The default is to charge you the fee whether you have a tuner in your household or not. This may be less ridiculous now that they provide a lot of other services, but it was also true back when they didn't.

Why, indeed?

What you use is noscript, and then you allow only the scripts necessary to get the portal working, and you don't run any flash or java from the portal, etc etc. And you keep your browser updated. It's not rocket surgery. It's not foolproof, but it's best to act as little like a fool as possible.

I'd be more concerned about a catastrophic software failure. Modern drone autopilots have fairly astounding limp home ability, you ought to be able to crash them in predefined locations fairly reliably. Unless, of course, something goes batshit with the electronics and/or software...

A romantic notion, but incorrect. Private fleets account for 80% of trucks and over 50% of OTR tonnage shipped.

Fine them enough to bring in that line from the telco, installation and service. If that means they're paying for a fiber pull so you can get a fractional T3, so be it. It makes it a simple cost decision. I'm tired of blatantly fraudulent coverage maps, too.

Sounds good. Let's set the fine to be twice the cost of installing the line.

So the law says they can't charge you more because you're on a line which was installed under this program.

You chose to be part of the UK, you can live with being referred to as a citizen thereof. If you don't like it, you can try another referendum.

You're forgetting that Top Gear is the most popular television program... in the world. It's rather on the same scale as mismanagement of the Superb Owl.

Her English is very good, but not good enough.

You cannot sub out the cast and have the show work. So they shouldn't, but not because it's not worth it, but because they can't do it.

On average, that's false.

No, the main problem with American cars these days is build quality, just like always. UAW simply doesn't do as good a job as the non-union workers at the Japanese plants. Whether that's because higher per-hour labor costs make it impossible to pay them enough to torque fasteners correctly, which is a thing they seem to have trouble with, or just because they're shiftless layabouts without work ethic, the truth is that American cars tend to be assembled like shit.

If I want a car assembled correctly, I buy one which was put together in Germany or Japan, or second choice, by a Japanese company operating its own plant in the USA.

Only the top-end American cars are built from the same basic design strategies as euro cars... well, maybe and the Fiesta and Focus.

The way most stars are handled when they act out, you put them into counseling, make them make a public apology, that sort of thing. And that's why the BBC is stupid for being all PC over things Clarkson has said in the past. They gave him final warnings over things which didn't deserve any warning, now this happened and they had no choice but to go straight to firing him.

You mean battered. Just threatening someone is assault.

I think a lot of people would benefit from a pop in the nose. And I say that as someone who was bullied in school. Namely, some of those bullies could have used a good socking-up, for some perspective.

We don't know what was said. It's easy to say that violence is never an acceptable answer to something that someone says... But if that's true, then it's equally never acceptable to say something hurtful to someone, because words can hurt more and longer than fists depending on how they are applied.

I'll worry about Clarkson being violent when I find out what was said, and not until.

I think that a corporate master will let Clarkson speak his mind, because that's a big part of the appeal. Without that, he's not the same guy.

My mental model of "low electricity" is a $20 pogoplug drawing basically nothing and sharing two USB3 disks, plus 1 SATA disk. The whole arrangement will use less than your CPU.