I mistakenly selected "Earned me a stern reprimand" when I should have gone for "had a serious chance of leading to jail", which is quite a slip.

About 9 years ago I got in trouble for crashing into another car. I was pulling out of a minor road to cross more major one. I looked right, then left, then forgot to look right again (I'm in the UK btw) and as I pulled out I got hit from the right by a car with a couple of old guys in. My car got turned through about 60 degrees and ended up partway across the carriageway I was crossing. The other car ended up crossing the other carriageway, mounting the kerb, running over a tree and coming to rest just shy of someone's garden wall. Mercifully no one was seriously injured.

The police turned up and had a look around, took their pictures and so on. I got pulled into a car and told that my choices were either to face a charge of careless driving (possibly even dangerous, I forget) which I think could lead to up to 6 years in jail and a £6k fine, or I could go on a "Driver improvement course" and get away without even being arrested. I took the course, naturally, which was a 2 day affair with lectures on careful driving and some practise driving with instructors. At the time, it became very clear that it should actually be called a "You can't drive for shit course" as some of the people there were truly inept - one woman wouldn't go beyond third gear, a guy I met was on his 6th write off... really useless drivers. Still, the choice between spending £120 and 2 days on that course, or potentially going to prison was a pretty easy choice.

I still don't think I was entirely in the wrong with regard to that accident. I was joining a road with a speed limit of 30mph, and with a good long line of sight when looking to the right, so for someone to go from being not there to being on top of me in the time it took for me to fail to glance right and move out suggests to me that they were speeding. The fact that they managed to run over a tree with a 6 inch wide trunk after hitting my car and mounting the kerb also doesn't persuade me that they were doing just 30mph.

All that being said, the evidence would have been clear to the police officer - at the time I was a 19 year old man with very short hair driving a red car. Case closed, your honour.

You're welcome.

Main rate CT is currently 28%, small companies rate is 21%. Marginal rate applies between 300k and 1,500k, though the thresholds depend on how many associated companies you have. The 24% rate won't be the lowest in the western world, though it will apparently be the lowest in the G20. The drop in CT rates is good, as is the drop in NI, though it's balanced by the drop in capital allowances from 20% to 18% for main pool expenditure and 10% to 8% for special rate pool expenditure.

Why yes, I do happen to be a a corporation tax adviser ;)

I'll bet Nintendo don't know how to do those things and I'm sure they flat out don't want to do those things.

Yep, same here. Posting from my laptop... Well, my employer's laptop, technically.

The Finnish government is based on proportional representation and coalitions, so my Finnish mother tells me, which I imagine means less scope for governments to sieze tyrannical power without someone to keep them in check. The country is indeed also very socialist, but somehow it works and you don't appear to piss money up the wall on stupid things in the same way that Britain does.

I'd move to Finland in a heartbeat if I could learn the language and persuade my wife and kids, and the political system is one of the reasons.

It's fitting this message should be passed along by an anonymous coward.

Why is the parent post flamebait? It's a very well known phenomenon that when US products go on sale in the UK, the exchange rate may as well be 1:1.

Watchmen was such a faithful adaptation of the comic that it was unwatchable as a film

One of the main aims in producing Watchmen, the comic, was to show what a comic can do that a film can't. So they went ahead and made the film, it didn't work terribly well, and the circle is complete.

Are you even required to have an Internet connection to use Natal? Can it even perform adequate facial recognition to ID a person? Wikipedia says it only does 48 skeletal points, and I doubt enough of those are on the face to recognise a specific person. Can you turn Natal off? Can you not use it altogether?

This is not 1984. Calm down.

What if when you bought the car you agreed to a contract that granted Sony the right to remove any part of the car at any time?

The real question in all of this is whether the EULA is binding.

violent video games where 99% of the time the *targets* are other human beings, and there is little to no moral context for the violence

I've got to take exception to this. Plenty of violent games have moral context. You mentioned Halo, which has the moral context of repelling hostile invaders. That's pretty moral as far as I'm concerned. The same goes for other games like Call of Duty - wars are waged, generally, for moral reasons.

OK, so something like GTA is decidedly immoral, so I'll accept any objections to that on these grounds, but to say that violent games have little to no moral context seems a bit short sighted to me.

Big deal. Call me when it can do a 4 dimensional Rubik's cube.

The explanation I heard for the mixed fabric rule was that the two threads will wear and shrink at different rates, so the garment will fall apart and you waste both materials. We've pretty much got around that problem these days though.

I'm not comparing them to anything really, except to their own past values. Apple's market cap has recently exceeded that of Wal*Mart, and their share price has been similarly growing.

Besides, I wasn't saying they were outstripping everyone else, just that they are by no means dying.