I have an idea: why not fork Firefox and create a leaner/faster just-a-browser and cut out all the excess junk.
And it could be named after some sort of animal or bird that comes out of ashes maybe ?

Me, I would just ban cars. That would be heaven to cyclists, pedestrians, public transport users, horse riders, children ... !!

USD 99 is price in China: US version estimated at +USD 50 = USD 149

I work in ground based space systems, and can confirm it is tough enough to write the code for a modern satellite *with the documentation* :-0

Why bother ? The UK already contributes to ESA, which has Envisat

From ESA "A major problem was that the spacecraft's orbit was not accurately known, whereas ground stations normally require very accurate position information for pointing due to the antenna size."

Excellent, thanks: I had not seen that one before, I found it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_zNSSknXC4
That was the idea, but unfortunalty Ms Lumley's part was a bit short :-(

No word on who may play The Doctor. *Please* let the role be played by a female: the potential for Dr-Who-esq humour would be immense !! And of course a male "companion" !

Makes me feel old: when I was a kid the best computers could do was play Pong against me !!

But,... guess what... the world does not/never did really divide into just USA and USSR. i.e. !USA /= USSR
There are lots of possible ways of organizing society, most with pros and cons.

Come on Slashdot: surely the headline should have been "Solaris goes up too 11" !!

> Why did we need to invent twitter, web fora, and IM when we had Listserv, USENET, and IRC?

The few USENET groups I used to follow basically died due to trolls.
The "real" users migrated to Web Forums, sometimes funded by advertising, which usually have some degree of Moderation.

But I really miss the functionality associated with the single interface to all USENET groups, (although you could of course chose *which* tool to use).
Some people tried to write plugins that converted web forums to pseudo USENET groups, but I think they all failed (I had tried one ages ago to read Slashdot in Xemacs/Gnus.)

Firstly I am an atheist, however I guess the obvious *religious* response (I repeat: not mine) is that (again) it is God testing you: do you have faith in him, even though there is stacks of evidence and logical arguments against his existence.

> First shredding, and then incinerating would seem fairly fool-proof though.

Than drop the ashes from a plane, over the ocean, during a storm ... !

No need to panic: this is a suggestion from an UK civil servant. Even if it did became policy one day the work would be farmed out to a least-cost supplier, the project would be 5 years overdue and 6 times over budget. If it ever made it into anyone's home it would be cracked by 12 year old in her lunch break :-)