Please point me to some (real) evidence that New Labour is left wing in any way whatsoever...

Can we now stack people more efficiently so they take up less space?

You are kidding right? This is some form of humor? Altavista at the end was a very lame joke. Yes google is poor if you happen to be searching for ring tones or asbestos lawyers but 99.9% of searches are very good. With altavista you were lucky if you got ANY genuine results.

Based on what? There might have been more porn as a percentage of all web pages, but I can GUARANTEE there is absolutely more out there now. Also what on earth are you looking for that you can't find right now in two clicks from google?

Things move on; embrace change. Although it makes people really angry chnage is rarely bad and the past is always viewed through a lameness filter.

heh, that's funny, 7 years ago Windows 98 was the best operating system that anyone had ever used and XP was the unstable new PoS that no-one was ever going to use and was going to be Microsoft's death knell. How times change...

They couldn't make ships that would routinely survive the antarctic sea until about 1750. How could they be be maps of antarctica in 1500?

The iphone is very pertinent. Because it happens to be much better than the compeition it is becoming a defacto monopoly. At some presumably the eu will make apple offer IE on it and open up the app store to all comers? I know if i was MS i'd would be having my lobbyists pointing this out rather forcefully.

It's somehwat ironic that safari is by far the worst thing about the iphone.

Actually that was one of the things we were looking at (without the electric arcing); there ARE very few low angle impact craters. There are a range of reasons but the largest is that an impact crater looks round even for pretty low impact angles. It has to be like 75 degrees from perpendicular to show any serious deformation (IIRC). On mars you also have an atmosphere to deal with and any body coming in at that kind of angle will just skip off, so only the ones relatively close to perpendicular will get through.

I am not. I am however frustrated by the singular lack of real progress that anyone's made in the 15 years since I was involved. Most of the Spirit/Opportunity mission seems to be mainly about confirming stuff that we were already pretty sure of, plus getting a few more pictures.

Which is not to say driving a buggy around mars is not pretty cool, but it's not really going anywhere.

Actually the final year of my space science degree almost entirely revolved around martian geology and impact cratering (you wanna know how many craters per square km there are in amazonis planitia? or the southern highlands? TS, go count em yourself...)

So anyway, bite me.

Sorry, I thought we'd already established that there was water on mars? You know, those giant ice cap things? The streams running down the slopes? Why do we have to be amazed and surprised each time we get a new picture of it?

I'm really failing to understand the priorities when it comes to exploration of Mars. All missions are now touted as searching for either water or "life", presumably to garner a bit of publicity in order to keep their funding. We must by now be 100% confident there is H20 there now, and 99.98% certain that there is no, and never has been, life. Also if we're wrong about the 0.02% we can be 100% confident that it is at least 2 billion years since it last metabolized whatever it is that hypothetical martians metabolize and therefore will have no ascertainable impact on, well, anything. Even geological literature will be pretty much unmoved at this point.

Anyway, the point is; can't we start doing some interesting stuff on Mars now? Send some monkeys up there or something?

Diddums. Tax is a zero sum game, it might hurt you but it's not going to hurt the economy overmuch: tax goes up, public spending goes up. For lower tax regimes than the US you might want to limit your search to Africa and some of the more war-torn regions of the planet. As a rule of thumb, anywhere with ADSL is going to be more expensive than where you are now.

You are doing something that it's not designed for and then complaining that it's broken?

That's funny, I got to exactly the same point and did exactly the same thing. Very disappointing, even the graphics aren't that good. Glad I only paid $3 for it, presumably that was during one of their price testing deals.

Surely apple are the complete opposite of that? They have like 3 products...

and your evidence for a link is....

While you're thinking, here are some actual facts.

• There are about 10 million school children in the UK who trump your single case.
• There is no plausible evidence. The only paper to have found a link was based on just 12 subjects and the beliefs of their parents.
• I have a small baby, were she to catch measles from one of the unvaccinated luddites wandering around the outcome for her would be much worse than for your unfortunate nephew.

I feel sorry for your nephew, but you have to accept that autism is naturally occuring and that there isn't always someone you can pin the blame on.