First thing that came to mind on reading this article was "1998 called, they want their suggestion back".

Back in 1998 when the Web was new and cool, Swatch were attempting to market a metric alternative to the 24 hour clock, which they excitingly referred to as 'Internet Time'. It divided the day into 1,000 'beats', and was based around the Central European timezone (GMT + 1) on the basis that Swatch's headquarters are in Biel. Unsurprisingly, the concept went down like a lead balloon.

FWIW, you'd have to think about different timezones anyway. No amount of universally-shared timezones are going to change the physical reality, so they may as well reflect it.

And then you discover that the iPad is out of battery or is for some other reason b0rked.

Manuals are a good idea. Manuals that don't require a battery are an excellent idea. I can see benefits to having both, but I can't understand at all why one would actually stop carrying the dead-tree version.

It's not just the Internet. Spanish press published the identity of said soccer player weeks ago. We must eradicate the teaching of foreign languages in Britain!

Actually it is fair to say that the last decade or so of educational policy already did a pretty good job of that, but at least now we know it's a good thing.

You want to know what is posted on twitter? Ask Google: 'football super injunction'. For me, the first link returned was something called 'CaughtOffside.com', who obviously need to be sued in England until the pips squeak.

maybe in some parallel universe those items still radioactive are indeed stored, but not in this reality.

To be fair, technetium emissions from Sellafield have recently been greatly reduced. Apparently Sellafield launched a new trial treatment in 2003, in which technetium is removed from the liquid waste and, wait for it, stored as medium-level solid radioactive waste. Apparently this led to a 95% reduction in Tc-99 during trials. As a result of this, this cleaning technology was adopted on a permanent basis.

I agree that the Wikipedia article does not contain this factoid. Wikipedia is not the only source of information on the Web.

Modern nuclear age? What?

The Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant began construction in 1966 (Fukushima Dai-ichi dates from 1971). Furthermore, both use General Electric boiling water reactors. The major difference seems to be that Browns Ferry is/was expected to continue to operate until 2033.

Similarly designed technology dating from a similar time has similar flaws. In most areas engineers learn from their mistakes and upgrade regularly for precisely this reason. Then we actually would be in the 'modern nuclear age', and discovering a new flaw would be disturbing news as opposed to being a wholly predictable consequence of expecting to keep dodgy, ancient crap running for well over half a century.

Completely agree with you about the sensationalism of the media, and the vulture lobbies, who are treating this as though everybody's ideological Christmas has come early. The whole feeding frenzy is in very poor taste, foul and dehumanising. Plenty of time for zOMG NUCULAR! once this situation has been resolved. I finally blew a fuse last night and put the BBC, Telegraph, Guardian and Independent in my hosts file underneath the entry identifying the Daily Mail as 127.0.0.1. In the short term, turning off the TV is probably the best move, but perhaps it would be worth sending a complaint to the BBC. The coverage of this has hit rock bottom in quality.

Be all that as it may, I wish you all the best - that all goes well, that your wife's family and friends are OK, and that the area recovers quickly from the earthquake damage and everything else that has happened since.

Chicken.

I wish your analysis were accurate, because it would be the simplest possible solution to the whole problem if it could be boiled down to personal responsibility. However, some people are allergic - not "OMG autism!" allergic, but simply allergic - to components like egg protein or gelatin. Those who were perfectly able to take the vaccine and decided not to because "OMG autism!" are increasing the risk for those who can't, and have to depend on others to do the responsible thing.

To compare with the examples you give - people have the right to drink, but not to undertake activities that might harm others while they are intoxicated (ie. driving, etc). Similarly, they are free to smoke, but there are increasingly strict limits on where and when - I'm in Britain and my personal opinion on the nanny state is unprintable, but I see that New York just banned smoking on beaches and in parks, so I guess Britain is not alone.

I find in a humid client jeans will smell within days.

What job title do you have? I doubt there's a large waiting line for a job that requires you to put on jeans and then spend days immersed in damp clientele.

Yeah, I know. Although before they start solving differential equations, they need to work out the model, which in itself is a potentially intractable problem on this scale. IMO, the proposal should've been junked by reviewers at the first stage on the basis that, whilst noone expects this sort of funding to actually achieve anything concrete other than paying IBM for another round of supercomputer hardware, it's good practice to politely pretend that they're not entirely, overtly kicking the arse out of the system. Taking data they know nothing about from point A and collecting it in point B does not necessarily mean that they have a clue about what they're storing, let alone what it signifies or how it may be processed or modelled.

As Douglas Adams put it:

'I think,' said Dirk, 'you will be impressed. Consider this. An intractable problem. In trying to find the solution to it I was going round and round in little circles in my mind, over and over the same maddening things. Clearly I wasn't going to be able to think of anything else until I had the answer, but equally clearly I would have to think of something else if I was ever going to get the answer. How to break this circle? Ask me how.'
'How?' said Miss Pearce obediently, but without enthusiasm.
'By writing down what the answer is!' exclaimed Dirk. 'And here it is! With the result that I am now able to turn my mind to fresh and intriguing problems, like, for instance...'
He took the piece of paper, covered with its aimless squiggles and doodlings, and held it up to her.
'What language,' he said in a low, dark voice, 'is this written in?'
Miss Pearce continued to look at it dumbly.
Dirk flung the piece of paper down, put his feet up on the table, and threw his head back with his hands behind it.
'You see what I have done?' he asked the ceiling, which seemed to flinch slightly at being yanked so suddenly into the conversation. 'I have transformed the problem from an intractably difficult and possibly quite insoluble conundrum into a mere linguistic puzzle. Albeit,' he muttered, after a long moment of silent pondering, 'an intractably difficult and possibly insoluble one.'

It's a safe assumption.

Actually, it's probably a safe assumption that this is just a way to extract $1.3 billion of funding out of the EU in order to pay for a bunch of supercomputers and interdisciplinary research. It's apparently part of something called FuturICT, a submission to the EU's Flagships initiative, which is to say that it is meant to be ambitious - here a codeword for 'infinitely improbable'. FET Flagships are long term initiatives on a budget of around 100 M€ Euros per year.

You can get a copy of the proposal from here. It's a bunch of hand-wavy maybes. Most of the proposal is taken up with the interesting observation that knowing stuff about stuff is a prerequisite to revolutionising education, understanding and fixing the world economy, identifying financial crises before they happen, identifying innovations before they catch on, solving transport problems, creating a whole new scientific paradigm ('science 2.0'), fixing energy consumption and making us all safer. However, they have letters of support from George Soros and various other luminaries, so presumably the EU will assume (or already assumed) that they know what they are talking about.

Legally, LocalH is correct. The wording of the law relates to use rather than ownership; if you're using it to receive or record broadcast TV, emphasis on broadcast, then you are liable for the licence. If you're not using it then it suffices to take a cursory step towards demonstrating that you do not use it - like not plugging it into an aerial, and ensuring that it is not tuned. You'd need to use the epoxy approach in some other European countries that take a different approach to TV Licencing law, but it's hardly worth it in the UK.

The licence requirement deals only with the action - not the capability - of receiving/recording broadcast TV, which has the intriguing side effect that catching up with programs on iPlayer is perfectly legal without a TV licence. Similarly, watching sports shows on the Web as they are being streamed (broadcast) is illegal without a TV licence. And if your fillings picked up ITV, you would have to get a TV licence for the receiver in your skull.

The level of enforcement is variable, as the enforcement is done by 'visiting officers' who are very much like any other rent-a-goon on a small wage, with one exception: a good part of their salary is paid through performance-related bonuses (commission). This gives them an excellent motivation to lie, cheat and generally harrass their way through life ('oh, the law's changed, you need a licence for iPods now. No, I can't show you any proof. And I'm not leaving until you sign this, and if you don't sign it I'll have you arrested and fined £5,000'). They will lie like a rug, partly because they barely know the law themselves, partly because they don't think you know the law, but mostly because they need the money for whatever it is Blattaria sapiens do in their free time.

I haven't had a TV for a decade, so I've had a lot of practice in dealing with TVL enforcement. It's true that the BBC is incredibly popular, but like diet soda, it's an acquired taste. We lost the habit because we couldn't afford it, being students. Having lost the habit, the BBC now tastes like carbonated aspartame.

Not sure I agree with you here. That's very much 'in the box' thinking, if you like, and it comes from a mindset that believes very strongly that even admitting to the existence of other options is marketing suicide.

How about, 'Here on the left side of the stand, we discuss the strong, stable and supported OpenOffice.Org, which is insert marketing spiel for OO.o here, and here on the right you will see the bleeding-edge, exciting, cheerfully compatible LibreOffice, which is insert marketing spiel for fork here'? Direct competition will only happen here as and when Oracle definitively fails to compromise, which is to say, sometime next week.

Marketing deals with nuanced choices all the time; Cheap 'n Cheerful, Traditionally Produced At Twice The Price, Extra Hot With Chilis. There are many possible ways to market across a range in a manner that is not particularly offensive to either and optimises involvement with both products, and it happens all the time with open source. The customer can then choose whichever fits in best with their own perceived needs, and will usually get what they deserve (if not what they actually needed).

Oracle's stiff-necked attitude is damaging for all concerned.

Authors in academia are only rarely given a significant upfront advance, unless the author is famous and/or notorious and/or appears on TV, Star Trek or The Economist.

The intro textbooks may actually carry an advance, but the low-volume specialist works either won't, or will carry a tiny advance, as in a few hundred dollars. General interest technical books make more, as in maybe 5-10k.

People write academic stuff for tenure, not for cash in hand. Only about three hundred people will ever care enough about shoelace manufacture in ancient Rome to bother reading the author's magnum opus. Essentially, specialist academic publishing seems to follow the rules laid down by print-on-demand organisations.