That kind of thing is easy enough to remember for the passwords you use a lot. For everything else, there's Keepass.

I use VOIP sometimes but have often had to drop my calls and go back to the standard phone network because the quality was so poor. Maybe other ISPs or VOIP providers would be better - but it's a bit of a crapshoot. It's certainly not good enough to abandon conventional phones entirely.

I tried one of those Chinese smartphones. Absolute pile of crap - technically it worked but it was so slow and frustrating that trying to use it was an utter chore. My Nexus 5 cost three times as much but is easily worth it.

Agree on the contracts though - my monthly bill on Three PAYG is about £5-10.

Let it die in the middle of a big recession? Not the best idea to put countless people out of work, reducing tax revenue both directly and from less spending in the wider economy. The lower spending of these workers elsewhere would then have knock-on effects and the total damage could easily exceed the cost of the bailout.

Saying "just let them die" would needlessly destroy a lot of normally profitable and productive companies that struggle purely due to a recession that was outside their control, as well as make said recession a lot worse.

That huge screen is fucking ugly, like an enormous TV in a small room. The other things sound like gimmicks. Maybe the other car companies didn't do all that because it was a bad idea.

Most source I've seen quote efficiency of an ideal Otto cycle as over 45% for a 10:1 compression ratio - and some engines have much higher compression than that (e.g. Mazda Skyactiv 14:1).

Your figure of less than 30% overall is probably right though, because engines spend most of their time operating quite a way from their peak efficiency. IIRC the Prius's engine has a peak efficiency of about 37%, with the benefit of the hybrid being that it can operate near that peak much more than a normal car by avoiding less efficient conditions such as light loads.

There's still a lot of improvements that can be made to the good old internal combustion engine. Both batteries and fuel cells are much more expensive - they may come down (slowly), but the efficiency of combustion engines will keep going up, thus maintaining the gap.

Theoretically newer diesels are cleaner than old ones, but I still see plumes of black smoke from the exhausts of cars that should be new enough to have particulate filters, as well as noxious smells. Whenever I get stuck behind a foul smelling car, it's always a diesel (except for the very rare cases of a pre-catalyst petrol). On my commute it's got to the point where flipping the ventilation to recirculate mode is a reflex.

Indeed, I much prefer my radioisotopes bound up in solid cladding. A molten salt reactor seems to combine the difficulties of a reactor and a reprocessing plant in the same package - except worse, because normal reprocessing plants work on fuel that's had a couple of years to cool off.

They also solve a problem that right now doesn't exist - there's no shortage of uranium.

Aren't they? I see them all over the place. They're certainly not some rare luxury car like a Rolls-Royce (*) or Ferrari.

But it would be a nice change to the trend of cars getting ever heavier.

(*) Well, except that they own Rolls Royce of course.

Because kids always do exactly what they're told, and would never do anything reckless or stupid.

Indeed, but it's not only you that needs to be disciplined and consistent - it's everyone in the team that's working on the project. I had a nightmare of a time working with C++ code (CERN's Root package) that obviously had been people with a very different idea of sensible programming practice. It was a lot quicker, easier and more reliable to ignore it all and write mostly outside it, even if it meant reinventing the wheel a lot.

Plain C isn't nearly as opaque and unpredictable as C++ can be, but then I write mostly in Fortran these days (90 or later) which I suspect doesn't appear too high on lists of most used languages.

I use Keepass and let it generate random 6-8 character unique passwords with numbers and lower case only (for ease of typing on a phone/tablet) letters. For the stuff you use a lot those turn out to be easy enough to remember anyway. That's more than adequate for a online service, though obviously not as a key for local encrypted data.

Works well apart from from obnoxious password strength checkers that think it's easy to guess just because there are no upper case letters or symbols. A more intelligent checker would be very welcome.

I was looking at older Ford Mondeos, which mostly come as diesels. I decided against it due to seemingly endless reports of dual mass flywheel failure & injector failure.

Particulate filters becoming clogged is a well known problem, particularly for cars used for town driving so the exhaust doesn't get hot enough to burn off carbon deposits in the filter. Probably the worst problem I heard of in this respect was the Mazda 6, where the engine's attempts to burn excess fuel to try to clear it could result in diesel contaminating & overfilling the engine oil, potentially causing severe damage.

Maybe it's all just the inevitable trouble you get with a new technology and the new ones are better, I don't know. But I prefer to buy second hand and let someone else take the big depreciation hit in any case.

I've yet to hear of a petrol engine with a particulate filter. And even in the latest direct injection engines, the pressures are nowhere near as extreme as for a diesel.

I mentioned those things because they're notorious for failing in modern diesel engines, and make buying a second hand one a bit of a minefield.