Really? I've seen cars which pre-dated the Model T and are still road-legal (at least in the UK) at vintage/veteran car events.

It is expensive to maintain (and run, if you drive long distances - at least compared to modern cars which are vastly more fuel-efficient) older cars properly if you're used to something <3 years old - but compared to the cost of maintaining an average 1980s (ie 30-year old) car, there's not a huge amount of difference. The main difficulty with replacement parts is you need to find an engineering shop which will do one-offs for those more often than not. But there are a *lot* of people (not owners) who will do this as (at least in part) a labour of love, just for the pleasure of seeing these machines continue to run.

Fuel also isn't a real issue. Leaded petrol (and additives for unleaded) are still available, at least in the UK, from specialist suppliers. For older cars, it was never an issue anyway - as they were never built for leaded petrol anyway and the move back to unleaded petrol was actually a positive for those owners if they hadn't converted their cars. Have a look here for example.

That might open a whole can of worms. I imagine the interaction between DMCA and Magnusson-Moss Act is pretty ripe for some protracted and expensive litigation (and as usual, I suspect the lawyers will end up th biggest winners from that)

If a human can view the content and work out where the ads are, so (ultimately) can a computer - the obvious fix for now is that Greasemonkey can be used to sort those out.

I'd also add though, this may well be heavily counter-productive for many sites. There is very little truly unique content out there in reality - and as a consequence it is worth far less to the marginal user than the site owners often think it is. Some of the sites which lose viewers because of this may simply say "good riddance" as those users are a net drain on resources - but that's a dangerous path to take as those people are, I would imagine, more likely to be either influential opinion-formers (who drive much more traffic to the site who won't block ads), or providing user-generated content which has value in itself.

Remember Tony Blair's chauffeur driving him down the M4 bus lane? I can easily see this being abused for "politician or important official is late for a meeting" type situations too (in fact those will be the more visible cases).

Actually I'd be quite happy if the police were banned from engaging in high-speed car chases. They just create more danger for everyone else on the road, encouraging those being chased to drive even more dangerously as well as the risk that the police cars themselves cause an accident. There are other ways of catching criminals which do not create such danger for the rest of us.

Utter BS. It's just people who enjoy being "above the law" wanting to be *more* above the law and feel important. Noone should be above the law. They are not an emergency service and they are not police. The only justification for speeding should be to get *to* an emergency situation as a first responder, ie paramedic or fire crew.

This is interesting because it relates to one of the problems I have wondered about with Bitcoin for a while. Largely, trust in Bitcoin (at least for me) depends on the idea that "anyone" can (and will) verify a block and hence it is difficult to cheat. But as mining becomes uneconomic for anyone who doesn't have specialised rigs, the number of people who can realistically and economically verify blocks starts to shrink, potentially quite rapidly.

This effect is irrespective of the USD/whatever value of a Bitcoin and of the absolute number of Bitcoins earned in a mining transaction - it's simply about economies of scale in the marginal cost for mining which leads to marginal revenue being below the marginal cost for most people using the currency - ie the gradual appearance of a barrier to entry in mining for smaller players. This in turn magnifies the risk of collusion. Thus as Bitcoin becomes more popular, it also becomes less trustworthy, which is not a property you would ideally want it to have.

In reality I doubt this is likely to be a big problem as most people are willing to trust central banks already, compared to which Bitcoin is always likely to be a least a little bit "better"; but it is an interesting philosophical question.

Actually, those calculations are not entirely useless. Yes there needs to be a verification of signatures and transactions BUT this process also needs to be "hard" to achieve so that I can't just invite six of my friends to immediately verify both double-spend transactions I have just posted. In turn, the fact that these need to be "hard" transactions is why there is an economic incentive to perform them. What's more, you also need the "hard" work to be dependent on the specific ordering of the blockchain so that you can't solve a bunch of it in advance but not share the results until you are ready to send your double-spending transactions to the blockchain. Think of it as similar to (though not the same as) the idea that you want a password hashing function to be slow (have a high number of rounds/good salts/etc) to make brute-force attacks harder.

There are potential alternative scheme which mean the hard work is less "useless" (e.g. protein folding) but I think it's highly likely that these only really work if you have a system with more centralised tracking of the "work" (to produce the path-dependency); at that point, you could simply ask "why not just trust a central authority to verify the transactions in the first place"...

Utter rubbish. Whatever you think about Bitcoin, stability of exchange rate has nothing to do with whether something is a "currency" or not. The Mexican Peso dropped by nearly 50% in less than a week in 1994. The Russian Rouble dropped by 70% in less than 6 months in 1998. Argentina's peso devalued by around 75% in a similarly short space of time in 2002 (including at least a 30% drop overnight). There are lots and lots of examples of rapid currency devaluations throughout history.

I'm also in Europe and in my experience the lifetime of CFLs has been approximately equal to the incandescents they replaced, but the failure pattern is different. Incandescents used to see a bunch failing when we got the first onset of colder weather each winter, with a bunch of bulbs going at roughly the same time; CFLs fail more evenly throughout the year but nonetheless they do fail at about the same average age, I'd guess c.12 months. The failure modes I've seen are that they simply don't start any more, start flickering like mad or just get very dark. No fires or the like.

The other issues with CFLs also all still hold - slow to start, bad colour temperature, and most significantly mislabeling ("100W" equivalent bulbs are reallty more like 50-60W, and the "true" 100W equivalents are much more expensive and difficult to find).

Overall though the impact on our lives has been pretty minimal because we basically avoided using them in areas where we spend long amounts of time. Firstly, we already had halogen bulbs/fittings in some of these areas (using a dimmer halogen still gives a nice quality of light) and secondly where we didn't we now use candles a lot more than we used to. Actually candlelight is nicer even than incandescents used to be so in a weird way it's sort of been a positive.

In the UK, unlike in the US, there is no longer automatic sovereign immunity for the government from suits for contract or tort. However the legislation which governs the intelligence services is so very broadly drawn that I suspect that anything and everything they do is always legal (or, at least, can be authorised ex post facto by a minister without the involvement of parliament or a court and thus made legal). That leaves, perhaps, seeking a judicial review of the authorising minister's decision but I'm not sure how successful you might be there. This is what GCHQ was boasting about in some of the "marketing" slides which were published by the Guardian.

He didn't jump any ticket barrier. The "jumped the ticket barrier" comment was attributed at the time to an eyewitness but it has been alleged that it was in fact one of the police officers involved (and if that's true then it appears consistent with the idea of the Met realising their mistake and trying to smear him through this and other 'off the record' briefings to the press with the aim of making themselves look less incompetent).

Actually, only half the victims could have realised this (at least directly). The websites being spoofed are victims here as well - after all it does your reputation no good at all if someone spoofs your website to serve malware. Best case, you look like an incompetent admin; worst case, someone thinks you did it deliberately and starts telling a lot of their friends. It's akin to a murderer framing an innocent party for his crime - that innocent party is a victim of a crime too. I suspect these agencies have legal immunity unfortunately but if I had proof this had happened to a website I owned, I'd be thinking about what legal redress I could seek.

As an outsider, the political problem with Obamacare is obvious - it simply overpromised massively. Not surprisingly, it turns out that many people will have to pay a bit (and in a large number of cases a lot) more so that other people can pay a lot less and/or get a lot more out of the system - that's just how the maths works out. So Obamacare is, and always was, fundamentally a political deal between generations and between classes about who pays for what - but that was never made clear enough at the time, in my opinion because the Obama administration was far too worried about its short-term poll ratings and was (from what I could tell at the time) obsessed with the law being seen to be "popular" at the time it was passed.

I suspect this is where Romney's and Obama's proposals differed most - in the rhetroric which would have been attached to a Romney-led reform. Because Romney would have been coming from a position of political strength (Democrats would have been in favour of any kind of reform in the direction he proposed), he could have afforded to make the "grand argument" without taking much risk; whereas for Obama the risks were greater, hence he did not.

The problem the administration now have is that because noone was straight about how this would work at the time, a lot of people feel that what is now happening was never the political bargain that was entered in to. As a consequence, they feel that they and their fellow voters (including, crucially, those who were in favour at the time) were taken advantage of. Many of this group would likely have grudgingly supported the actual deal as a case where effectively their "side" was outvoted if it was concluded more openly at the time - but the way the changes were marketed leaves them feeling like the administration lied to people to get the law passed.

This leaves the administration with a problem which cannot be solved in any satisfying way without simply repealing Obamacare and starting again after a fresh election with a fresh president. As this is unlikely to happen I suspect the programme will be unpopular for many years to come and get blamed for all sorts of ills, some of which will be its fault but many of which will not.

I don't think people on their phones mid-flight are likely to be a significant problem in the near future at least. For one thing, you're rather unlikely to get signal at a high altitude unless the airline installs repeaters on the plane (if you fly a lot you might notice every so often on flights that about 5 minutes before landing people suddenly start to receive a lot of texts; that's because they left their phones on by accident but didn't have signal until the plane got lower). And of course you can guarantee if the airlines do that it will be expensive to use, at least for the first few years, and therefore not used very much for calls - how often did you ever see people using AirFones when they were still installed in nearly every seat after all? (though people's phones would still ring with a repeater which could get annoying I suppose).

For another, aeroplanes are actually very noisy environments - it's amazing how quickly the human brain can simply tune that background noise out (which works since it's pretty constant and unchanging noise) - but unless you have something like a jawbone headset, the person on the other end of the call might have a bit of a hard time hearing you so most calls are likely to be pretty short.