Try the Sun. It makes loads of it and it's nearer too. Bring some back for me.

You are not making sense (ie I don't understand what you are saying). Is this American language? Elevated, what's that?

In The UK, in most big cities, it is crazy to drive a commute by car and nearly as crazy to use a bus, even with dedicated lanes. The dedicated lane system breaks down at junctions, and there are stops every few yards where scores of people get on and off, all fumbling with money or payment cards. For a fit person it is quicker to get off and walk. Anything involving the public road is just slow, slow, slow. You talk about "slow" commuter trains, but they are going at the speed of light compared with road traffic.

Not quite knowing what you mean by elevated, perhaps you are thinking of trains as things sharing the road with cars. In the UK we call those trams, and trains are things with their own dedicated infrastructure, whether at ground level, on viaduct or in tunnel, with nothing else in the way, such that the only restriction on speed is the engineering.

And you can say that about road and motorway building too. Living in rural Wales I don't get any direct benefit from new motorways or road widenings in, say the Midlands; nor do most people living in Newcastle or Scotland for that matter. I could even do a reductio ad absurdum of your argument by extending it to say that even if I do use a 3-lane motorway, I get no benefit from the two lanes I am not using. Building HS2 is like having more lanes of motorway.

Whether there is really any benefit in building either motorways or high speed railways is another matter. I have always doubted it. When I see a motorway I am always left wondering how it is that so many people can be in the wrong place and needing to get somewhere else. Usually, when these things are built, people just start travelling longer distances, like my company centralised (closing its regional offices) in the 1980's when a lot of new motorways were completed (the M25 in particular) - explicitly because "travel times were reduced". In fact it took longer to reach most destinations from the central office than it had done from the nearest regional office before they were closed. Staff numbers were not reduced anyway.

Mrs Thatcher had a chemistry degree and before full-time politics she worked in food technology. But the irony was that she came to preside over the destruction of Britain as a leading technical nation. It sems she hated technology.

Psychologically, I have seen this explained as, her having changed careers (science to politics), she was inclined to look back in contempt at her former one. A bit like her having made it into a man's world (as political leadership was back then) she famously looked back in contempt on other women. You can imagine her wanting revenge for having once been the lab junior, making the tea for the others etc, as we all did once.

If you think Slashdot is bad, you should see this one :- www.microsoft.com

On the contrary, from your argument, it sounds like it was small breasts that were unnatural (underfed and ill). In fact, I have known obese women with small breasts, and slim women with large ones (if you don't know any women, look in some porn websites, you will find all combinations).

Actually he was talking about dogs, mostly. His point about women was that they stand upright and their front has breasts on it (of some size or other) if they are of post-puberty maturity - do you dispute that?

Perhaps you prefer Homer Simpson's description of women : "Like a refrigerator, - about 5'2" high and give you beer". It leaves the breasts out of it.

I find women's breasts a huge (sorry) part in my sexual "process", and if it is only Western society that has caused that attitude (as some have said here) then - bring it on. Many women themselves are also turned on by their own breasts, as part of their own arousal. I had a busty GF who would get a breast out to admire it herself in a public place if there were no people about - I would tell her off about it. You are missing a lot if women's breasts mean nothing to you (or your partner); I am feeling sorry for you..

However, some women do not have much to show in the breast department, so it is just as well that there are guys like you who will be quite happy with that.

Is she unattractive perhaps?

I know women who are not married but do wear one most of the time because it is at least a partial deterrent to unwelcome men pestering them. Not all men are deterred, but it does make a worthwhile difference, they tell me. They are attractive women.

I (male) am married but I don't wear a ring because women don't "pester" me, and I am not sure I would not wlecome it if they did. Women don't tend to pester men anyway unless they look like Brad Pitt in his prime.

Thus it is largely a practical matter. How you get the idea of it meaning "property" out of this is beyond me. Does a necklace mean property too? A bracelet? Most women like jewelery anyway (some wear rings on all fingers and toes), and it all needs to be attached by some kind of "shackle" or it tends to drop off.

Not enough by miles. How about they let a team of independent financial assessors evaluate how much they were able to over-charge customers by virtue of their monopoly position, and cost other companies. Then pay refunds to all those people and entities.

You are showing incredible ignorance. It is Microsoft who corrupt them. It is not as simple as corruption by handing out bribes. With Microsoft occupying the posiition it does, the corruption is more based on fear - of potential loss of business.

In the OOXML affair, it was noticed by Microsoft that companies in the relevant field could join the national standards committees fairly easily. They therefore got their partners around the world ( a "Microsoft Partner" has a formal association with Microsoft) to join these committees in sufficient numbers to outvote the existing regular members.

The regular members were not corrupted, they were outvoted. In some countries, the dozen or so regular members arrived on the day of the vote at the usual small meeting room to find it already packed out with newly joined "Microsoft Partner" members. Some of the regular members could not even get in the door. These new members were never seen again after that vote.

Being a Microsoft Partner is essential for the business of many of them (they get pre-views of software and technical support. They would not dare to ignore a Microsoft request such as joining their national standards committee, so no money was being handed out. Perhaps extortion is a better word after all.

No confusion here. The point with secure boot is that while it can be disabled if you have the technical nous (don't worry, I shall) it deters a casual user from trying out Linux and parhaps liking it. That is what Microsoft are after and they have a part in the affair.

Perhaps incompetence; it was the fact that no-one had ever forseen that anyone would play the dirty trick that Microsoft did. I hope they have fixed it.

I am interested in yacht racing under rating rules. The yachts can be of different design, but there are rules to make the yachts competative with each other. Like you can have a certain sail area but of any aspect ratio. But every now and then someone turns up with a yacht of a design that exploits a loophole in the rule, and everyone (often even the owner) agrees it is cheating and the rules are soon amended to block the loophole. It is similar in F1 car racing.

That is what Microsoft did - found a loophole - but the result has been far more catastrophic than a wrong yacht winning a race.

Even if the "real world" is still using Windows and Office by the time your kids get into it, do you seriously believe that that they will still be the same versions and have the same UI as they do today? Look back ten years and see how things have changed since then. Even the concept of files and directories has changed.

True, some things have not changed, but those things (the Internet, keyboard layout) are common to all systems anyway.

Besides, I think you are seriously under-rating you pupils' ability to adapt (which differs from the ability to moan). I saw the change at work when everyone first got a desk PC, as opposed to a few techies sharing a mainframe terminal in a special room. We all went on a two day course - engineers, clerks, typists, workshop foremen - and they took to computers like ducks to water. And that was a change from pen-and-paper and forms to PCs. Yet you are saying your pupils could not adapt from Word to LibreOffice, say, if they needed to. If so, I think your teaching must be making their minds too narrow somehow.

Because at best it is a self-fulfilling argument. If not at best, it is untrue, because in future people will be using Windows less and less.

It must be the crap software itself that is the deciding factor then.

Firstly, I do not know what you mean by a "war holiday". A USA thing? There is no "war holiday" in the UK, just ceremonies on 11.11, and also the nearest Sunday. I agree that a holiday does not sound appropriate.

As for the soldiers on the losing side, as I live in a country that was on the "winning" side in both WWs, I have no idea what they do in countries on the "losing" side. There is nothing to stop them remembering their dead too. AFAIK, cemeteries of German dead in France and Belgium are treated with respect.

I cannot see whether the right side won or not comes into it. That issue is not raised in the UK ceremonies; it entirely about remembering the dead. But generally it is assumed that the "right" side always wins in history, because they wrote the history books and whitewashed the dirt. Just look at the invective raised if anyone suggests Hitler was right (this is not Godwin, because this thread is about the WWs). Yet because Stalin "won" WWII, it was not until two generations later that it was recognised fully what a shite he was, probably worse than Hitler, but we will never fully know.