True for Ryanair. But it's not legal, they have just been getting away with it for rather long.

Re train tickets: Sounds as if you bought a ticket for local trains and a reservation for an express train. Depending on how you bought them, this could be either your own fault or the fault of whoever sold them to you.

I am not at all convinced by this argument. Assuming the technical details that you are describing are correct, the situation is no different from, say, an eight-digit phone number in Munich such as 40123456 and a six-digit (legacy) phone number such as 123456 in Hamburg, which has the prefix (0)40. Both would be represented by precisely the same number and distinguished only by the TON field, so a TON = national number that just starts with 911 can't be a problem either.

Or are you saying that it is the case, and technically necessary, that if I dial 0112 in Germany, resulting in 112 with TON = national, I get the same result as when I dial 112?

Germany has been completely metricated for so long that several pre-metrication generations are no longer alive. Yet some Germans are still using customary units. And that's fine because they are simple multiples of metric units and are the same everywhere in Europe. For example a pound - to the extent that it's still in use - is nowadays exactly 1/2 kg except on those islands in the North West.

What most people are really attached to is words, not the precise size of a unit. What they don't understand is that with metrication they don't have to give up these words. They can call 1/2 kg a pound, they can call 1/2 litre a pint, they can call 1 metre a yard (this is already in use for distances on British motorways), they can call 1.5 km a mile. Years ago my mother sometimes asked me to bring half a pound (= 1/4 kg = 250 g) of butter from the supermarket. You can go down to the pub for a metric pint of 0.5 litres. Sure it's a bit less than an imperial pint, but you will get over it. Maybe see it this way: It will be a bit easier to have two. Or even three. This will be similar to what happened in Bavaria. A "Maß" of beer (e.g. at Oktoberfest) was once 1.069 litres. Nowadays it is precisely 1 litre.

Incidentally, every German child still knows some of the units as they still occur in fairy tales and other old texts, e.g. "7-mile-boots". They just don't know how much these old units are precisely, and as these formerly were different in different parts of the country, there isn't a simple answer anyway.

That's not relevant because for a call to Nürnberg you have to dial either 0911... from within Germany or +49911... for an international call. Neither starts with 911.

What is a problem, though (as someone already pointed out above and I verified independently), is that a huge number of phone numbers in Madrid is of the form 911xxxxxx and has to be dialed like that from everywhere in Spain. They would all have to be changed.

The MPAA's original paper: http://de.scribd.com/doc/115644694/NOT-Motion-Picture-Association-of-America-Final

They brag about how much money they are making and speak in passing about the "massive" impact of closing down Megaupload. The one thing that seems to be conspicuously missing is any estimate of how much more money they made due to the reduction in "piracy".

Yes, there are some suspicious elements. It may be part of a big push to get funding for NASA to do a manned Mars mission. And to encourage the Chinese to continue pursuing their plans. I would consider that a good thing.

On the other hand, it wouldn't be reasonable for them to design a transport ship on their own anyway. Apparently they are going to cooperate with DragonX, who apparently said in principle the technology is already there.

See http://mars-one.com/en/about-mars-one/advisers

"On what conditions would states allow a private company to send humans to another planet? What kind of requirements should a Mars settlement comply with in terms of planetary protection? What legal regime will govern life on another planet? Until now, these questions used to sound very 'far off', but if Mars One lives up to its promise, space lawyers have work to do, and I am excited to be a part of that!"

Tanja Masson-Zwaan, Deputy Director of the International Institute of Air and Space Law at Leiden University

Interesting idea, but I would hope that anyone going there from Earth would know precisely where the bodies came from, and when and why. And that anyone coming from elsewhere would be sufficiently advanced to realise that those guys can't have been endemic, what with containing lots of elements that are totally rare on Mars.

Someone just sufficiently far removed from the judge made a bet on Yahoo's shares falling just about this time.

I think you missed the point about detecting CFCs. It's not about unintended terraforming of someone's home planet. It's about terraforming *another* planet that initially is a bit too cold for the civilisation in question. In human terms we are speaking about creating factories on Mars that pump CFCs into its atmosphere so as to create a more habitable (for us) climate there. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars#Using_fluorine_compounds

As far as I know Microsoft *does* have a strong interested in being pirated in those jurisdictions in which they are not going to sell much anything. It's a question of market share and staying the monopolist.

Yes, German autobahns have speed limits, though obviously not everywhere. We have them because they are absolutely necessary. Germany has more than twice the population of California on significantly less area. The traffic often is accordingly.

For the same reason, it is absolutely forbidden to overpass another car on the right except under very specific circumstances (stop and go traffic, or direction lines at a crossing). This is the other thing which this driver has done. In contrast to the costly but socially accepted offence of being 30 km/h (20 mph) too fast on a motorway, this is considered absolutely reckless behaviour by almost everybody and raises eyebrows whenever someone does it. Here is an example for what often happens when idiots do it anyway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AGwQuT0-Lk

In general, driving on German motorways, with or without a speed limit, requires significantly more concentration than driving on Austrian ones (resulting in a significant change of my stress level each time I cross the border), which in turn requires a lot more concentration than driving on a British motorway (in spite of the left-hand side traffic), which in turn is not even comparable to the child's play on American motorways. (At the other end of the spectrum you can continue this with Italy, then probably countries like India.)

The stuff installed in this car makes no sense if the driver didn't (intend to) use it while driving. Germans don't live in their cars, they use them to quickly get from A to B. That's one reason we have smaller cars. If he used this setup, then he risked lives in much the same way as "Turbo Rolf" did in 2003: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/1454812/Turbo-Rolf-jailed-for-tailgate-deaths-of-mother-and-girl.html

That's actually a very reasonable reaction given the history of this kind of propaganda operation. Effective measures against smoking were delayed significantly by the first generation of these propaganda techniques. The goal never was to prevent anti-smoking legislation, it was to delay it by, e.g., introducing the word "junk science" for any scientific results that link smoking and lung cancer. When that battle was over, the front organisations for the tobacco industry's propaganda moved to denying global warming, initially with the same techniques, though of course they have since been improved. Of course many of the front organisations also changed over the years. There is academic research on this, but people and organisations like Fred Singer and the Heartland Institute really stand out to anyone with half a brain. They moved directly from denying smoking-induced lung cancer to denying (or down-playing, or approving, or all of these simultaneously - anything that creates a fake controversy) anthropogenic global warming.

This fake debate is essentially a denial of service attack against science in order to prevent that politicians act on it. There is no reason why the BBC should be obliged to support this manipulation.

As far as the hardware is concerned, a first-generation EeePC seems ideal to me. These things are easily available second hand, cheap, powerful enough even for a little bit of video, and can take a lot of abuse. As to software - that's more tricky, depends a lot on the child and will require a lot of work.

As it is mostly about space, ignore the smaller files. For large files, the file size is already a pretty close approximation to a unique hash. First of all, create a database with size/path information and some extra fields where you will later add better hash sums and maybe note how far you got in processing.

Process files by decreasing size. If there are only two files of a particular size, compare them directly.

If there are more than two files of a particular size, get a better hash for each. (Choose a fast hashing algorithm that looks only at the first KB or so of the files.) After that, make the obvious comparisons to detect precise copies.

I have some further ideas in case this is still not fast enough, but I am worried that I may have already pissed off enough people by reinventing key parts of their precious patented algorithms without mentioning them.