Who needs the kind of shit he's had to take since he stumbled into the job less than two months ago? You'd have to be a pretty hard-assed kind of guy to brazen out the flak that the (print) media have been dishing out against the BBC in general and him in particular. Not that they'd have any kind of agenda in the aftermath of the Leveson inquiry...

The BBC is still the best and least biased source of news in UK, and probably in the English-speaking world. Every other source has manifold compromises because of its ownership, sponsorship, or government influence. OK, a couple of programme editors screwed up; at least they had the freedom to do so.

Mate, there's nothing but FTA services on Freesat!

It's available nationwide, is easily as good as Freeview, and has HD channels. What's not to like about it?

Care, feeding and education of. They have been my largest single expense since they were born. Fortunately I can think I am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel as their undergraduate courses are nearly finished.

Not so; it's amazingly easy to sign up for Costco in UK, much easier than getting a card for Makro or Booker. If you really want to seize the savings -- which can be considerable if you can resist the temptation to over-indulge -- and you haven't joined, I'd say that shows a distinct lack of imagination.

You are so right. The first mobile provider to offer roaming charges that are as as low as even *double* what I pay at home, will get my business immediately. As it is, the roaming charges (I am mainly interested in data) are so prohibitively high that I disable data as soon as I get near the border. The provider loses out, I lose out, and it's only the suckers who sustain this deeply flawed business model.

I would mod you up if I could; you are right on the money. Here is an interesting article from yesterday's Observer (UK Sunday newspaper). It addresses the same issue basically.

I usually find that a generous cleaning of the windshield will send enough water over a tailgater to get the "drop back" message across.

The only spam that gets through to me these days is typically content-free - it doesn't appear to be advertising anything, often the body is completely empty. As the sender won't have had any acknowledgement, what on earth is the point of that kind of email?

Actually, there is a Tivoli product that does more or less exactly what the OP asks for: IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager for Dynamic Content Delivery

I take the view that by downloading a copy someone else has made available, you are not personally infringing copyright. The person who makes it available has done that. Your action in downloading seems to me to be entirely equivalent to finding a copy that someone has left on the bus.

So I say download the e-text and read it, but under no circumstances should you re-distribute the copy you downloaded, because that would clearly be infringing on someone's legal copyright.

If you wish, you can write to the author and say you enjoyed it (if you did) -- that's just normal respectful behaviour and no different to what you might do if you had bought a first edition in hardback.

Under the circumstances I see no need to make any payment to the author, since neither she nor her original publisher seem to be motivated to earn further payment for the work.

FWIW I'm in my mid '50s.