I'd be interested to know how much difference Amazon's actions are actually making to Hachette. If I want to buy a book online I Google for it and find a supplier that has it for a reasonable price (and can deliver in reasonable time, if I'm buying the dead tree version). If Amazon doesn't have it or has a long lead time, won't folks just go somewhere else? It's not as if they actually have to walk down the street to get to the next store. As far as I can see, all Amazon is doing is encouraging buyers to check out the competition, but I don't know whether the figures back that up.

Not actually true -- I live in London, and it's a five-minute walk from my house until I get on camera (basically, when I get to my local high street). The majority of the cameras you see reported in London (and the UK as a whole) are private security cameras inside shops. And the figures for the vast number of cameras in the UK are bogus -- they were based on counting the number of cameras on two busy shopping streets and multiplying by the total number of streets in the UK.

With any luck it will mean they start spending money on storyline instead of VFX.

And as we see, occasionally we find someone who doesn't so much have a dick as is a dick.

See above. About 1%. So if you take Facebook's membership as about 1 billion, that's about ten million users. Probably worth the effort of some extra items in a drop-down menu.

I learned almost entirely from books. I've no idea what Kernigan and Ritchie were like in front of a class -- I was in the wrong country to find out -- and for all I know they might have written The C Programming Language in their moms' basements. Ditto Knuth, ditto Booch, and so on. Sure, there's no reason for a programmer not to be a great presenter, but there's no reason they have to be for us to learn from them.

I am against the death penalty for one simple reason. It gives the government more power than I trust the government with,

Well, in this universe, at least.

Well, that's one possible metaphysical assumption.

Wrong (almost certainly). The best evidence is that "morning after pill" works by preventing fertilisation, not by inducing abortion, as you'd know if you'd read the RA (though of course this is /, so there wasn't much chance of that).

What have abortions got to do with it? This is about contraception, not abortion.

I suspect the biggest issue isn't technical. At the moment, if a driver drives full speed into a line of kids crossing the road it's the driver who ends up in court. If it's an autonomous self-driving vehicle, it's likely the vehicle manufacturer who ends up in court.

I don't expect the lawyers to allow these vehicles on the road in my lifetime.

I don't think you understand what "a priori" means in the theory of knowledge. And it looks as if you don't understand how science works, either. Try reading some Kant.

In US English, true. But in British English the sentence was correctly punctuated as it stood, and putting the stop inside the quotes would be seen as a blunder (or resented as a creeping Americanism).

Good job she came with me, so I didn't have to calculate the relativistic effect of only one of us making the journey.