We used to call it "the hot seat" back in the 70's, there was no such thing as 'suspension', you were either punished or expelled.

Although there have been threats to do so, this isn't happening in Oz any day soon, the court specifically warned the MAFFIA not to use US style extortion letters. Any letters they send must be pre-approved by the court. If they do it now they WILL be held in contempt and possibly disbarred for abuse of process.

that brain teaser has been around for what, eons now?

I literally (not figuratively) cannot remember when I first heard that one, but I was using it to get a friend's head around spherical geometry in the mid-1980s, so I knew it long before then.

I'd finger Eratosthenes as the guilty party. Or a close contemporary.

He was lying. [aside]You can tell when politicians do that by checking to see if their lips are moving.[/aside].

What a refreshingly open and honest political culture you have. Here, we can tell when our politicians are lying by their not being decomposing into putrid puddles of greasy bones. The only honest politician is a dead one. Dead and clearly decomposing.

tasteless hops to make their piss water.

"their diabetic horse's piss", please. Go the whole hog on the (entirely justified) insult.

(The version I'm thinking of is $BIG_MERKIN_BREWERY$ sends crate of it's best product to Czech brewery $BIG_CZ_BRAUERIE$. Some weeks later a reply is recieved at $BIG_MERKIN_BREWERY$, which is opened with excitement : "Dear Sirs. We regret to inform you that your horse has diabetes.")

Are not public schools subsidized by the childless?

Severely. And some of us are fighting back to move the tax burden back to the profligates where it should fall.

The policeman camera is the best reign of all,

From a country (most likely, this being Slashdot) where the reign of monarchs was overthrown by terrorists over two centuries ago, and where the national self-image is as a cowboy clutching the reins of his horse and riding off into the sunset ... I find the inability to distinguish the two homophones particularly hilarious.

And it seems to rapidly be becoming a more common misspelling.

When replying to a post I barely notice who wrote it. A reply post is not just a message for the author it's a statement for all of slashdot to consider. In other words it's about the content of the comment, not the identity of the poster.

I'm a prolific poster (5000+ last time I looked), I was a subscriber until dice took over. My Karma has been stuck on excellent for a decade and I get mod points every few weeks, yet haven't meta-moderated in years. I'm also modded troll quite frequently but it's never heartbreaking since I don't post to be popular. I normally blow my mod points on a single story that I don't want to comment on.

Like most people, I get modded up when commenting on something I actually know about and modded down for ignorant comments about things I don't know much about.

To be honest, I was thinking of a second laptop on a cart, with a bunch of cables hanging out of the back end of it. Possibly four laptops (TFS mentions VMs running XP so any brain-dead 32nd-hand laptop should have the necessary grunt) on a cart so you can do an entire island at a time.

- set out the cones to stop new cars arriving at the target island then hook up the cables as existing drivers finish and leave.

- set upgrade running on first system to be ready. When you're blocking on that pump, swap to starting the process on the next available pump ; lather, rinse, repeat until all 4 are running away.

- meanwhile, start moving the cones so the first machine to be finished will be the first available to the next customer, and you're ready to start isolating the first pump of the next 'island'

If you can spread things out evenly, then your maximum hanging around time has dropped to 7 and a half minutes, and if there is any significant amount of user input, your idle times are going to be shorter than that.

Though it is a networking problem, it's really an optimisation issue.

You can get a much, much larger effect by attaching a much larger, more easily manufactured and testable actual solar sail.

How are you going to do that attachment again? The attachment mechanisms for Philae worked spectacularly well given the amount of information that was available about the comet's surface structure ten years before contact. So we can realistically anticipate a similarly accurate degree of knowledge about the surface properties of the asteroid we need to manage in two years time.

Next suggestion?

I notice she skipped addressing the questions dealing with the EV1.

Probably necessary, since there is not going to be much more she's likely to be able to add to the subject, but it would be worth hearing anything she did have to say.

If you drop the (US), then quite often. In Canada the maximum punishment for a provincial crime is two years less a day. Anything more serious than that is federal.

It's true in that those universal statements aren't universally true. Grass isn't green in the winter here, it's brown. The sky is blue outside my window currently, but yesterday it was gray. There's an awful lot of water around here that isn't wet during the winter.

The Hycopter uses its frame to store energy in the form of hydrogen instead of air

This makes it sound like there are all kinds of quadcopters out there that are using air to store energy. This is news to me, although given the low density of compressed-air storage I'd be pretty surprised if it's true.

Anyone have any idea why anyone would say this, as opposed to "instead of batteries"?

Can you imagine the dystopian dictatorship where trekkies come to power? All of the halls of power full of people walking around in spandex and fake ears and brow ridges, the fed directed to work toward the absolution of currency, the military directed to accelerate development of phasers and for all recruits to undergo "Kobayashi Maru" training.... NASA would finally get their proposed $18,5 billion dollar annual budget passed - except that the bill would have the word "annual" crossed out and the word "monthly" written in its place. National anti-bullying legislation would be passed, probably with a name like Spock's Law. And of course they'd insist on referring to the UN as the United Federation of Planets.