A contract does not require a signature, it requires a meeting of minds. A signature is one way of demonstrating this. Accepting the pay cheque and showing up for work is another.

How on earth are you buying CFLs with only a 3-year warranty for $12 each? The only ones I've seen that are that expensive come with a 10-20 year warranty. 5 years is about the shortest I've seen and that's on ones that are under $1.

The youngest CFL I've replaced was, I think, 3 years old. I left most of them behind when I moved house after living in the same place for 7 years and most of the CFLs had never been replaced since I installed them shortly after moving in. I was a poor student back then, so all of them were the absolute cheapest that I could find.

If you're rewiring and going all-LED, you can apparently save quite a bit with a DC main for lighting. And this also makes it easy to have USB and similar outlets for device charging. I wish more new builds would install a DC main alongside the AC...

Maybe you're not looking very hard. Typical incandescents get 16 lumens per Watt, CFLs get 60 lm/W. That means that your 100W incandescent would generate around 1600lm, and you'd need a 26W CFL for equivalent. That's not a round figure, but 25W is and a 10 second search tells me I can pick up 25W spiral CFLs which are about the same size as an incandescent for around £5.

I was actually a bit surprised by those numbers (maybe Wikipedia is wrong?), because I found that the light level increased when I replaced a pair of 100W incandescents with 18W CFLs around 10 years ago. I mostly now buy 12W ones, because they're cheap and the fact that they're much brighter per Watt than incandescents means that I can put them in lights that are only rated for a 40W bulb and have more of them.

That said, I started using CFLs about 16 years ago (largely because I got tired of replacing bulbs). The first generation ones were noticeably dimmer after 2-3 years (but had already paid for themselves in energy savings, so were just demoted to lamps that didn't want to be as bright). The first ones died after 5-6 years. Since then, I've not bought a light fitting that doesn't comfortably fit a large CFL bulb. Most lampshades do, so it's only the smaller free-standing ones that are a problem. I like the Japanese-style ones that are a vertical cylinder of paper and these will happily take CFLs that are brighter than 60W incandescents, but won't take anything hotter than a 40W incandescent.

UNIT is not a British organisation, it's under UN control.

That's the same logic people used for choosing C, and just past the 25th anniversary of the first remote exploit of a buffer overflow vulnerability, it's still top of the list of causes of CVEs.

No one cares how much students in the UK protest, because they don't vote. Students are a demographic with one of the worst turnouts in elections. For allegedly intelligent people, it's surprising how few seem to realise the correlation between this and getting shafted by their elected officials. Go back to the '60s, and they had a lot more influence because they were much more likely to vote.

Only if you've got a really old printer. Remember, DOS predates abstraction layers and clean printer APIs. You print from DOS by opening the serial or parallel port and sending some data over it. If you've got a DOS program that can print to PostScript printers, then you're better off printing to a file from DOSBox and then printing the result from the host OS.

That said, there's little reason to use most DOS business applications these days. There are typically open source alternatives that are far better as they aren't written with such tight resource constraints in mind and can reuse GUI toolkits and so on (again, remember that DOS programs had to come with their own embedded GUI system and for most of them 4MB of RAM was a lot - a modern program can use more than that for the window buffer). I still occasionally fire up the Psion Series 3A emulator in DOSBox (if you tweak it a bit, it will run at 640x480) and use the spreadsheet though, because I've not found another one that's as easy to use with just a keyboard and constantly moving my hand from keyboard to mouse becomes annoying.

EA released Command and Conquer Gold as a free download a few years ago. That's the Windows 95 version using the Red Alert engine (so high-resolution 640x480 graphics!), but with the same game as the original. It ran quite nicely in WINE when I tried it (a long time go now, may need an old version as WINE doesn't monotonically improve, but according to the apps db it works fine and is rated 'gold', which seems appropriate...).

As a game? I vaguely recall enjoying Doom on release more than Quake on release. I enjoyed Duke Nukem 3D a lot more than either. The thing that made Quake special wasn't the game, it was that it was an off-the-shelf game engine with a free SDK. All of the game-specific behaviour (including things like the flight paths of projectiles) was contained in a bytecode file that had the source and compiler provided. For a while, I had about 500MB of mods for Quake installed (the game itself was around 50MB). Doom had all of the game behaviour hard coded, so all that mods could do was change the visual appearance. People wrote rally games and flight simulators in the Quake engine as mods. There was nothing like QTank, AirQuake, Quake Horrorshow, or Quake Rally for Doom. There definitely wasn't anything like Team Fortress, which accounted for the majority of the time I spent playing Quake.

I tried taking a shuttle to the Minneapolis Hilton on my last trip to the US. I was told it would be there in 20 minutes and would take 25 minutes. For a tenth the price, there's a light rail service that runs every 15 minutes, takes about 25 minutes, and stops 5 minutes walk (or, for the exceptionally lazy, a short free bus ride) away from the hotel. I arrived at the hotel at about the same time as the shuttle. Given the price of the flight and the room, I'd have been happy to spend the money for the shuttle if it had got me there faster, but paying ten times as much for no time saving (and to sit in a more cramped form of transport - the light rail had loads of space, the shuttle was packed) didn't appeal.

At least in London, there are inspectors who pose as members of the public and take taxi rides. If they are refused or the driver doesn't take the most direct route, he can lose his taxi license.

Part of the reason for Orkut's decline in the US was that it was overrun by Portuguese speakers (mostly Brazilian) who posted (in Portuguese) in every English-language discussion, making the system unusable by anyone who didn't speak Portuguese. For the same reason, it remained popular where Portuguese was the national language or commonly spoken.

Anyway, you've got to love the message from Google: Use social networks, you're giving a third party the ability to kill your online presence and the identity that you use for communicating with your friends on a whim!

At the very least, the majority of advertising is aiming to make people buy things that they don't need. Beyond that, it's often stuff that's unhealthy or inferior to alternatives available at a lower price.

No they're not. For example, count the number of adverts that you're aware of in a film some time. Then look up how many careful product placements there are. See also, paid product reviews, social network endorsements, and so on. Most people are aware of a small fraction of the marketing targeted at them.