... how much the UK Gov't needs for things like paying its talented and over-worked Civil Servants. I'd go into detail but the heating's switched off in my part of the building over Xmas and the New Year

As someone who works in the British civil service (on non-strike days anyway) I can assure you that neither "Yes, Minister" nor "Yes, Prime Minister" have dated much.

A man from Hibernian Express was on the "Today" programme on BBC R4 yesterday morning and was clearly surprised to be asked how many milliseconds there are in a second. After a bit of flapping he declared there were 100,000.

... and a neat complement to the welcome support Cameron got from the Chinese Govt for his proposal to block social networking sites as they could be used to organise riots.

In the UK we don't really do earthquakes and tsunamis so I suppose our stress-tests will feature vibrations caused by loud music from the neighbours (because we certainly won't ask them to turn it down, v unBritish) and predictable rain on the first day of a test-match.

Never too old to learn (to think straight), merci.

Aside from the odd doc I forgot to print off at work my printer's used in the production of letters to send to utility providers, banks and other large organisations, many of which don't seem to have good mechanisms for dealing with electronic correspondence. And could someone tell the /. spell-checker that when I type "organisations" it's because I mean to.

Not because the TSA (or equivalents elsewhere) will want it but because some company will offer it and the need to be seen taking every precaution (while ignoring quite a few low-profile ones) will be irresistible.

Tabs? Qu'est-ce que? As I may have mentioned before we are still on IE6.

Could be. The RV method can't detect small (ie Earth-size) planets at a distance from a star and simulations by the team showed such the presence of such a planet in the "habitable zone" would be consistent with their results (or at least it wouldn't knacker all their simulations). I welcome our not internally inconsistent overlords.

I get very little, mostly junk. Ideally I'd like to shove it straight into the rubbish bin just outside my front door. But, of course, that's not the bin for paper, which is in the kitchen (it's also for cans). Should I be a good citizen and carry this dross through the house to the correct bin? Or open the front door and guiltily sneak it into the bin for general rubbish? And that's nowhere near the most exciting decision I have to take each day, let me tell you.

Replace of IE6? In my dreams http://www.techwatch.co.uk/2010/08/02/uk-government-thinks-ie6-will-have-to-do/.

It's a chance to review the quarter finals and take a view on who'll win the semis. It might have been a time to think about a sub or two for my fantasy footie team were it not for the fact that I've had to use all of them up clearing out Italians and Englishmen.

The need for any paper-based note-taking is usually a result of a computer problem - in which case it's whatever scraps of paper I can find (tissues, train-tickets, Con-Dem coalition agreements).

What?! I've just been mulling over whether to upgrade the OS on my main machine to XP.