... engage in a complex procedure of transferring passengers, then needing to circle back round (potentially taking ages to get back to their 'route')

Except it eliminates this part...

The train can't even continue before the carriage meets back up because people who just got into it may have to move into other carriages in the same train.

Maybe trains are different in the US, but on the ones I'm familiar with one can easily change carriages while the train is in motion?

In the UK back in the late 1800s/early 1900s I believe that trains often used to drop off carriages as they passed stations so the people going to that station would roll into it and stop while the rest of the train carried on

This.

Why have trams catch up to HSTs, engage in a complex procedure of transferring passengers, then needing to circle back round (potentially taking ages to get back to their 'route')

Much better to have the trams double as carriages. When you want to get off at a destination you simply go and sit in one of the last few carriages and when the train passes the station they automatically detach and roll up to the platform. At the same time trams with new passengers leave the platform, catch up with the train and attach as replacement carriages to the end.

It's perfectly true that there isn't a "correct" temperature for the Earth. In the past the planet has been both much hotter than now and much colder and, well look at that, it seems to have come through OK.

However what with the predicted extensive desertification, rising sea levels, more extreme weather conditions and what have you, CC is likely to be somewhat inconvenient for the soon-to-be 7 billion people wandering about.

Google, champion of the browser-based app, is inadvertently showing us the dark side of the 'cloud' concept.

When a installed app is discontinued by the provider you still get to use the last version for as long as you want.

When a cloud app gets discontinued, it's just gone.

10. Wallpaper/paint. We're thinking of repainting the living room at the moment and just trying to pick a colour. As I sure everyone is aware not only is this a non-trivial amount of work, even with tester pots you can never be sure what the final result will look like until you've finished.

With full colour E-Ink you could pick a different shade or pattern at the press of a few buttons and change it every day (or have it constantly changing if you wanted).

Once subscribed they will stay if the service is good quality, not caring what OS or version is running in the background.

Or will they stay because MS doesn't allow them to download all their documents or transfer them to another service (or allows them to be downloaded, but they're in proprietary formats that are useless for migration purposes anyway)?

The trick is to define what you mean by "criminal exploitation".

Selling investors derivatives composed of sub-prime mortgages, but cunningly obfuscated so they appear to be valuable rather than nearly worthless - does that count as criminal exploitation?

Offering a high ranking government official a high paying job for when their term of office ends, with the unspoken understanding that the official votes or regulates in certain ways - does that count as criminal exploitation?

Producing report after report full of deliberately misleading facts and statistics, in order to convince politicians that your industry is losing billions and the economy is suffering as a result - to persuade them to enact unnecessary and dangerous legislation - does that count as criminal exploitation?

The problem is you're exactly wrong.

There is absolutely nothing written in the theory of capitalism that says the government cannot get involved in the game. In fact in its purest form capitalism argues that everyone is a free agent - including politicians.

The problem is this is not sort of government the founders envisioned and its not the government America (or any other country) needs. If we didn't already know that unfettered, largely unregulated capitalism isn't really what we should be aiming for, the recent banking crises should have made it clear.

The government is supposed to be "by the people, of the people, for the people" - while it's fine to allow the workings of capitalism a certain amount of latitude, it's supposed to curb it's excesses and rein it in where necessary and put the needs of society ahead of allowing individual people or corporations from accruing too much wealth or power.

I was under the impression that politicians took an oath to uphold this principle - apparently this sort thing is treated as a joke these days.

On that note, intelligent design, in a true scientists eye, will hold the same merit as the theory of evolution until one of the two is supported by facts and a deeper understanding of the world. Both could, essentially, have a lot of support going, one could pull ahead only to be overtaken by the other again.

Well ... no. If only you hadn't picked ID you'd have been OK.

What you say is true as far as it goes - competing scientific theories are compared by gathering evidence and seeing which matches best. The bit you're missing is a little thing called "falsifiability".

A theory is only a true scientific theory if you are able to define what would be required to disprove it. TOE has this property - all you need is to find some lifeform that indisputably could not have got to where it is today through evolution.

Since an all-knowing omnipotent being can, by definition, counter any attempt to disprove his/her/its existence - ID is not and cannot be a scientific theory.

In case you think this is just sophistry, this actually happened to Newton's Theory of Gravitation not so long ago - Newton's theory held sway for centuries, but was displaced by General Relativity when it was discovered that (among other things) Newton's theory could not account for the precession of Mercury, whereas GR accurately predicts this effect.

If any of that starts selling, it will collapse the market down to nickels and dimes.

If it does, that'll be my cue to buy $100 worth and hope the price climbs back up again. And since I probably won't be the only one, it probably will.

Biggest problem with sourceforge and has been for ages.

You'll do a search and find a project description that makes you go "Wow! That's exactly what I'm looking for!", then you get the disappointment a few seconds later of realising that writing the description is actually the entirety of the effort ever expended on the project.

Sourceforge really need to purge all these vapourware projects.

I thought he was pretty good in Jumper.

Ahhh, that explains Bananaman! Thanks for clearing that up.

When River shoots at the spaceman(woman) and misses (despite being already established as an excellent shot) she mutters something like "Yes, of course" which could mean she knows her shots went wide because it would be a paradox for her to shoot her younger self.