Sounds good. Let's set the fine to be twice the cost of installing the line.

So the law says they can't charge you more because you're on a line which was installed under this program.

You chose to be part of the UK, you can live with being referred to as a citizen thereof. If you don't like it, you can try another referendum.

You're forgetting that Top Gear is the most popular television program... in the world. It's rather on the same scale as mismanagement of the Superb Owl.

Her English is very good, but not good enough.

You cannot sub out the cast and have the show work. So they shouldn't, but not because it's not worth it, but because they can't do it.

On average, that's false.

No, the main problem with American cars these days is build quality, just like always. UAW simply doesn't do as good a job as the non-union workers at the Japanese plants. Whether that's because higher per-hour labor costs make it impossible to pay them enough to torque fasteners correctly, which is a thing they seem to have trouble with, or just because they're shiftless layabouts without work ethic, the truth is that American cars tend to be assembled like shit.

If I want a car assembled correctly, I buy one which was put together in Germany or Japan, or second choice, by a Japanese company operating its own plant in the USA.

Only the top-end American cars are built from the same basic design strategies as euro cars... well, maybe and the Fiesta and Focus.

The way most stars are handled when they act out, you put them into counseling, make them make a public apology, that sort of thing. And that's why the BBC is stupid for being all PC over things Clarkson has said in the past. They gave him final warnings over things which didn't deserve any warning, now this happened and they had no choice but to go straight to firing him.

You mean battered. Just threatening someone is assault.

I think a lot of people would benefit from a pop in the nose. And I say that as someone who was bullied in school. Namely, some of those bullies could have used a good socking-up, for some perspective.

We don't know what was said. It's easy to say that violence is never an acceptable answer to something that someone says... But if that's true, then it's equally never acceptable to say something hurtful to someone, because words can hurt more and longer than fists depending on how they are applied.

I'll worry about Clarkson being violent when I find out what was said, and not until.

I think that a corporate master will let Clarkson speak his mind, because that's a big part of the appeal. Without that, he's not the same guy.

My mental model of "low electricity" is a $20 pogoplug drawing basically nothing and sharing two USB3 disks, plus 1 SATA disk. The whole arrangement will use less than your CPU.

There's probably a lot more that went on behind the scenes to which we are not privy, conversations mostly. They might well have asked Clarkson to make an elaborate apology and he refused, for example.

Whoops. You're right, I was wrong, how lame.

Again, why would they do that? The only members of the "trucking industry" who stand to lose if trucks go automated are truckers themselves, but they can't possibly out-lobby trucking companies.

No. Wal-Mart will just contract with whoever can moves the trucks most cheaply. But they're not going to do the leg-work themselves. They'll just contract whoever has the self-driving trucks, after they do the lobbying.

Wal-Mart doesn't give a shit how cheap trucking is, only that they get it at the lowest possible cost, because they don't care what their prices are, only that they are lower than the competition.

You're assuming that there were not earlier events which led to this event, and also that the producer didn't say anything to exacerbate the situation.

Look, violence is not a wonderful answer to something other than violence or impending violence, but the anti-Clarkson force seems to believe that he just got the wind up his arse and started throwing fists. But since none of us were party to the conversation, and none of us know what was said, none of us knows how unreasonable violence was as a response.

As someone who was bullied in almost every possible way in school, including a whole lot of verbal abuse, I know that verbal abuse can be as painful as the physical kind. In fact, studies have shown that emotional abuse actually causes physical pain responses in the nervous system. That's right, words literally hurt. If the BBC were as progressive as they'll have you believe, they'd fire people for saying mean things to other people. And then it might well have been the producer who was out of a job, before he even got a chance to eat a fist.

So they cracked down on a shot to the jaw as a response to being soft on pedophilia?

Nobody really believes that "no excuse for violence" canard, do they? The world certainly isn't run that way.

I'm not turning away because of the lack of data. He-said, she-said, few-facts-available.