That very recent United States policy is very pretty, but it only holds true until they change their mind. If someone invaded the continental United States, destroyed critical infrastructure and occupied US lands it would change very very quickly.

The simple fact is that there has never been a war between two nuclear states. There has never been an invasion of a nuclear state.

If your country was being routinely threatened with invasion and bombing why wouldn't you try and build a nuclear deterrence.

But the twist is you don't have to have the toolbar installed in Firefox.

Having the toolbar installed in IE (even disabled) will result in it miraculously appearing in Firefox.

It's a little bit like an old school virus. Once you let it into one of your executables it takes it as permission to jump into them all.

Sadly no.

It turns out even botnetters haven't yet figured out a good use for Mozilla's Ubiquity extension.

A bigger number on the same device probably means you have a better signal. A 'two' on one device could be equivalent to a 'five' on another or a 'one' on a third. There is no standard that is used across the industry, or even across all devices from a given manufacturer.

When a device manufacturer gets customer reviews that say "I only get one bar with your phone but two from company X" the device manufacturer can either try and explain repeatedly that their one bar is better than X's two bars and that unlike X you can still make phone calls on our device on one bar. Or they can just double the number of bars reported on the next model so they don't look worse than X.

Which do you think they do?

To do a real test you need to use a constant antenna and location, attenuating the signal gradually until each device stops functioning. The amount of attenuation it can take is a crude indicator of the quality of the radio.

I understand their desire to reuse the prime real estate they have for their phone boxes and convert it into a new profitable market.

However in this case I'm not sure it will actually be so useful. Typically you position phone boxes in pedestrian heavy areas where people can see them and use them. Normally you would want recharging stations in car parks, where cars like to hang out for extended periods of time. Do you really want to base your business model over having cars parked beside the road in busy streets for 6.5 hours at a time? Looking at the phone booth in the picture there doesn't even seem space for a single car to stop.

Yes and No I'm not joking.

Personally I believe documents on racial hatred reinforce existing racial hatred, it's ludicrous to suggest that they create it from scratch. I also don't feel that suppressing the relevant documents is effective, the history of religous persecution is ample evidence of this. Restricting access to the materials does make it difficult for those who oppose them to read it and address their grievances or develop counter tactics.

The argument for censorship in this matter is an argument for thought crime and I'm not sure it can be dismissed lightly. I don't give two hoots if someone wants to sit at home beating off to drawings of children. Having sex with a minor is a crime and anyone who does so should be charged. I haven't seen any solid evidence that the first leads to the second, there are reasonable arguments that porn provides an outlet which helps prevent the sexual act.

Actually it's more in line with current practice than you realise. If you manufacture a banned book in Australia, they will stop you from manufacturing it. If you import a banned book from overseas they will stop you from importing it.

This is directly analagous to the proposed filtering. If you host banned material in Australia they will take it down, this already is the case. The proposal is that if you import the banned material they will stop your from importing it. This is a block imposed on the importer, your ISP.

This isn't to say that I support the proposal or even current practice. Just that in this point you are wrong.

People addicted to telephone's are showing increasing signs of not coping well without them. A receptionist said, "My whole day revolves around the telephone, I don't know what I'd do without one."

This addiction isn't just limited to the classic call center stereotype. Formally normal people like businessmen have gone to extraordinary lengths to satisfy their cravings, "I have a phone I carry everywhere with me, I just find it so hard to be out of touch with the office. I even have the car wired so that I can talk while driving between meetings."

A guy who provides alarmist quotes for a living told me, "This telephone craze is destroying the very fabric of society, it's a completely abnormal form of communication. People have no idea of your facial expression is or how your gesticulating with your hands. Eventually we will all evolve to just talking with our hands in our pockets, then how will you know who the Italians are!"

It's vital that we develop treatement plans to assist people in transitioning to a phone free lifestyle, fortunately some profiteering fearmongers have stepped up to the plate. Initial treatement involves lying in a hospital bed with the comfort of the occasional ringing phone in the nurses station, eventually patients progress to walks in a phone free park. The problem is so bad and phones so addicting however that family and friends are smuggling specially designed "mobile" phones into patients, despite clear signs preventing phone use in the area.

Most of the time I don't bother.

Seriously scripts (be they Bash, Perl or Python) are designed to get something done. Occasionally if the script will be rerun frequently I accept command line parameters, if the script takes a long time (> 10 mins) I'll output some form of progress measure and if the script is being run by non-techies I'll even strap on a basic GTK gui for them. The vast majority of the time though I just hard code the parameters into the top of the file, use the script a few times and archive it for later reference. If you are spending any more time than absolutely necessary to get the job done then you don't get the scripting ethos.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. My last employer had a formal process of release meetings before a product was provided to a customer, all the significant players would be there, about 6-10 people. We called them "blame sharing meetings" and even wrote the minutes with that title. The concept was that everybody present had to approve of the product and everybody had to share the blame if it went terribly wrong.

The result of these was an overall improvement of quality. It also meant that someone responsible for a given section wasn't solely responsible and in line for a firing if something went wrong.

A common simplified structure is:

malloc memory
use memory
free memory

With these new innovations you get:

async malloc memory
block until malloc finishes
use memory
async free memory

And free shouldn't take a noticable amount of time.

You might not believe in overqualified but you now have someone who you are underpaying and is probably actively applying for jobs elsewhere. As the job market improves they will certainly be looking elsewhere. Especially if you are getting them to do the crappy work you would normally use a grad for.

I'm not saying you chose wrongly but you have to weigh up the cost of training and integrating them vs the amount of time they stick around. Giving them a pay rise as the economy improves will probably improve that but you don't really want to do that if you needed an entry level person.

Applying for jobs sucks and in many ways is a numbers game.

Making up some numbers, for any given job there will be 20 people who apply and think they have a chance. Three of those will be interviewed and one hired. So you have a 15% chance of getting an interview and a 5% chance of getting the job.

• The numbers are far worse for a graduate as there are more of you.
• The numbers get worse as unemployment goes up.
• The numbers get worse as people pitch for jobs they are overqualified for because they have family, mortgage etc. and need the money.

You can increase the odds of getting a perfect job by using two different tactics. If you see a job where you think "I could do that", do the selection criteria, fire in your CV and check it off the list. If you see a job where you think "I really want to do that" go the extra mile, call them, talk to anyone you know in a related field, do the selection criteria, rewrite your CV, call them again, rewrite the selection criteria etc. Going the extra mile will take a few days but it really helps for those truely awesome jobs, it's too much work to do every time though and you need those applications working through the system.

Looking for work should be considered a full time job. You would normally work over seven hours a day, try to use at least five hours a day to apply for jobs. Some time also needs to be devoted to remaining positive to try and fend of depression

ATC uses two different types of radar. Primary radar is the common radar you are thinking of. Secondary radar uses a transponder system where a signal is broadcast to the plane and the plane sends a unique reply. A primary radar site is always paired with a secondary (otherwise you don't know which plane it is).

There are a lot of purely secondary sites where I live, not sure about the US. When they talk about coverage etc. it's always secondary radar. If you switch off your transponder you will be invisible for most of the country.