NPR membership: what's that?
Birth control pill: wrong gender.
Non-pharma drug provider: is this a euphemism for weed and stuff?
Car insurance: I don't need to drive, I go to work on a bicycle and I pay for public transport as I use it - I'm not on often enough for a season pass to be worthwhile.
Gym membership: isn't that where people drive for half an hour to get there, spend an hour on an exercise bike, then drive for half an hour to go home again?
Health insurance: well, nice to have, but hardly an essential.

Which brings it down to a choice between home and mobile internet. Home internet's far faster, but I could more easily copy with having only 3G internet connectivity and no cable than I could cope with having cable internet and no mobile phone. So I voted for the mobile.

There is also a huge wall inside the DMZ, separating the two Koreas. SK says their isn't, but it is clearly visible from the North.

Are you going to link us to a satellite image of this wall, or are Google in on the conspiracy too?

I've been reading the odd scraps of information coming out about Taranis for a few years now. Supposedly it was supposed to begin flight trials in 2010; has this happened yet, or have they just shown off the prototype model on the ground to a few media hacks?

There was an interesting conspiracy theory put about a while back that Taranis was only incidentally a scary UAV project - that its real purpose was technology laundering. BAE have had access to American stealth technology through the JSF project; Taranis is a stealth aircraft supposedly developed independently. So if ten years from now BAE start selling stealth drones to every sheikh with a few billion quid in his trousers, they'll say 'oh, this technology is derived from the Taranis project. Nothing to do with the American secrets we were shown while working on the F-35, no, not at all...'

closed, locked down and heavily restricted devices

BusyBox v1.10.2 (Debian 3:1.10.2.legal-1osso30+0m5) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

~ $ sudo gainroot
Root shell enabled.

BusyBox v1.10.2 (Debian 3:1.10.2.legal-1osso30+0m5) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

/home/user #

It like admitting that communism can't produce enough rope, only capitalism can, but they need rope so they deal with capitalists.

Read 1984 closely enough and you'll see this in effect. The despairing ending which everybody remembers is the future imagined as a boot stamping on a human face forever. But what was the first example we saw of the Party's information control in action? Why, it was our hero Winston Smith editing the figures for boot production.

For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot.

Keep stamping, Big Brother. The day's coming soon when you'll run out of boots.

Not to mention that whenever you leveled up, everything else in the game mysteriously leveled up as well, in a way that was so painfully obvious it totally broke my suspension of disbelief. When the wolves mysteriously turned into timber wolves I realized leveling was pointless.

Sounds a lot like Dragon Age. Every monster levels along with you; advance your skills enough and it tells you their level on the mini-map. Every single mook in the room, all the same level, all one level below you.

Massively pissed me off, because it takes away all the 'omg cool now I kick ass!' reward of levelling up. I don't mind the monsters scaling up to harder kinds of monsters; as I levelled up further in Fallout 3 I randomly encountered yao-guai and deathclaws more and more often and that was fine. And I don't mind the game scaling the difficulty up by throwing monsters at me in greater numbers; I feel really good about levelling up when I massacre dozens of a monster type that used to give me a hard time one on one. But I can't accept that the exact same goons I was slaughtering back at the start of the game have all uniformly levelled up alongside me.

4% sure does seem significant. But more interesting is that the measurement is thought to be much more precise because of the method of measurement. Doesn't it seem more likely that it's just not possible to get an accurate measurement with the electron -- like measuring a grape with a yardstick instead of a micrometer?

Maybe, but this is still surprising. Measure a grape with a metre rule, you should still be able to say 'it's between a centimetre and a centimetre and a half.' Measure it with a micrometer, and you'd expect to see a result like 'It's 1.2144 centimetres.' If the micrometer instead measured the grape at 0.7218 centimetres, well, you'd be puzzled. First of all, of course, you'd check you were doing it right. You'd examine your micrometer and make sure you were operating it correctly. You'd recheck how you measured it with the metre rule - is it zero from where the number is printed, or from the edge of the ruler, is the ruler maybe worn down at the edge?

But if all that checked out and you still had this discrepancy, you'd start to wonder if your ruler and your micrometer were really measuring the same units.

Hence the suggestion of new physics. Theoretically the muon should act like a heavy electron - interacting with the proton in just the same way, so that it can be used as a more precise probe on the size of the proton. It would be the micrometer to the electron's metre rule. If it doesn't - if the muon interacts with the proton in some unexpected way so as to throw the measure off - then we've discovered something beyond the standard model.

There are quite a few indications that there is physics beyond the standard model - heavy neutrinos, the abundance of matter over antimatter, the dark matter - and so if we can add this to the list then maybe it can help pin down just what sort of a new theory we're looking for. We've got to have something to do once the good people of Geneva finally hammer us out a Higgs, after all :-)

Google doesn't use the hella prefix consistently. Example:

1 hellagram = 1.0 × 10**27 grams

1 hellabyte = 1.23794004 × 10**27 bytes

Shouldn't that last one be a hebibyte or something?

I guess I could use them for children's birthday parties huh?? Just hope some little girl doesn't think she's cute and rubs it in her hair to make it staticy and BOOM!!!

You've heard, I suppose, the story of George, who played with a Dangerous Toy, and suffered a Catastrophe of considerable Dimensions?

Resources exist to be consumed, and consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None, I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill.

-- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, The Ethics of Greed

Imagine what would happen if terrorists took control of a train and flew it into a building!

A frightening thought indeed!

I feel had the Lib Dems allied with nobody after the election, they'd have gained more long-term respect for sticking to their manifesto.

Oh, bollocks. If they'd done that, nobody would have bothered voting Lib Dem ever again. What would be the fucking point? You vote for a third party and then cross your fingers and hope for a hung Parliament, so that you can maybe get some of your policies enacted in a coalition. If the Lib Dems had been presented their golden opportunity, a hung Parliament, which happens a couple of times in a lifetime, and had just walked away... Never mind doing a deal with the Tories, that would have been the supreme betrayal of their voters.

A Freedom/Repeal bill is great in principle, but it'll never happen in practice. Quite apart from the problem that any repeals will pilloried as Soft On Something, the coalition have very different ideas on what the little people should be free to do: Cons tend to be pro freedom to smoke tobacco and anti freedom to smoke cannabis, and the Dems are t'other way around, for example.

Chances are they'll both be able to agree on repealing 'Stuff That Labour Did'.

Actually, since the Repeal Bill was a Lib Dem manifesto pledge that made it into the Coalition agreement, it might be worthwhile seeing what it was the Liberals had in mind. This might change because the Tories will have their own ideas and they might even bring in some public suggestions from that website (it is just about possible), but I'd expect the bill to end up looking a lot like that one.

No, it's just a God (well, government) given opportunity for libertarians to have a rant, which let's face it, they're very good at.

Bearing in mind that the government is an alliance of broadly left-wing sandal-wearing bearded social liberals and broadly right-wing money-grubbing City-whoring economic deregulators, this might genuinely be a great opportunity for British libertarianism. One way or another you've got a sympathetic ear!

when i saw that when cameron moved into number 10, he only had a simple bed, 1-2 ikea brand stools and whatnot. i said to myself, well, someone who is living that simple has to have some good qualities at least.

Careful with that. He's no common man; both Cameron and Clegg are fantastically posh, so much so that they don't need to flaunt wealth with conspicuous consumption. He's still got his town house in Notting Hill as well; no need to move the best furniture into the prime ministerial residence, is there?