You're right. In future I'll make my sarcasm blatant. Except then, of course, it won't be sarcasm.

I guess you missed the subtlety of the answer you "whooshed" back to, eh?! Sometimes replies can contain sarcasm; mine did.

Java. It's quite a big player in IT job market.

"Proprietary"? No, open source

I'll concede Google is a single company, but the Go developers I've encountered are all outside Google, and speak very warmly of Google's Go team.

Translation: there is much astro-turfing on them thar intarwebs. This ain't it.

She's Qwghlmian? ;-)

Just to clarify, that's 0.1.9.1, not 1.9 - if you're happy with 0.5 it may be worth considering sticking with Firefox 3.5. I stuck with 0.1 because I found the new command structure annoying (I could have learned to live with it, but ultimately I'd prefer Firefox to be up to date more than I'd prefer the latest and greatest Ubiq ;-)

Latest release works with Firefox 3.6

Your comment re: spirits onboard reminded me of travelling into New Zealand - you're not allowed to carry spirits into Australia or New Zealand. The cause was a flight that crash-landed in Guam: the plane got down relatively safely, minimal people were hurt during the landing, but in the aftermath the duty-free spirits in the overhead lockers caught fire and the deaths quickly mounted up. A Kiwi on the flight survived and began campaigning for a change to the regulations regarding spirits on flights. To date only Australia and New Zealand have changed their regulations.

When I first encountered this I assumed it was a scam to get me to buy my duty-free at Auckland airport. The more I learned about it, however, the more I supported this measure. It's one of the few changes to air travel that actually make me feel safer. (And it turned out that duty-free was cheaper in Auckland compared to Bangkok - go figure...!)

Guam government webpage about the crash, If it ain't on Wikipedia it never happened ;-)

Yeah, that would be my preference too. There are a couple of issues with this approach, however. Firstly, it's considerably cheaper and easier to apply sales tax to everything. Secondly, if there are exceptions then you can bet that some "kindly" government will, sooner or later, roll back those exceptions. When Value Added Tax was introduced in the UK it was touted as a luxury tax. Right now there are very few exceptions - food (except in restaurants), children's clothes are taxed at 0%, and electricity and gas are (I think) taxed at 5%.

...it is interesting to note that for MOST of American history, there was NO income tax and very little in the way of other taxes.

Well, I don't know about "most". By my reckoning it's 125 years of no income tax against 108 years of income tax. I'm basing that on: no income tax from 1776 to 1861, from 1872 to 1894, and from 1895 to 1913. Income tax was first introduced to finance a domestic conflict (the Civil War), by the way - it wasn't until the First World War that income tax paid for foreign wars.

Federal funding seems - in the no-income tax period - to have come largely from tariffs, which wouldn't fit easily into the free-trade world we currently live in, and I suspect that if the US was to reject income tax once again then an alternative, non-tariff, form of funding would be needed (some form of beefed-up sales tax, maybe).

Declaration of interest: traditionally I've favoured income tax over sales and other taxes, as it's progressive - I pay more proportionally than my less well-off neighbours - but I've recently been converted to considering sales tax in preference, with tax rebates or credits for the less well-off. So I'm not banging the drum for income tax, necessarily, just clarifying the history.

I'm tempted to suggest that training for bankers is at fault here. However, in this fortnight's Private Eye they list several senior UK bankers, regulators and ministers - and a radio presenter. The only one with any kind of banking qualification was Terry Wogan - the radio presenter. And Sir Terry doesn't present money programmes - he does light 60s/70s chart hits. He used to host the Eurovision Song Contest. And he's better qualified than the muppets who got Britain into this mess. I'd love to know what kind of qualifications senior people have on Wall Street - I suspect it'll be much like Britain.

If they are, they're doing it very well. I got hit with a QuickTime and iTunes update yesterday, didn't really pay attention to it and just agreed to everything. I checked for Safari just now, wondering if I'd agreed to download it as part of yesterday's update - but no, I don't have it.

Oh sure, but we're (well, you are - I'm currently outwith the UK) still in the middle of the switch-over - the powers-that-be have until 2012/13 to complete the switch-over. Interesting that in some areas analogue needs to stop entirely before digital can start; I wonder how many people will be prepared to buy a digital TV or box *before* they can actually use it? I know in my case a consideration was that I could fallback to analogue if the digital box was useless and return the digi-box for a refund, and I'm hardly a highland crofter barely making ends meet...

Needless to say, I have *every* confidence that by 2013 all parts of the UK will be able to receive digital. I mean, when has the UK government ever got anything like this wrong? ;-) *cough* every large government IT or infrastructure contract *cough*