I once asked my Argentino friends when they used the word if "puto" meant "mujeriego" (man whore in that particular context) and they laughed and told me it meant "maricón" (poofter).

That's really interesting. My experience, and I'm on my fourth HTC (and possibly last depending on how well Cyanogen goes). I've never had any hardware problems. I don't even cringe when I accidentally drop my phone onto concrete now because I know it won't break.

Which do you recommend as the better quality brands? The Samsungs have lovely specs but they're huge and look seriously ugly. There just doesn't seem to be much of anyone else in the HD range where I'm looking.

I haven't tried Cyanogen yet but I agree entirely. HTC hardware is right up there with the best but the software ranges from okay to an excercise in frustation and one recent upgrade actually cost me the ability to share files with my Linux computer. Then in frustration I borrowed my wife's Windows laptop and it was only after half an hour that I could share files on that and then only by systematically turning off every bit of HTC software that it had installed on her laptop.

HTC make lovely phones that look and feel superb but they are let down by some really crappy software releases and even crappier software design choices.

I believe they got the job title wrong - surely it's Windows Blue ScrDETh (thanatest engineer).

Americans love public transport, look how often they catch cabs!

If you named them that you'd be making a boob, well two boobs.

I bought a lot of stuff from the US when I was trying to build an electronic AL in the livingroom (complete and utter failure on that count by the way, artificial life needs interleaved and cross-woven micro-networks in a way that I found impossible to replicate on then current serial electronic parts).

The USPS is very good when it's good and decidedly slow when it's slow. I found the lost delivery rate to be very close to that of Australia Post, about 2 or 3%, of course that may have been entirely at Auspost's end. I also noticed that some items took an inordinately long time to arrive. One time I bought an item from New Mexico and paid for fast delivery. I then bought a second item from the seller but paid the normal rate. The normal came after three weeks (that's pretty good from the US which is 12,000km away at it shortest - mainland to mainland). The quick one took eight weeks, just under two months, which is what it would have taken from England in the days of sailing ships.

Every delivery service has exceptions so that should not be taken as normal. There is one thing I do think that the USPS should be criticised for, the very complicated way it calculates postage for parcels. It's easier to get out of Guantanamo than it is to get a price out of the USPS.

Those quibbles aside I've always found the USPS to be a good service that fills me with confidence but Saturday deliveries really are a bit 19th century so I don't know what the problem is with dropping them.

Australia.

Yes, the Canadian government's response was swift and effective and I thought at the time that they had turned things around. But lo and behold it turns out that the Canadian government thought the root cause of the problem was in the military while it was really in the government itself trying to do too much with the Defence allocation, spending on the wrong things, buying the right things the wrong way. The military does what the government tells it to and until the Canadian government gets its defence act together the Canadian military will always have one hand tied behind its back.

The Canadian soldiers were being stolen from every night, at first in an ad hoc way, then later on a systemic basis. These were reportedly the best soldiers in the Canadian army but they had been trained for war and not dealing with hordes of pilfering children. The soldiers got wound up so tight that they would catch kids and beat them. Later they started to torture them. Eventually one of the kids died. Somalia brought out the worst in a lot of the armies there and this behaviour was by no means restricted to the Canadian troops.

It was not one isolated incident. It was the final and most extreme of a long series of incidents. Your commandos were totally unprepared, had no training for that social/political environment and had insufficient support. It was, when seen in retrospect, almost inevitable.

After the parliamentary inquiry things did improve somewhat but to this day whenever I hear that my nation's forces have been deployed alongside Canadian forces I get an uneasy feeling that doesn't go away until the deployment is over.

I believe that the root cause of the problem is that Canada's defense is too important to the US for them to allow it to stay in Canadian hands.

HMCS Chicoutimi.

Nuff said.

Well as I understand it Princess Pat's Regiment were of a similar standard to the average good Canadian infantryman at the time. They just happened to be in the right place at the right time and saved Seoul from falling to the Chinese and potentially stopped the UN from losing the Korean war. Not bad for a night's work.

This is the Canadian armed forces who are so chronically underfunded and undersupported by their government that their submarines blow up on their remaidened voyage, that their special forces capture and torture to death children caught stealing from their base in Somalia.

I despise the US idea of shoot anything that moves but I'd much rather have that than an underprepared military with little support from the government whose dirty work they do.

At Kapyong in Korea the Canadians showed they the best soldiers in the world. Those days are long long gone.

In the 1970s one of the other programmers where I worked used to print text files on the big format daisy wheel printer to form the image of a naked woman in ASCII or EBCDIC characters to represent light or shade. As demure as they were that passed for pornography then so it had to be done stealthily and for security reasons programmers weren't allowed into the computer room so he had to collude with one of the computer operators to get them done.

I have no idea where he got them though, there were no emails then and no floppy discs. Everything was punch cards or tapes.

Yes. Big payments a smaller proportion.