Not sure about this.

When I have load of crap to carry I sometimes swap my C-class for a colleagues 5 series. I am definitely aware that I tend to drive more like a dick when I'm in it. I would like to think that its everyone else on the road. They assume that the guy in the BMW is a dick and treat me accordingly (can't argue with that, I do the same myself) so obviously I react to that. Maybe its just aggression caused by trying to use iDrive. But I'm not sure , I think its the car doing it.

Are you kidding?

I work in that grey area between engineering and sales, and have spent a lot of the time on the road in the UK and Australia (Both have had this for years) We almost always meet up in McDonalds, so that we can check E-mails etc while waiting.

Inevitably there are a few other doing the same thing. I reckon this must get them at least an extra 20 or so meals per day per branch.

I'm amazed this is only just coming in in the US,I'd assumed they started it there.

If only this was a troll!

Unfortunately this idea, if properly written up, would probably get granted a patent. The level of examination now seems to be absolutely zero.

A few days ago I was handed a copy of a patent that was recently granted (to a large airplane company based in the NW USA) it contains a long list of reference documents, reading of which should be sufficient to show the examiner that it contained nothing much original.

A guy I know had a patent granted which contained the wording (from memory) "This method represents a digital implementation of a standard analogue approach" . These guys know they are trying it on, and are being fairly honest about it.(they are engineers, don't like this system anymore than we do, but do what the boss says)

None of this seems to stop patents being granted.

Great car-based analogy, when you drive on a road your car has to be an approved type (safety inspections, weight limits, seat belts, not too many passengers, not too polluting etc) and if its stolen the police will pull you over. Plus if too many people try and use the road at once everything slows to a crawl. it may be 55mph capable, but not when everyone is driving a truck full of logs....

They don't have to all: these Countries have incoming customs requirement that handle this. sometimes stuff gets through free, sometimes it gets overcharged (I paid £15 pound tax on a $50 book from Amazon US once - The tax rate for books in the UK is zero ...) . either way there is a process. In contrast there is no customs agency or equivalent checking what comes into a state. The only sane way to handle it would be for each state to define a simple incoming goods tax rate and require businesses doing over a certain size to collect it. Anything else unfairly discriminates against physical businesses trying to operate in that state.

Of course people should pay the use tax, but since Americans mostly seem to consider cheating on their taxes to be almost virtuous that is never going to work.

The entire UK (Is it any different elsewhere?) Mobile Phone industry works on ethical standard that would shame organised crime, among the many abuses I've come across :

* Deceptive tariffs, resulting in unexpectedly large bills, especially the roaming data ( I used to handle the phone admin for a medium sized company, we had a user come back from overseas trips with bills up over a thousand pounds when the free roaming data the salesman told us we'd bought turned out to have a fair use limit of 10MB...)

* The reverse billing text message scam - some of the companies operating this make tens of millions, and have been fined hundreds of thousands for repeated abuses - they are still in business.

* your bank details get passed on and you are billed for insurance you never asked for

* BUYING the stolen data

Think of these guys as a bit like Chris in the Sopranos, They got impatient and wanted a piece of the action for themselves. They may get a slap on the wrist, but the business is full of worse criminals.

for another data point.
28000 in the inbox (you thought you were bad...), Windows 7, exchange and a POP account 66MB used.
I don't think that is too bad.

No-one has noticed, but most of Africa is rapidly becoing part of China...

So far I'm quite impressed with Windows 7

I never used Vista, so have probably had a steeper learning curve than some, but the RTM version seems pretty solid.

On the other hand the Technical preview version of Office 2010 is a long way off being something I'd want on my desktop yet.

maybe Dell has been using a special build?

Dell handled it much better in the UK,

In the old days we had a dedicated small business team in Ireland. We would phone up a lady called Ines, she would sort out what was needed. give us a good price and everyone was happy, we had a company full of Dell PC's.

Then they shifted the SALES TEAM to India. This works really well, you get totally pissed off BEFORE you've spent any money, buy an HP and everythings still fine.

Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie etc got going in the early 1980's, (i.e. around 15 AP)

Other things in the chronology you should check out are

Oscar Wilde (Esp. Importance of being Earnest - A hundred years old and still hilarious)
PG Wodehouse
ITMA, (war time, led to the Goons)
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore,
TW3, (David Frost et al, he became a total Dick later on but in the 60's he was good) - The 60's satire movement in general,
At Last the 1948 show (pre-python)
The Goodies
Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy (avoid the horrible remake)
Ben Elton (see comments on David Frost) - BlackAdder (which starred Fry and Laurie) is probably on a level with Python
The Young Ones.

and lots of other stuff. obviously there are huge interconnections between everything.

Wkipedia and Youtube should keep you going for a while

Yes but we drank it out of proper cups, in sensible quantities, and didn't try to drive at the same time.

I actually get quite irritated when people hold up the McDonalds Coffe incident as a dumb lawsuit, Having spilt 1980's McDo coffee on myself once I was fully in sympathy with the suit. That stuff was lethal. It was 20-30 degrees hotter than everyone elses, handing it out at drive-ins was just stupid.

perhaps even more than the soviets, there were a whole host of amateur radio enthusiasts monitoring the lunar transmissions, so at the very least the Americans were relaying the pictures from the New Mexico desert via a transponder on the moon.

You never saw that Mel Gibson movie then?