To be fair, the Soviets made some amazing equipment during the cold war. The Americans for example were amazed by the NK-33 rocket engine. One of Lockheed's engineers described how they couldn't have made a similar engine in the US because of design concepts. Russian design engineers gave the design to the manufacturing engineers who in turn would refine the design during manufacturing. The design was then built, tested and refined iteratively. American engineers were less likely to build a design that was likely to fail - the design had to be refined before it was built which meant that they were more likely to be conservative.

UK's Channel 4 had a series called Equinox that did an episode on it.

That's pretty damming - why was he not prosecuted for soliciting murder as well? It seems a message that the trafficking of drugs is worse than murder.

Did Cedric get a rainbow too?

Neither - The Wrath of Khan.

There was a YouTube creationist called nephilmfree who was a fervent believer in "the flood" amongst other things. He accidentally showed his favourites menu in a video, which people noticed contained links to escort agencies. The video was re-uploaded with the link removed, but as he learned -nothing gets deemed from the internet.

From what I recall, whilst scanning for CRTs was technically feasible, simply parking an empty van with "TV licensing detector" written on the side was the a far easier and cheaper method.

I would have thought sticky would be a more apt adjective. Each to their own I suppose.

What is the rationale behind "seatbelt laws are wrong"? I suppose I've grown up with seatbelt laws so I don't think about them, other than the fact that they're not there to protect just you, they're also there to protect the people you're sharing the car with.

In the UK, most (if not all) coaches have seatbelts. The announcement on my local service into London is "this coach has seatbelts and it's a legal requirement to wear one" - and I do, because I've seen what happens when one of those coaches crashes on the motorway.

Which is pretty flawed - the seats may well stop you flying through the windscreen, but it quite likely there's some poor bastard in that seat who's going to get clobbered. In the UK they used to have a road safety advert that went along the lines of

I think it's an age thing too. When I was growing (admittedly this is about 25 years ago) up there was an old lady that used to walk into town. We often gave her a lift and she would pull the seat belt across her, and hold it but not plug it in. I don't know anyone in my age group (or my parents' age group) that don't wear seatbelts - but then they've been mandatory in any countries I've lived in.

Hey, I didn't see you all over there...

I wasn't actually disagreeing with you - it was just an opportunity to share an anecdote about a complete muppet I once knew. Yes, taxes are definitely an expense.

Absolutely, I *don't* trust Al Gore on climate science. You know who I do trust - climate scientists who've had their work peer reviewed. It's got nothing to do with jealousy and loathing, it's got everything to do with not trusting everything somebody says simply because they're absolutely outstanding in a separate field.

Yeah, I think the AC was getting confused with the people who thought that light a fire under gas bottles would cause explosions - some of them were doctors. Ironic that the more educated ones were more inept. I saw it more as a sad indictment of British education - they'd all been schooled over here but didn't understand basic science.