Yes, we have too much surveillance. And it hasn't reduced crime by an amount commensurate with the cost, IMO.

The English used to refer to England standing in for the whole of the UK. A synecdoche if you will. So, the monarch of this torpid islands used to sign themselves King or Queen of England, and that would apply to the whole. The multiple volume Oxford History of England was, you guessed it, a history of the UK. It has changed, particularly since devolution. We are British now, apparently, although this tends to apply those outside of London.

Good posting. A page turner no less ;-)

I thought they patented windows a long time ago. Hey ho.

And I find myself ... not caring. I've not heard anything about Windows 7 that makes it compelling.

XP on netbook: that truly stank of desperation, and will be marked as the point when MS truly lost it. And they had to screw the netbook spec with a hard-disk to shoe-horn it into place. Epic failure.

Are these connected to the Facebook quizzes? a lot of these are infuriatingly ill-spelt.

Noting ephemera in books has along and noble history in books. I've owned literature study books absolutely crawling with notes, sometimes useful, some not. But that was in the day when second-hand books were more plentiful. I prefer the notes to be in pencil as I could rub them out. People who use high-lighters should be shot.

I've also owned books which had to be sliced open. That's right: books came with the pages folded and you had to cut each fold to read the individual pages.

Now that books are becoming virtualised, that relationship will change. It will be a great loss if we cannot record our thoughts with the book. Indeed, using hyper-links, I think annotating books will become a deeper exercise.

Religionism is the worst of all isms: it blinds you to everything but the gods at the center.

Actually, the Romans were reluctant to spend any money at all on their forces; forcing Generals to bulk out their forces with less reliable native auxillaries.

What will bring you to your knees is your inability to keep spending to a level to compete with, say, China.

We've just come off the back of the biggest glut of easy money yet not one ISP seems to have taken advantage of it to lay more fibre. If there was an easy bet to be made five years ago, betting that bandwidth demand would increase would be that bet.

There was easy money out there, yet no one seems to have taken advantage of it. No one seems to have invested in laying more cable in the last quarter. It seems that most capitalists these days are risk-averse. Which to me is very sad.

I was a big fan in the day so when I saw the upcoming new series, I obtained a copy of the first series. It hadn't aged well. Worse, the new program was ... just ... hideous, and utter shit as AC says.

A lot - no, nearly all - of the people who lost their money in the recent scams were nearly all highly educated people.

Highly educated != the ability to see a scam coming.

But I see you're someone with an axe to grind just looking for a hook ...

Your distortion of history is ... unbelievable.

Star Wars never worked, would never have worked, was never built, will never be built.

What Reagan may have done was probably hasten the end of the Soviet Union by forcing it to spend like crazy on weapons programs. Then again, I think he was lucky. The Soviet Union was ripe for collapse anyway, and it just happened on his watch. I think that's the most likely explanation.

What Reagan DID do was almost cause WWIII: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83 After 83, he entered into a period of rapprochement with the Soviet Union.

indeed. I live by the scientific method. And google.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7540822.stm

so ... maybe

"There is currently no evidence from clinical trials in humans that injecting or consuming vitamin C is an effective way to treat cancer.

"Some research even suggests that high doses of antioxidants can make cancer treatment less effective, reducing the benefits of radiotherapy and chemotherapy."

The human body discards Vitamin C once it has reached saturation.

Actually, your slur on poor Gore is quite amusing.

I suppose you mean Jim Bakker - that's two k's - whose benighted career had the virtue of being somewhat racey. When I was watching the US elections that Gore lost, I found myself hoping - desperately - that Gore would find the common touch, some excitement, some charisma, some racey-ness, if you will. Alas, no. I felt I was watching a dull, provincial bank-clerk clearly out of his depth. And so it goes.