A friend of mine was stopped and cautioned by the police for cycling at 40mph (downhill) in a 30 limit.

Nonsense. Helmets reduce acceleration on impact, and that applies to intra-cranial effects too. Without a helmet, a 12mph fall from 2m is likely to result in a head acceleration of over 1000g in the 2ms or so it takes to stop; helmets are designed to keep that below 300g (often less) by extending the acceleration time to 6-8ms.

In London, the average speed of road traffic is 13mph, dropping to 7mph at peak time. Bicycles are usually the fastest thing on the roads. In big cities, cars are the problem, not the solution.

You've missed one of TrueCrypt's major features: plausible deniability. You can provide keys that unlock encrypted data on your HD. It may not reveal all the data, but it's not possible for your accuser to prove that it's not.

MySQLs handlersocket (included since 5.5) does NoSQL-style read and write operations bypassing the SQL engine. While it has some limitations, it will do >200,000 queries/sec on a low-spec server and there are benchmarks of it doing >750,000 on a 8-core Nehalem (faster than Memcached!), and it's not restricted to in-memory operations. The nice thing is that you can use that for the simpler parts of your app, then use transactional SQL on the same database for more complex operations.

Another one to look at is TokuTek's TokuDB, another InnoDB drop-in replacement, which is particularly good for inserts, low disk use and low-latency replication. They ran a demo doing 1 billion indexed inserts in 7 hours when InnoDB took a week.

For distributed 'cloudy' apps, one of the better choices is Drizzle, which retains the nice bits of MySQL (and MySQL client compatibility) and rewrites all the rest.

I don't think I'll believe MemSQL until Percona have benchmarked it...

> As far as I know no one has created a model of the earth to test global warming or bred a large number of animals to create a new species.

No-one that is, apart from those that have. There have been a fairly large number of the latter, both observing and inducing speciation in plants and animals.

There are plenty of earth models for climatic and other purposes. It's clearly not practical to make physical models, so we have to make do with software ones which don't have such practical constraints. Their accuracy can be tested by seeing if older data can be used to predict more recent data (hindcasting), for example can data gathered from 1900 to 1960 in a given model be used to predict what the conditions were like in the 1960s? If they do, then you might consider some of that model's future predictions trustworthy too. This technique is used to test models of individual parts of an overall climate model, such as temperature changes, cloud actions, El Niño events, gas mixtures etc. Generally these models will only ever get better as research improves and computing power increases. Still, they are an approximation (as all models necessarily are), but as the IPCC said: "Despite such uncertainties, however, models are unanimous in their prediction of substantial climate warming under greenhouse gas increases". More info.

The 'Apple' key's official name is 'command', so yes.

Not encountered ctrl-cmd-D?

OS X has BSD roots and is an officially certified UNIX. Linux is not.

I was just reading about that today. Since issuing loans with fractional reserve is more or less a zero-cost for the bank (apart from a minor admin overhead unrelated to the size of the loan), interest isn't really deserved. So what would happen if interest wasn't payable on loans with no reserve behind them, or perhaps fractionally according to the fraction of reserve? Obviously it would make the loans far less attractive to the banks, but would it also undermine the markets built on the virtual money printing operation they represent (which isn't much to do with the interest)?

Please don't post links to sys-con - they probably stole the content.

Dual G4/867. I've not tried Camino on my old iMac G3/400, but 10.4.5/Safari works just great on there. It's true that Safari did get a lot faster in more recent versions, but I think the biggest speed improvements did also appear in 1.3. For rough timings, the digg.com home page loads in about 2 sec for me in Safari, vs about 6 in Camino. You should try the Schubert IT PDF plugin on 10.3. The built-in version in 10.4/2.0 is the same as in preview anyway, though I do use the Adobe one for slightly better compatibility. Either way, it's trivial to configure PDFs to load in an external helper.