Well, I typed an intelligent first post in this thread. And it never appeared when I pressed submit. Given the complete lack of other posts, I have a suspicion that something is broken here.

I certainly hate the trend of bringing laptops to meetings. The user may well claim to be saving paper by bringing the meeting documents on his laptop. But to everyone else at the meeting he might as well be checking his email, posting on FB or writing a novel.
As a university lecturer I don't see much of a trend to bring laptops to lectures: our students seem to prefer sleeping or not attending at all. But I think if I was faced with a wall of laptop backs when I looked at the audience I would suggest that their owners should close them down and pay attention to the lecture. Given that there might be some dyslexics who can take notes more easily with a keyboard, a better approach would be to walk around the theatre and publicly mock anyone who was reading email or facebook --- the radio mike and laser pointer mean that one is not stuck at the front of the room any more. Maybe mocking would be too harsh: one could just ask them a hard question about the subject of the lecture and wave the radio mike under their nose.

Why yes, since you ask, I am the BLFH.

XIVth post?

Oh, if only we could persuade Messrs Horn and Downes to re-record the song with new lyrics based on the parent post ...

he had an apple 1, and it was numbered 151. Heh. A magic Apple number. ISTR that on the Apple ][ you could type "CALL -151" at the Basic prompt to drop yourself into the monitor/disassembler mode.

REAL American beer is done in microbrews.... like here in Portland, Oregon.
True, nowadays, and in big cities or nice trendy towns like Portland. When I lived in rural Mississippi in the late 1980s, you had a choice of Bud or Bud light. (Even in the so-called Irish bar. Honest! No Guinness in an Irish bar.) The "fscking close to water" joke dates back to that era, if not to an earlier one.

Brilliant. It arrives just at the point in my life where my eyesight is deteriorating, so that I have no chance of benefiting from it. Sigh.

What kind of a unit is Jupiter masses anyway? How much is that in Humvees?

Meh. I, for one, welcome our new self-assembling, replicating lego overlords.

Oh so nearly Haiku! Let's try again:

Adobe Reader X
Slow, more bloated than before
New holes to exploit


Darn. You have to pronounce "Adobe" as "A-dob".

Apple sues for the use of "X"
Followed closely by that company that makes the X-box. What were they called, now? ISTR them having a lot of lawyers. I don't imagine that the current providers of the X Window System will bother.

Did I really type RIAA instead of RAII?
You did, but it may intentionally have managed to be both funny and insightful.

I imagine not brushing your teeth gives you a few minutes extra every day, and that adds up.
That slur is common, but is very out of date. British dentists have persuaded an entire generation to clean their teeth with Fluoride toothpaste. As a result, there is now so little of the old drilling, filling and extracting work to be done that most dentists are desperately trying to get their patients interested in botox injections, getting their teeth bleached to an un-natural #ffffff white and so forth, just to keep themselves in business. It is almost like the USA, in fact.

Like anyone in the UK cycles anyway.

Parent answers this by suggesting a few Olympians, but TFA was about Cambridge. If you have ever been there during the University term, you will know that a navigational device is superfluous and unusable. Your bike will be sucked in, swept along and deposited somewhere at random by the dense, kerb-to-kerb flow of other cyclists.

To pick up another thread, the only sort of clothes they are unlikely to be wearing are Chris-Hoy-style spandex.

I'm thinking the current IT disaster by EADS
I think you might mean EDS rather than EADS.