In Britain, almost all railways define location using miles and chains from a defined starting point. Sometimes the distance is from a starting point that no longer exists, or is partially over a route that no longer exists, but correction factors are defined for these cases. Only the newest light railways, such as the Manchester Metrolink and the Docklands Light Railway, use kilometres - even though Metrolink is partly built on an old railway.

By the way, there are 22 yards in a chain and 80 chains in a mile. A chain is also, conveniently, very close to 20 metres.

Just be glad we don't use Wizard currency. "Seventeen silver Sickles to a Galleon and twenty-nine Knuts to a Sickle, it's easy enough." Those multiples are *prime numbers*, although they might be reasonable estimates of the relative rarity of gold, silver and copper. Of course it was a parody of real pre-decimal British currency - 12d to the shilling and 20s to £1.

I wouldn't call it "potential for extra efficiency" so much as "robustness in the face of hardware failures". If the cooling remains adequate when a pump or a fan fails or a blockage occurs in an air path, then the increased coolant temperature provides a signal for admins to react to, and the servers don't suffer any downtime.

Which is a very good thing for a cooling system. How many stories are there about overheated and dead servers due to an aircon unit failure?

An important point is that anyone *can* sue anyone for anything.

Whether they have a snowball's chance of winning is entirely another matter.

That's easy - he's good at qualitative analysis but not quantitative analysis. Numbers and by-rote facts mean nothing to him, but if he can see a pattern, it makes perfect sense. A formula is a by-rote fact into which you plug numbers...

If you cannot get your problem resolved during the first call to an outsourced call centre... Stop Calling.

Write a letter to your branch manager (if a bank) or local head office (for any other organisation) instead. It gets much quicker attention from a native English-speaker, and they take written communications much more seriously than phone conversations because it is easier to legally prove that such communication took place.

If your writing skills are not up to producing a business letter by yourself, ask someone who can do it for you. In the UK, Citizens Advice Bureaux should be able to help with this.

That's right, inflation has no effect on subsistence farmers and wage-slaves, who spend all their money pretty much as soon as they get it - assuming that pay rates keep step with the cost of living, which is not always the case.

But inflation has a very negative effect on people with savings and investments, because the real value of these is diluted over time. It strongly exaggerates the "time value of money" concept, and indeed amplifies it.

Historically, when Britain and other major countries used a precious-metal standard, mild and controlled deflation resulted, because population growth exceeded that of stocks of metals. Deflation is usually cited as a Bad Thing because capital owners can just let their money sit around instead of investing it, and it's value will go up anyway. But this ignores the fact that investment is always a sound rational choice if the expected return is higher than unity, regardless of inflation or deflation, and that most people now save using banks, which are in a position to invest those deposits wholesale.

Because people are irrational, people with significant amounts of capital are now tempted to speculate on the market by the possibility of greater-than-inflation returns. These people feel that they are losing out if they get anything less than the inflation rate, and would often be quite happy to leave it in a bank if deflation existed. But speculators are what cause bubbles, and bubbles always burst and crash.

There is one advantage of a fiat currency: governments can borrow money from the people, without asking, in a time of emergency (such as war), simply by having the Treasury print more money. It will be paid for automatically in the medium term, by inflation. But this only works, as we see from Greece's sorry example, if that government directly controls the issue of currency.

It is not possible to just "produce a load of extra gold". You'd better believe that gold mines are already working at or near capacity, and that gold is one of the most thoroughly recycled metals on the planet. That is why it is such a good store of value - even if an unusually large nugget were to be found unexpectedly, it would only have a small and temporary effect on the price. Silver also makes a good store of value (mind you, it is currently undervalued), though it takes up a lot more space for that purpose than gold does. Even copper has been used as an effective store of small amounts of value - if pennies were still made of solid copper, the metal would be inherently worth considerably more than face value - and still has a high enough scrap price that thieves often steal both live and abandoned electric cables.

There's some fun political history there...

Most of the Nordic countries have been merged and separated at various times in the past few centuries. For example, Finland was once part of Sweden, then the Russians invaded in the early 1800s, then the Finns declared independence while the Russians were otherwise occupied with their revolution (so as such, Finland is a very young country). Norway, Sweden and Denmark have been parts of each other in a very complicated manner, and have dependencies and ex-dependencies all over the North Atlantic, dating back to the Viking era. The Åland islands logically belong to Sweden, technically belong to Finland, are Swedish-speaking and are a demilitarised zone...

But the short answer is that a lot of concepts and ideals are indeed shared between the Nordic countries.

In Finland at least, both national and municipal income taxes are witheld by your employer based on the instruction given by the "tax card", which is automatically generated by the government based on the information given to the tax office. The most an ordinary employee needs to do is to take their evidence of income to the tax office when it changes significantly, and return the tax card to their employer. The result is not ideal - the amount witheld by the employer is an estimate, so there may be an excess or a refund at the end of the year - but it's a lot less hassle than the US system, not least because the employer reports your actual income at the end of the year, and the government does the calculations.

I should point out that the PAYE scheme in the UK has the same general effect, so it's not solely a Nordic phenomenon. If your taxes are "normal" - ie. you are a waged or salaried employee - your employer is responsible for paying your income taxes, your bank is responsible for paying your interest taxes, and your supermarket (well, any shop) is responsible for paying your sales taxes (that is, VAT). But you still have to pay council tax yourself.

Personally, I think the ideal is that ordinary citizens should not even have to think about taxation. But at the moment, checks and balances do still involve the citizen moving a small amount of paperwork around - this means that both the employer and the employee have to collude to avoid tax, rather than the employer being able to do so alone. But it still happens, usually when the employee is in a disadvantageous position, eg. an illegal immigrant being paid under the table. The advantage over the US system is that the ordinary citizen does not have to understand the tax system to a professional standard (or pay someone to do so) in order to fulfil unavoidable legal requirements.

There are basically two classes of fixed-wing aircraft: those where the controls are physically connected to the flight surfaces, and those that are controlled entirely by hydraulic pressure and/or electronics. The latter is increasingly common in large airliners, but has been around for decades (a DC-10 was infamously controllable only by the wing-engine throttles after the tail engine shattered and took all the hydraulics with it - roughly half the people on board survived the "landing").

Both of them are easily capable of landing after all engines fail at cruising altitude. Electric power, where necessary, is generated by a small windmill which extends from the body of the plane when needed.

Only the directly-connected type - which (conservatively) includes pretty much anything up to about corporate-jet size or built before 1970 - will be able to continue flying in a controlled fashion if the electronics are destroyed by a large EMP. Some of the hydraulic indirect types will probably fly too, depending on how independent the controls are of EMP-sensitive electronics and whether a source of hydraulic pressure remains. You do *not* want to be on board *any* Airbus if an EMP goes off within range - they are entirely computer-controlled, and the pilot's joystick inputs are merely suggestions.

Whether the navigation equipment will still work is, frankly, unlikely. The pilot will have to find his way to an airport the hard way.

Going back to the original subject, all cars certified for road use have a physical link for steering (usually with power assistance these days, but this does nothing at highway speeds), and two braking systems that can be applied by human effort alone (both hand and foot brakes, though the footbrake is usually power-assisted too). That's enough to easily retain control in the face of total electrical failure and engine cutout.

But it is worth noting that a lot of old cars have engines, with carburettors and distributors, that would not be affected by any kind of EMP. At worst, it would induce a momentary misfire and fry the radio. If you look in the right scrapyards, you can find Renault and Volvo engines that have outlived their vehicles and are robust enough to withstand quite a lot of boring and boosting... so serious criminals who put some thought and effort into preparing their crime can avoid being stopped by the EMP and still have a fast enough car to keep ahead of the chase. But high-speed chases are usually the result of insufficient planning anyway...

Unfortunately Cringely has overlooked the principle of conservation of momentum.

Once each piece of junk lodges permanently in the net - assuming for the moment that the net is a good solution - the whole ensemble will by definition have the total momentum vector that the spacecraft+junk had beforehand. No amount of clever angling will help that.

Now, if he instead said that he was going to bounce off each piece of junk so that the junk was sent into the atmosphere and the spacecraft was also redirected usefully, then that would have been more plausible - except of course that he would then need to make the spacecraft itself pretty damn robust.

No, I'm much more inclined to consider small drones which can drift around with a little ion drive and attach to a few bits of junk each (at near-zero dV), and then deorbit themselves.

Funnily enough, that bag was released in LEO... and will therefore eventually decay of it's own accord. He'll have to be quick if he wants to snatch that up.

The most obvious place to start is Suomenlinna, the Fortress of Finland, which is built on an island complex just outside Helsinki. There's a regular ferry between there and the mainland, and it's big enough to be worth spending at least an entire day there.

The museums there cover everything from pre-1800 (when Finland was part of Sweden rather than Russia) to at least WW2, and many of the 19th-century Russian howitzers are still in position, though unusable.