Like this dickhead - literally over the road from a London Heathrow runway.

My office is on an old Halifax (WW2 bomber) airfield and we get RAF Pumas and Chinooks doing low (shakes the building low) level training over it. So when I built my quadcopter and was testing/tuning it, I double checked whether we are in a MATZ - it ends on pretty much over our office (though the chart is a small scale, so it' difficult to be precise), so I can fly up to a thousand feet (if I was stupid enough).

The problem is that I know what to lookup to work out if I'm flying safe or not, but most people wouldn't even have heard of a MATZ, even if they're aware that flying at the end of a runway at the word's busiest international airport is monumentally stupid.

What effect would that really have? http://www.northkoreatech.org/...
It would screw up the rulers, and possibly the military. However, seeing as most of the aircraft they "fly" are still using vacuum tubes, they're fairly well EMP hardened. It's probably safe to say that a lot of their military equipment is EMP hardened by virtue of using obsolete* technologies.

* I'm sure somebody will say that vacuum tubes aren't obsolete.

That's an outrageous accusation - how dare you suggest that he's not supporting the organisation he's a director for (the Motion Picture Licensing Co - MPLC)

Dear BMW,

During cold weather the ignition timing on my car is out and makes is idle rough until I "reboot" it. I've replaced the cam and crank sensors, but it hasn't made a difference. It's not the MAF sensor, and when it's running rough my ODB reader says the ignition is retarded by about 10deg. I'm thinking of replacing the VANOS solenoids next, is this the correct course of action.

ps. I also asked this question on http://forum.kerbalspaceprogra... but didn't get a reply, why not?

Well, lets see:
1. The title is "Severe crash on motorway in Belgium - E40 Bruges" - so, not in Germany, not unless you count a brief period 70 years ago.
2. Unsure of nationality of car - can't see the number plate, and the resolution isn't high enough to see if there are the distinctive German discs (emissions and state seal)
3. Even if the driver was German, you're expanding one instance to encompass an entire population. Every country has idiot drivers, I've seen some horrific driving in Germany, and their traffic jams (Stau) are second to none. As a child on holiday in Germany, we used to dread seeing a banner saying "Stau" hanging on an autobahn bridge. In fact, I've seen horrific driving in every country I've driven in.

However, according to this, 11.6 people per 100,000 in the USA were a road fatality, compared to Germany's 4.3 per 100,000. UK & Ireland were slightly lower (both 3.5 per 100,000).

Shit, I didn't think of it like that - I've gone from laughing at these idiots to realising that part of my country's* population are a punch line. Next time I hear somebody over here talk about "Stupid Americans" - I'm going to point them to this article.

* A non-card carrying British resident, but my English brother-in-law described me as being more English than he is.

It's only a bargain if you actually need it - not my words, but I did think along the same lines when I was watching the mayhem.

Black Friday scuffles: 'I got a Dyson but I don’t even know if I want it'

Makes me proud of the country I live in.

Try is - Infiniti Q50 - a friend had one as loaner for his FX30d and I got to take it for a spin. Fantastic car to drive, and insanely quick acceleration. The other nice thing was that when you hit a bump you got just enough feedback to tell you that you've hit a bump. You get the responsive steering without any annoying juddering (the roads where I am are horrific, and it feels like my run-flats are flat).

Not sure what car you're alluding to, or even if you're just making it up - which I guess you are - as I can find no mention of wrecks caused by a fly-by-wire car. Please, correct me if I'm wrong.

To add further to the description of BT - a company split into three parts - BT Retail (the phone provider / ISP), BT Wholesale (who run the infrastructure and exchanges), and BT Openreach (who run the last mile infrastructure). It's supposed to mean they can't abuse their monopoly. As far as the customer is concerned, it means that reporting a fault might have to go through 3 companies and most of the time spent is the 3 companies passing the buck. They also like to charge each other and pass the cost on to the customer.

Phone lines cut out randomly

BT Retail is basically staffed by a bunch of MBAs, salemen and shit tech support (although their BTnet tech support is actually pretty good). BT Local business are a bunch of complete wankers and will [literally] cancel your ISDN30 and recreate it so they get more commission - this resulted in 36 hours of downtime.

BT Openreach - you're not allowed to speak to - but when an engineer does come out, they are generally professional and knowledgable. However, in the above case, they will fulfill BT Retails requests to cover their arses. In the above ISDN30 case, they pretended that the failure was due to a faulty NTE-2D (Fibre termination equipment) even though we had it confirmed that our contract had been "cancelled" the day before.

We have a 100Mb/s leased line with BT, which I have to admit has been pretty bulletproof - we've had about 30s of downtime in 4 years (but is also insanely expensive). Anyhow, when we renewed out contract I told them we wanted an IPv6 subnet, this was subject to a charge of £400 as they said they needed to upgrade our bearer. This was never done, so we complained, and they said they would have to charge us £3,000 - the normal installation fee. We pointed them to the contract we signed. Now, instead of sending out a bloke to update the router, or even send out a new router, they have:
* Spliced together 26km of fibre to the exchange.
* Installed a 3rd fibre into our office
* Provided a new NTU
* Provided a new Cisco 3xxx router
* Sent 3 engineers out to do all this

I spoke to one of the Openreach guys - he shrugged and said "that's the way they like to do it". I said "it's ok, we're not having to pay the standard installation fee, just sounds like a waste of time and money though". He also explained what the bearer was (confirming my assumption) and looked pretty confused when I told him BT Local Business insisted that it had to be upgraded to "carry" IPv6 packets.

I was thinking along the lines of the AC, but I suppose it depends on context - business or personal. I also note that you said you "made" $2,000 - not charged him $2,000 - so I'm going to assume your friend worked out what your time was worth.

I've never asked for money for helping a friend out, but I've been given numerous bottles of wine (including a very nice looking Rioja under my desk), beer and some cash (as my dad once said - refuse twice, then accept). However, I also know to offer my time to people who will appreciate it, and may also be able to help me out in the future.

I have also flat out refused to fix a colleague's home laptop - I'd already fixed it twice (for no reward) and explained to him what to do to prevent his son fucking it up. The 2nd time, I had told him "I never want to see that laptop again in my life". The whole office thought it was hilarious when he tried saying "I'll just leave it on your desk in case you've got time" - my reply was "You bloody well won't, I told you I didn't want to see it again".

I suppose I hadn't thought the CDN content already being cached. Granted, for high volume sites, 100KB will add up, and it's one less (possible more) file for the client to download, but I'm still not massively keen on the idea of the possibility that the library I'm using may have been altered.

I'm aware that I haven't audited the library I downloaded from jQuery, but we've often seen malware being served unwittingly by 3rd parties*. However, I'd also hope that jQuery regularly verify that files served from the CDN haven't been altered, so maybe I should start considering it.

* Basically, if my web server starts serving malware, I'd prefer it's due to my cock-up, not somebody elses, which when I think about it, maybe I should set myself up to blame someone else when the shit hits the fan.

Ok, one qualification - dealers won't take drafts for trade transactions.

The problem is that bankers drafts can be faked and it does happen. Piston Heads - Fraudulent bankers draft update!!!. The problem is that you'll find out the draft is a fake after releasing a car, calling the bank is useless. As far I can see, fake cash is easier to check than a fake draft.

For example, when I was buying my flat, I had to move money from my Irish account to my UK account, by my bank Ulster Bank (part of RBS) were being a bunch of idiots and wouldn't tell me how long the fast transaction would take. My sister, who luckily works for another bank (I'm not going to mention who), told me to have get a draft, pay it into her account and she'd do the international transfer. However, because the draft would take a couple of days to clear, she however had to act as guarantor.

If a couple of days to clear is "cleared funds", then by that logic, so is a cheque. Go get a draft and try cashing it in a different bank and see how quickly it happens.

Because the US is a bigger country, so 5 times 0 is - let me get my calculator -zero? That can't be right.

Anyhow there's a difference between the UK and Germany and the US. In the UK, police generally don't carry firearms*, we have specialised armed response units**. German police do carry firearms, but clearly aren't that trigger happy. American police, well...

* They do in airports and other heightened security areas.
** Which have had some spectacular fuck ups in the past.

Probably the annual Labour Day march (1st May), which is probably only going to confirm to you that they're all a bunch of commie bastards who deserve to have their heads kicked in.

Why would you link to libraries on a remote web server? I this time and again, and have never understood the reasoning.