Just imagine writing a job listing for someone to replace a retiring remployee!

Clearly they'd have to train someone suitable on the job, and for the right person it wouldn't be too hard, but when that person moves on it would look very strange on their resume.

Ah yes. Once computers used to run at 12MHz but had a Turbo button that let them run at 16MHz when you needed extra speed.

The story is called "The Planck Drive" and the author is Greg Egan (the man without a photo ). The story can be found in the book "Luminous" among other places and I highly recommend it.

Yeah. Derren pulled out all the stops and actually got one man to believe that he was in the middle of a zombie apocalypse for days on end. It was a masterpiece, Derren's best work in my opinion.

A zombie apocalypse happened in Britain and was shown in a BBC documentary by Derren Brown.

You do know that hawkinspeter was the one who mentioned April Fool, right?

LOL! I actually felll for this until you mentioned April Fool. I guess I'm low hanging fruit.

Who cares anymore? Gnome 3 could have special in a good way but instead it was special in an OMG way. They had a chance and blew it. If they had eaten their crow warm the situation could have been salvaged but now half their user base has abandoned them and the other half has become divided. It's going to be hard for them to maintain a critical mass in the long term.

Ubuntu has a similar problem but not so pronounced. I'm typing this on a Kubuntu computer and I have no complaints with it. I've tried Unity twice and rejected it both times, once because it was ugly and once because it was unusable. Ubuntu is bigger than Unity though while Gnome can't be bigger than Gnome.

Thank you. Everything is clear now and I've also learned why Youtube hasn't been closed down which is something I've often wondered about.

What does that even mean?

I am so glad I never became a lawyer like my mother wanted me to.

So any planets outside the goldilocks zone are unbearable?

There's no way to know for sure but I've often wondered if Earth being a binary plant and the warmer Earth core from the tidal force of the Moon affects where the goldilocks zone is. It'll certainly have made a difference on the volcanoes that broke snowball earth and the resultant explosion of complex life, and also on the intertidal zone that must have been so important when life later moved from water to land.

There are two binary planets in our solar system out of perhaps twenty in total so very roughly that hopefully indicates that 10% of these exoplanets might have suitable moons. That's a very promising percentage when looking for complex life in other systems.

I didn't know POV-Ray was still around. It caused me untold grief in the 90s and it's the main reason why I ended up buying Shade and Poser which were much easier to use. I've also used Photoshop and now use Blender. The very thought of using POV-Ray again gives a cold shiver, it would need to be a whole new beast to be a viable alternative.

Well there is a certain subtlety to it beyond the obvious. Take the women from any dynasty, The House of Windsor for example, from Queen Victoria to Princess Alexandra to Princess Elizabeth to her daughter Queen Elizabeth to Princess Diana to Duchess Camilla to Princess Catherine. Or perhaps Senior White House women. Any group of women who are newsworthy for other reasons create interesting patterns as the kaleidoscope changes with each change of generation.

Curiously in the 80s and 90s the type of girls known as Jersey Girls in the US were called Effies in Australia after a TV character called Efimea but known to all and sundry as Effie.

The different meanings of the words F-able and effable and their antonyms unF-able and ineffable often form an unholy symmetry when applied to particular women.

The prize is top spot in the foodchain of the future. I'm betting on mice to take it. They eat anything, they're small and clever, they won't be outside when the bombs start blowing and their favourite food is cockroaches so they'll always have something to eat. Perhaps we'll eventually have one tonne mouse predators hunting ten tonne mouse herbivores and even Rodent Sapiens making mouse warrior robots to fight their mouse wars for them against the Rodent Erectus scum.