What idiot modded this as informative?

I suggest reading a bit of history before you post crap like this. Just try The Desert War and The Battle for Caen as examples. The British, Americans, Russians and French all fought ferociously against the Germans, and at one point it was the British alone.

It happened - was a racing cyclist in the 1970's, possibly in the Tour de France. Dope tests were relatively new then and only used in the topmost races.

The "other person" was his wife. The sample was given in front of a doctor, so "planting" someone else's urine would have been very difficult. The story I heard (as told in the "Cycling" newspaper) was that before the test he emptied his bladder behind the bushes and refilled with his wife's urine via a catheter. AFAIR he was not a top rider, just a lowly domestique desparate to stay in contact with the race. He was certainly not cleared of charges.

So there would be an expectation that the client should be treated more leniently? I don't understand why this should be an excuse if that is what you are suggesting (our brain patterns must be different - LoL). How about an analogy :

"Your honour, my client drove into someone because he is susceptible to drinking, so please sentence him lightly".

Anyway, since when was it necessary to study brain patterns to establish if someone is a compulsive gambler?

Whooosh!

Since you say "dealer" you seem to be talking about cars. When you buy a car it would be unusual to drive it straight away. If it is new and you have specified a particualr colour and accessories, it is going to take a few days (at least) for the dealer to get one. Even if it already on the premises the dealer will (or should) want to give it a check-over before releasing it. So in the meantime you give him the cheque and he sees it clear.

Even using a debit card for a big purchase, I am not going to have $20,000 sitting in my current account in case I decide to buy a car that day. I will be looking around for a good deal and when I find it I will only then transfer the required money into my current account - something I would rather do at home than on a mobile in the dealers with a salesman breathing down my neck.

In the UK cheques are still used widely. I have just written one for my house having been re-roofed, and many people pay utility bills with them. They are not taken in shops any more.

NATO; an academic working on Russian issues; - these are not "political organisations" (NATO is a defence organisation). You think they should say to the world "Please send all emails for us via our local security police" ?!

It might be an anonymous tip-off. In this case it sounds like the emails were posing as just that. Ironic from an anonymous poster LoL!

If NATO or any other agency working on defence or international relations issues receives an unsolicited email purporting to list pro-Russian extremist activities, then they certainly should open it. That is part of their job - to remain in touch with these affairs. Chances are it is a hoax or scam, but they should still check. Otherwise it would be like the fire brigade refusing to pick up the emergency calls phone in case it is a hoax.

OTOH, they should open such emails in a sandbox suchas a VM, preferably in a non-Windows environment. They are professionals - they should be able to handle this sort of thing.

Really? Please could you give a link to that. People have argued over and over whether he really said that. He denies it himself, so it would be very interesting if a recording exists and can be made public.

I bought a mid-range digital multi-meter and was disappointed to find there is no damping on the readout. Even such a simple thing as reading a battery voltage the display acts crazy until you press the probes on really hard and keep dead still. As a result I still reach for an old, really cheap (it was from Tandy) little analog meter for most jobs unless I want particular accuracy or something out of the analog meter's range.

I would put a damping circuit in it myself if there were any means of doing so (the display is surface mounted on the PCB). I so mistrust it that I will not use it for checking that house mains circuits are dead before I work on them. That is a sad state of affairs.

In fact I have a lot of old analog stuff (multi-meters, audio kit) that my father left. I am currently refurbishing his multimeter - only because the sockets for the test leads have corroded, nothing wrong with the analog galvanometer itself.

Much of that old stuff did not "die", people threw it away because they assumed newer stuff was better, or because the old stuff becomes incompatible. Marketing droids see to the first, and as an example of the second I threw away a tube TV only because it would not receive digital broadcasting; another example is my father's camera which would last for ever except soon you won't be able to get film processed any more.

Older stuff did not look better, but tended to be made better, partly because people expected things like cameras, TVs, and even early PC's(!) to last their lifetime. I have some 1950's kitchen cupboards now in my workshop containing tools, nuts and bolts etc of massive total weight. I could have replaced them with more modern surplus cupboards but have put those in the trash instead, as there is no way they could have stood that weight. I do tend to keep a lot of older stuff; but because most people do not, they never see a direct comparison so do not realise the race to the bottom in quality that has been going on for a generation now. It is the boiling frog effect.

What are you complaining about? I once used an IBM keyboard to a mainframe (different from the Model M) and it actually had a little speaker inside it to make a clicking sound each time a key was pressed. It was to satisfy people who had come from mechanical typewriters.

You could turn the speaker off (I did) and then it just made the Model M sound. Same technology I suppose.

I find the sound of keyboards soothing, in fact worryingly somnolent.

The UK at one time (certainly around the 1950s-60s) had the world's highest number of electric vehicles on the road - tens of thousands of them I believe.

They were milk delivery trucks (called "Milk Floats") which typically delivered milk around town in glass bottles to people's doorsteps at around 5-6 am every day. That was before most people had fridges but wanted fresh milk every morning. They ran on batteries and had a top speed of about 8mph.

It was ideal, like it would also be ideal for rubbish (US garbage) collection. Electric drives are good for the constant start-stop driving with long-ish pauses in between. Also the early morning milk floats did not wake people up as a IC-engined truck would have done.

Fridges and car ownership brought an end to most doorstep milk deliveries, but there are still some around.

I dont think you understand how the UK NHS works. They make you wait for a long time for treatment in the hope that you will die first. It saves money.

International Standards eh? Like my company management is always droning on about "World Standards". Actually, if you take the average of "International" quality standards, it's shit.