There have been numerous organisations known as the IRA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy_of_the_IRA

"Hard to know whom to believe" is a fair comment, but the answer is very rarely "The Daily Mail".

It is a trashy tabloid that styles pretends it is a serious broadsheet. Pretty much a joke to most people in the UK.

http://www.mailwatch.co.uk/

In the UK, taxation on cars has never wholly paid for road maintenance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_Excise_Duty

It's from Darren Aronofsky film "Pi", which has some great lines:

"Hold on. You have to slow down. You're losing it. You have to take a breath. Listen to yourself. You're connecting a computer bug I had with a computer bug you might have had and some religious hogwash. You want to find the number 216 in the world, you will be able to find it everywhere. 216 steps from a mere street corner to your front door. 216 seconds you spend riding on the elevator. When your mind becomes obsessed with anything, you will filter everything else out and find that thing everywhere."

"As soon as you discard scientific rigor, you're no longer a mathematician, you're a numerologist."

I think people are instinctively wary of web addresses made consisting of random letters and numbers, as they remind them of those received in spam e-mails. I've installed an extension in Safari called Ultimate Status Bar which shows you where shortened urls will redirect ( http://ultimatestatusbar.com/ ), which is very handy.

Glass does not flow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass#Physical_properties Have a look at the "Behavior of antique glass" section, pretty interseting.

We will all just have to get in our SUVs and drive down to the nearest oil company head office and protest! I remember not too long ago when a Republican President poo hooed the heck out of Al Gore about his statement that the "greatest threat to American society is our reliance upon the personal automobile". This statement might have cost him the election, certainly in Florida the result would have been different if not for his political gaff of telling the truth! His statement is still far too true to be funny....

If there is anyway BP is going to actually pay for this disaster then we all are going to lose. BP will not survive this and will just be absorbed by some other multinational. Perhaps even some corporate entity associated with the Bush and Chaney crowd. It was all well and good to bail out the auto industry but we are just delaying the inevitable social collapse caused by our collective stupidity and greed!

There are two ways of looking at what to do -- proximate and ultimate.

In the proximate sense, one thing to do is volunteer time or supplies if you're in an affected area. I'm in Florida -- in my area, I know right now of Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary ( http://www.seabirdsanctuary.com/uploads/oil.pdf ) and Audubon Florida ( http://audubonoffloridanews.org/ ), which are each asking for volunteers, money, and/or supplies. Other organizations may be looking for help -- help if you can, spread the word even if you can't.

In the ultimate sense, it's hard not to become reactionary to things like this. Clearly there's a need for some serious prevention, and however that comes about, it must. There are boycotts, letter writing campaigns, and the like, and while they may seem awfully pedestrian, the first step in each is something that's been needed for an exquisitely long time -- awareness. People don't tend to realize that the oceans are just downstream from everyone -- for example, just how many people do you think recognize the oil spill that dribbles into the Gulf every year from runoff into the Mississippi watershed? It's once people start to realize what's happening, what's important, and where changes need to happen that movement toward change occurs. Oil being the trigger word that it is these days, it's hard to say whether or not ocean health is foremost in people's minds. Building awareness -- even inland! -- is about getting it there.

I don't know what the key is. Maybe it's kids asking whether the animals they love seeing at the aquarium are going to be lost because of the oil spill. Maybe it's fishermen who lose their livelihoods because their fisheries are either contaminated or outright destroyed. Maybe it's people who worked in tourism and sports industries that previously thrived on healthy beaches and coastal waters. Whatever that key is, some catalysis needs to happen soon, and it needs to start with people simply caring enough to understand and do something, wherever they are, however they can. Too much is at stake.

BP is going to pay? I don't think they are going to take it out of BP employee salaries. Let's face it, if BP pays then the costs get passed on to the customers. Whatever BP doesn't pay will get passed tot he US taxpayers.

If BP doesn't pay, then should their business licenses be revoked in all affected states? in the US?

The android Google TV I think will be a nice feature to have. Being able to transfer the web page from the computer screen to your tv screen using the Google Software is something that seems like its already been done,but hopefully many other platforms will jump on board with the idea!

speech software has been evolving at a steady pace. but the issue isn't that its the fact 90% of the users out there don't use it. if you live in a loud place with kids or other noise it will not work well. windows 7 has built in speech software and how many people use it. i played with the latest dragon speech software and i gotta admit its very good even without traning it. i did emails with it without any issue. but as i said speech software is more a toy then anything usefull. as people said it probly will have a good use on a cell phone rather then on a pc being it would be a easy way to chat rather then using the cell phones keypad. .

if we assume a 4 mile effective range (which i think is overly generous for a gun, but hey), that gives a mach 3 cruise missile approximatly 6 seconds within phalanx range, i'd love to see a crew that can reload ammo cans on an opperating, moving and firing phalanx system in that amount of time. you would just need ~8 missiles to overload a single phalanx (2 100-round bursts to take out a missile, phalanx runs out after 7 missiles), assuming its range is 4 miles (i believe that even if it is, it would be severly less effective due to bullet scatter), purely on ammo capacity

Phalanx might work against one or two simultanious missiles, but overpowering it with sheer numbers wouldnt be all that hard

When the web was new and I had to make presentations like this, I would do HTML pages (with bullets) instead of powerpoint slides. The big difference was that I would also provide lots of links to additional information and details on each point. It took longer to write (both because of the additional information, but mostly because we didn't have great tools to assist), but was more engaging with the audience and did provide the additional details that a bullet-list-slide didn't.

Nowadays, I might think about using something like Prezi for some of my briefings. While it does allow a linear path through a presentation, the information is layed out spatially and allows zooms and pans both through the path and independent of the path. This makes it pretty easy to provide additional information and show the relationship between some of the points. It does allow bullet points, but mostly so it can mock their use.

Thank you, sir. I applaud your efforts and admire your wit.