Putting gullwings on such an ugly vehicle is as the Amerians say "polishing a turd".

I use Ubuntu for work and Unity is an unmitigated disaster. I receive reports in many different formats, PDF, DOC, JPEG, HTML, PNG etc and need to refer back and forth between them. Pre-Unity this involved glancing at the bottom tool bar and clicking the report name. With Unity - I have to stop and think, "where is the switcher" oh yes it's on the left. Move the mouse to the left and then wait for it to appear. Now I don't know what format the report is in so I have to start at the top with Firefox and work my way down the different programs. If I am lucky I only have a few reports in each format and if they are distinct I can spot the one I am looking for with ALT-TAB. However more often than not I have to switch into the report to see if it is the one I need. If I have more than say 15 reports open I can forget where I am and go around in circles looking for reports. This rigmarole takes forever and is mentally draining. I have swapped back to Gnome2 now and it's a great relief. Mark Shuttleworth - the man who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory

he died, and I think the logical and precise man he was he would be annoyed at the use of such a weedy euphemism

The biggest criticism from the rest of the world levelled against the USA forces in Afghanistan is that they are killing far too many civilians. This is also a bad tactic as general Stanley McChrystal admitted last year they were creating more insurgents by their actions not fewer. He called it the hearts and minds offensive and implemented new tactics involving less use of indiscriminate weaponry (bombing) and closer contact combat. This new weapon is non discriminatory, who knows how many women and children might also be taking shelter behind the wall with the gunman. Not good, not good at all .....

Your example is a very small section of society and Is a US biker bar is any more or less violent than a UK biker bar. Now taking a far larger example, do you think US or UK football supporters are the more violent ?

Murder rate per 100,000 of the USA at 5.5 is over three times that of the UK at 1.5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate IMO the UK is a much more violent society, street fighting is the weekend pastime in many towns. The only factor reducing the death rate is the absence of guns, so while stabbings are more common in the UK deaths are more common in the USA.

If you are a regular reader maybe you could consider subscribing to their site, that way both parties are happy, you don't see any ads and they get a little revenue.

I had a number crunching PHP batch program that was taking about 45 minutes to run. After a long and tedious rewrite in C++ the best I could get was about 5 minutes faster (~10% improvement). On line the main performance hit with PHP (relative to C++) is the interpretation which can largely be negated using APC for caching and optimizing the intermediate code. Considering the nature of on line programs I would expect even less that the 10% gain I squeezed from the batch program. Of course it's horses for courses but from my experience I find the 10:1 ratio unrealistic for real world applications..

I like it and I'm going to use it, thanks :-)