Not that rare, really. A couple of months ago I was trekking through hill country in northern Burma, and several villages that I passed through had teeny tiny hydroelectric schemes on the go that provided the only electricity they had. There was very little of it, so they were careful about how it was apportioned, but they didn't need much, either. And all they needed to do this was the river that passed by and provided them all with their water.

The world's littered with little riverside villages like this, and they could all do the micro-hydro thing. They aren't going to be producing 20kW, probably not even 2kW, but in these cases it's 2kW more than they had before without recourse to generators.

Because of course you're Very Important And In A Hurry, right? Tell me, what were you going to do with those few seconds out of your day that it takes to safely move round a cyclist?

They're entitled to use the road just the same as you are. You have no more right to be on it than them. Share the road.

I mean, making an electric car out of heavy stainless steel is rather missing the point.

I wonder will they remember to design in windows that open this time?

If you think that's good, you should check out Memolane. They've been doing this with Facebook and quite a few other sites for a while.

I remember reading many moons ago that Colossus was able to do code-breaking in a couple of hours that a Pentium II-class machine would take a day and a half to do. The beauty of designing towards a single purpose, I suppose.

To be fair, though, WPP has more arms than a sackful of octpuseseses. You're bound to find patterns in there if you look for them. Also, because it is such a many-headed beast, most WPP agencies have nothing to do with each other, so a multi-pronged attack ranging across them is unlikely.

And make the same stupid mistakes again?

How's about we just learn to be better neighbours where we are?

How the heck would you expect them to post on here saying so?

Durr.

Seriously, who wrote it, Jeremy Clarkson? It just stinks of negative PR by somebody with an axe to grind. Slashdot should really be ashamed of itself for giving such a tirade of obviously biased bullshit such a wide audience.

They'll argue that the blood drains from its head so fast that it loses consciousness in next to no time, so it isn't aware of what's going on.

I think I know who it is but I'm not 100% sure. I'll give you a clue - he's a former editor of a major national tabloid and widely hated. But he's not Piers Morgan.

It's not Alan Shearer. I know who it is but there's no way I'm going posting it here. All I'm saying is that he's not very well known and if I tell you you'll shrug.

Oh, right. What about the letter bomber active in Scotland this very week? Do I even need to mention Northern Ireland?

You wouldn't be conscious when you get there, but you'd wake up.

Again referring to a conversation I had with a private jet pilot the other week, he was talking about how the plane he was flying had an auto-descent function if cabin pressure was lost. This is because at over 40,000ft, you black out so quickly that it's pretty hard for the pilot to get his mask on in time. So the plane immediately bombs to 11,000 feet and levels out. The reason that it goes to this height is that this is when oxygen levels will be high enough to bring people round again.

I was talking to a private jet pilot about this just the other week, actually. Now, they fly quite a bit higher than commercial airliners, at 40-something thousand feet, but he said that in the event of sudden depressurisation, his time of "useful consciousness" would be about six seconds. So if he doesn't get that mask on immediately, everybody's in big trouble. Of course, chances are that the people in the back would be unconscious and even brain-damaged by the time he got to a breathable altitude anyway, but one must do what one can.

So remember kids, if that mask ever drops, don't muck about, get it on right away.