I drive in the UK too, and that was my feeling not too long ago. Sure, driving a manual is a good skill to know, and one the can deteriorate rapidly (after driving my dad's Disco for a week or two, getting back into my car takes a few miles to get comfortable again), but my point is that the DSG and DCT gearboxes *can* really improve your driving experience. However saying "I'd never have an automatic" is [imo] saying that just because the original tech was inferior, any subsequent devices will remain being inferior. That said, there are still automatic boxes out there nicknamed "suicide boxes" because they were so laggy that the delay could kill you when pulling out in traffic - but [like most things in life] don't tar subsequent generations with the same brush.

The only analogy I can think of at the moment is this - I refuse to use modern calculators because the original electronic calculators were more cumbersome and slower to use than a slide rule - "I'd never have a electronic calculator".

Technology progresses [generally for the better] and I personally feel it's daft to ignore improvements because of previous failures.

I was talking to a friend about this - my current car is a manual, but all of the Dual Clutch automatic transmissions I've driven are amazing (Audi DSG, BMW DCT). There's no comparison to my Dad's automatic Discovery (which takes an age to change gear). Put a set of flappy paddles on the steering wheel and you've got the gear control you're used to with much faster shift times (DSG is apparently 8ms - you've changed gear before the your foot would have touched the clutch). I'm also actively trying to get my mum to get a manual - it's scary when she flails around with gears after pulling out on a roundabout - at some stage she'll get hit by a lorry.

For the people that claim to be driving purists, maybe they should go back to manual chokes and non-synchronous transmissions.

Yes, they were from the 70s. The reason I bought the book was exactly because of Asimov. It's possible that the stories he liked were nothing like his writing (which I love).

I wholeheartedly agree - I picked up a collection of Hugo Award winners, as edited by Isaac Asimov - I found the writing incredibly pretentious and the stories almost seemed to take a back seat. They were a massive disappointment to me.

Mod points, my kingdom for some mod points.

It's not a bad idea - in the UK the grey squirrels introduced from North America have caused havoc with the native red squirrel, it turns out they're quite tasty too - a local restaurant serves shredded squirrel meat. Same (apparently) goes for the signal crayfish that were introduced here.

Now I didn't know that - I suppose that I'm just used to using Republic of Ireland (rather than "Southern Ireland", which really grates at me)

That's rather a sweeping statement. Republic of Ireland anyone?

Surely what you'd do is traceroute to the VPN server, which will show you where the packets leave the ISP network (as long as the VPN is outside of it), and then traceroute to Netflix via the VPN. The compare it do the route taken directly to Netflix.

Have they started naming and shaming the ISPs who refuse to host a Netflix Open Connect box in their data centres?

Or even a comparison with his brain activity when inactive.

As a teenager in Dublin, I once needed change for a bus, so went into a shop and bought a sandwich. After walking past a beggar with a sign saying "need money for food", I thought "I don't really want this sandwich", so I gave it to him. That was one withering look he gave me.

Thanks for that. Now, what's your mother's maiden name?

Don't worry, it'll come down in price:

Yup, I can see production really ramping up for the F-35. Like most things in life, it's possibly to build something to do everything, just don't be upset when it does everything badly.

This is also made harder with the use of CDNs nowadays. A while ago our office started receiving large numbers of "InterFax" notification with a download link. I don't know what a proper InterFax notification looks like, but as you said, they did look professional, and in some cases the URL didn't look too dissimilar to some CDN URLs we've used.

I tend to visit web pages used in phishing attacks for a couple of reasons. First, I like to input useless data. Second, I like to rate what sort of job the scammers did in cloning he web site - I always feel a little let down when I see dead links, as they didn't make the effort to duplicate all the pages linked to by the cloned login page. Seriously guys, put some effort into your scams - the work ethic of the criminal world is really dropping.