Also, as other readers above have noted, anything my Michael Moorcock is great, especially the Elric books, The Dancers at the End of Time series and the Jerry Cornelius novels. Also the film of The Final Program wasn't bad.

Also anyone who has not read The Illuminatus trilogy needs to get their heads messed up by that one. And anything by Phillip Jose Farmer is worth a go. Harry Harrison is always good and James Blish knew how to write. Those Ringworld books were fun, and the Bio of a Space Tyrant books were excellent.

The War with the Newts is a classic, as is Solarus and Last and First Men. The Asimov 'Foundation' and 'Robots' books are great too. And The Phantom Toll Booth is worth a mention.

That ought to get you started.

Well to be fair Carbon Credits, real ones that is, represent either the actual removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere or the verifiable prevention of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere, and so they do have a genuine net environmental benefit, despite what the nay-sayers would have you believe. That these credits are sold for money is part of the point. Rich countries' money is used to finance carbon abatement projects in poor countries for a variety of reasons, the primary one being that the majority of the predicted emissions growth over the next 40 years or so is going to be in the developing world and so it's vital they leap-frog the polluting technologies we in the West used to grow our wealth. Also you simply get more environmental bang for your buck by building wind-farms in Bangladesh vs Boston.

I was hoping it would be Domestic Shorthair

Good question. Who cares?

Probably that 25% of humanity whose drinking water comes from glacial runoff, and they neighbours who will be the ones that get invaded as billions of people start to head to where there is still water to drink. Then add in all the people already living in marginal areas prone to drought, or flooding, or both. Then these are the people who's insurance premiums will cost more than their houses did as storms get stronger and hit more often, and as sea levels rise. Just to name a few. Indeed not caring at all is symptomatic of a genuine moral failure.

I was wondering that too. What's the app called? Is it too much to ask for a link to the App store from the original story? Vapourware perhaps?

Rather than spending valuable developer resources on a lame red-queen issue like this, I'd advocate that the Skype people devote some resources to making a Mac version of Skype that doesn't totally blow goats. The new Skype for Mac is the only version of any piece of software that I have actively gone and downgraded back to an older version, and now, if I want to upgrade my Mac to Lion I need to 'upgrade' to the new, horrible version of Skype for Mac.

Now Google Talk handles calls to phones, and G+ allows multi-user hangouts I find I have less and less use for Skype thank heavens.

Please Skype people, I want a buddy list where I can actually list my contacts and see their names —is that too much to ask?
I want to be able to screen share part of my screen again, like I used to be able to.

Fixing those two things would make me come back to Skype.

We always seem have have millions of spare rubber bands in our house so, for my home office cabling needs, I affix ethernet and phone cables to the tops of the legs of my desk to prevent my kicking them by accident, using rubber bands.

Now rubber bands don't actually last that long, a few months at most, before they dry out and snap. When they snap I tend to pull everything out of my office, vacuum and mop the floors, scrub the desk down and generally file all my shit. Then I go down to the kitchen and grab another 8 or so rubber bands and set everything up again. This both works well to keep cables off the floor and provides a handy timer to remind me to tidy up my office. And best of all those rubber bands are free.