"Sexting While Driving" ... got my hopes up. After that the actual story was a bitter disappointment.

OTOH, this means that whenever reference is made to one of their speeches people can just insert scandalous bits. Objections by the Tories would be countered by pointing out that because they removed all copies from the Internet then anything they publish has been modified and is therefore not to be trusted. It should be easy to cultivate an aura of mistrust in anything that they say after that. Well, that is what I would do if I was Machiavelli. Or true to my username. :)

Very little lactose in butter. However, I am sensitive to milk fats which means almost all dairy is out of the question, even skim milk (which is *not* fat free). So if I want a butter equivalent I have to go for something like an olive oil based margarine, but sparingly. I would prefer an alternative. Any suggestions?

When I first saw it my brain was a bit fried from an intense work day. I wanted a dumb as crap movie that I could tune out to. Fellow devs at the time said, "it's just mindless action." OK, good enough for me. But when I watched it it was a deep critique of society as a nascent fascist state. I actually liked it, a lot. If you have ever seen the propaganda movies of WW2, and enough footage from the Third Reich then "Starship Troopers" is a brilliant movie. Not much to do with the book though. I liked how you were suckered into thinking you were on the good side until it slowly became obvious that you were on the wrong, very wrong, side. The intelligence guy, whats-is-name, dressed like a gestapo officer, executing prisoners, conducting experiments on prisoners. Even the uniforms, nice versions of German WW2 military uniforms.

Most frightening part was that most people I knew who saw it didn't even realise that it was about a fascist state. Oh crap that was creepy. Not one of the great movies, but underrated I think.

Now it's not that I bump up against many bugs but this is a very smart move. So many times you see feature upon feature added, maybe crash a bit blah blah. But sometimes you just have to stop, take a deep breath and just fix what is there rather than pile on new stuff. A brave decision but essential for the OS itself which must be rock solid above all else.

Yes. My first reaction to seeing that Maverick was free was to ask myself why, and why make a song and dance about it? I haven't updated my macbook pro with this yet because I had this uncomfortable feeling. Now I read that they are giving an amnesty to pirated software but will in future require all software to come through the App Store. Well that rings a bell. That was the strategy MS took with Windows, first they let people pirate it then when everyone was dependent on it they used the activation strategy to suddenly make those people pay for the next release. I am feeling really uncomfortable with the whole walled-garden of Apple, now it seems they are putting razor wire and broken glass around the top of the walls of the garden. I think in future I'll just go back to Linux and maybe Windows.

Part of me keeps thinking that this sounds like a phenomenon that must have some industrially useful application but I can't think of it.

Seconded. A wonderful tool.

That there is a name to be made in debunking landmark studies in the biosciences because they cannot be reproduced. That should be part of the scientific process.

I find Oreos uninspiring. I really don't understand what the fuss is about. American chocolate I have tasted was terrible, it was complete crap. Maybe I have just got used to the higher levels of sugar and real cream in the local varieties. Although, 'local' seems more and more to mean anything not from the US. Hershey bars were particularly disappointing. On the other hand I hear that their ice cream is really something amazing.

Slightly longer answer: people want stories, not dry factual events. I have yet to read a science fiction story that didn't stretch the truth, but the critical thing was that if most of the science was still good then it was okay. 'Gravity' stretched the truth: orbits weren't right, the debris field wouldn't have been like that. "Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story" (to quote Mr Chopper Read). If it was factual it would be less dramatic, more cerebral, if they lost all their oxygen or suffered damage to heat shield on the shuttle etc etc, then what would the story be? Slowly dieing of oxygen starvation? Sacrifice someone? Still wouldn't solve anything. Okay in a short story like "The Cold Equations" but in a movie? Nah, bollocks. I liked 'Gravity', everyone should just take a few deep breaths and settle down.

I was involved in a large ecommerce site. $30 million. All in java, when it was finished we had started using the latest Java 1.1.5. By the time Java 1.2 came out java was very, very popular ... there was a lot of hype about it, but not much in the universities. That changed rapidly but the popularity of Java came first. Everyone knew that at the time. Now think about this image. This is post-hype, it was already waning by the time of the new millennium, but still dominant. That is before the popularity in the universities and colleges.

... I still cared about the status of Voyager 1. Perhaps it still hasn't left the nest, probably all set up in the basement playing GTA V.

Personally, I am delighted at the name of this phenomenon, whoever made up that phrase was clearly watching too much science fiction that week, or more likely not enough. "Interstellar flux transfer event" ... can you not see that in a future SF script? "Captain, we are caught in an interstellar flux transfer event, if we don't break free we will [go back in time | be transferred to a remote part of the universe | be transferred to another universe | nothing]"

To me the revolutionary thing about Myst was that the artwork looked like Art. It was beautiful. Haunting. Not quite immersive, but gee 20 years ago, what would you expect? The music wasn't bad either.

Here's a perfect example. Yesterday I was reading an article in the News section of Nature online. There were three comments: one was about how the item confirmed Billy Meier's contactee reports with his meeting with the Pleidians; another was (if I remember correctly) arguing against AGW; the last one was a guy touting his own theory of everything on his website. This is one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world. The comments were just embarrassing. They should just ban comments in the news section.

After that, this action from Popular Science looks positively enlightened.