Had the Spitfire not been a newer design that the German equivalent, this post might be in German (well, actually it wouldn't because my father would have gone to a concentration camp, but you know what I mean).

Unfortunately I make it the Saving HIgh-Tech INnovators From EgregIous Legal Disputes, or SHIT IN FEILD Bill. Spelling error apart, this is indeed likely to be as successful as trying to persuade bears not to poo in the woods.

It is in much of Europe. You're not suggesting that the freedom loving democratic USA has more corruption in Government than us Euro-weenies, are you?

The last British government (you know, the American(Murdoch)-Australian(Blair) one was heading down the same route, but amazingly most British judges are rather sensible and tend to discourage frivolous and exploitative lawsuits; companies that have tried it have gone bankrupt or even had the Law Society feeling their collars. Perhaps we should send you some redcoats like we did in 1814.

Yes, this is not intended to be taken seriously.

You must be awful fun when talking to customers. They tend not to understand the distinction between "shall" and "should".

"there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item" - in other words, this is a case where the feature should ALWAYS be applied to generic software because that must deal with all circumstances, not just "particular" ones.

It really should not be hard to have a popup that says "This web page wants to create local storage on your computer allow/disallow", for instance, and then let the user decide if this is a particular circumstance.

Indeed. And, since marketing persuaded the world that they wanted all-touchscreen phones, BlackBerry has been in the doo-doos. Yet I played with the most basic BB the other day - the 9320. It's built like Nokia used to be and it has a surprising amount of functionality. I didn't expect the GPS to work on such a cheap phone, but it was accurate. It's a little bit slow, but far more capable than a cheap Android phone. I now want a Q10, when it comes out.

The volume industry is driven by fashion, not function.

At one point in a voyage, at night, the Matthew was intercepted by a military ship - probably American - who demanded to know what she was and got the reply "Sailing ship Matthew, on a voyage from Bristol to Rio". The immediate reply was "I don't believe you, identify yourself correctly or we will board you".

The captain instructed that the Diesel be started and then had all the display lights turned on - it must have been quite impressive out there in the Southern Atlantic. Very soon after a one word message arrived: "Sorry".

Auxiliary Diesels on sailing ships can come in very handy at times.

No, that wasn't the reason. It was the phrase in the GGPP "could not dilate more than three inches". Ships don't dilate, they expand. I was commenting on the abuse of English.

Prostitution yes. Affairs, no.

Upper class women were often left at home for long periods while their husbands went off to rule the Empire. The result was a culture of affairs with men of similar social standing, and also of sex with the servants. The latter was in some ways a form of prostitution; in exchange for a clean indoor job involving standing around handing out food and drink and shifting luggage, all board, lodging and clothes provided, a footman was expected to service the mistress and perhaps her friends. In a divorce case (which was really considered scandalous) it was not done to cite other parties lower than one's own social status, i.e. bonking servants didn't count.

Not in all cases obviously, perhaps not in a majority, but the rules have been well documented.

A friend of ours who died a few years back was the son of a West Indian jazz musician and an upper-class British woman.

His mother used to tell the story of how his father went to ask for her hand in marriage. This was early 1920s.

Daddy: "So, er, how much exactly do you earn? Will you be able to keep my daughter properly?"
WIJM: "About £65" (roughly an average annual income for a worker of the period)

Daddy: "That isn't very much"
Daughter: "That's a week, Daddy."
Daddy: "Oh. Er...where were we thinking of for the ceremony?

The past is often not how Hollywood imagines it.

What makes you think modern cruise ships are any different? A hole in the bottom and the thing nearly capsized in shallow water. Many of those cruise ships cannot use the North Atlantic in winter.

Airships have to have light superstructures to be able to have adequate lift, and they have a very large surface area. To the best of my knowledge nobody has come up with a convincing way of safely landing (or taking off) an airship in high winds. Modern materials, good as they are, are still not sufficiently stronger than materials available in the 1930s to make a safe airship.

I wasn't aware that hydrogen was corrosive.It can cause embrittlement of steels, but that is quite a separate issue.

Three inches extra dilation? She seemed to think it was important.

One of the greatest European epics, the Chanson de Roland, is about a lost battle. Then there are the Greek tragedies. The Titanic story is a pure tragedy because the builders and the operators of the ship were brought low by hubris and by tempting Fate. That is why it has cultural resonance.

In one of the ironies of history, the Titanic was equipped with wireless but the operator was too busy sending the important messages of the VIP travellers to make distress calls. It was the early 20th century equivalent of people making Facebook status updates "Ship is sinking, lol" rather than dialling 911.

Given what happened to the R101, travelling by airship could literally be a unique experience for the last lot of passengers. And indeed, their last ever experience.

Face it, balloons either use an irreplaceable resource far too important to waste on vanity projects (helium), or they are insanely dangerous by modern standards.