Which is code for "extremely cold all the time".

All UK sewage works purify their sewage enough so that it can be safely discharged into the nearest river. In truth, where else could they dump it?

It (apparently) is not a myth that by the time the Thames has got to London, the water extracted from, to turn into drinking water, it has already been through an average of seven other people. And, whilst there is a reverse osmosis plant on the Thames Estuary, it is only used during times of drought and then to turn brackish (salty) estuary water into drinking water. Normal water treatment plants use traditional methods such as sand and/or trickle beds + UV purification. Reverse Osmosis is otherwise waaaaaaay too expensive.

But, but (splutter), since you have group access, then you can do rm -rf * anyway, so why bother with the cleverness? Especially as you have to leave a file there with your username handily stamped it ready for some more clueful person to catch you.

Er.. most of the exploits are only possible if one is root and/or the directory is writable for some other user (e.g. leon in this case).

Since one is root, one can do anything anyway so why bother with all this misdirection? If someone leaves world writable directories lying around (especially without the sticky bit set), then they deserve everything they get. Or is this some kind of "trap the (completely) unwary sysadmin" wake up call? If I see some strange named file (especially if I know I didn't put it there) I would investigate very, very carefully what is going on. I can't be alone in this - surely?

The engineers answer: ask someone who went to school before the zombies arrived. Mind you, an engineer probably wouldn't have to bother. Rhetorical question: I wonder how Euclid managed?

Everybody knows that that vital million to one chance happens nine times out of ten.

George 2 ???? George 3 for me! That's what Galdor moved onto after Flossie left and we moved on ICL 1905Fs.

It does not have "12KB" of ram. It has 2K of 48 bit words. Each word can contain 2 instructions. It is a decimal machine so each word can contain 12 digits. It also has (only) one accumulator (of 12 digits). Whilst this particular example has an indexing mechanism (actually a "pre-modify" instruction) which was added from a 1302, the standard way of indexing is by using "live code" i.e. doing arithmetic on the code on fly. The "2 instructions per word" structure actually makes this very easy to do. It was designed in the late 1950s and built in 1961. One can program it in machine code (very easy instruction set), an assembler, various obsolete specialist languages and, of course, COBOL. There is no C compiler. Flossie is very musical. She can play many tunes.

Did you know that, here, we can go to one of several websites and buy a new car from any manufacturer, usually with a significant discount over list, together with a mandatory manufacturer's warranty that has to be honoured by that manufacturer's service outlets?

The Health Service is creaking a bit though...

Depends on how paranoid you are and whom you think is out to get you :-)

Set one of these up, together with some surveillance, train the device to recognise the mark and where he is (in conjunction with the now mandatory CFL bulbs as well as the tv and computer screens) and when you gets to just the right place - let off the shaped charge. It's clean, capable of discerning whether there is any collateral damage potential (and wait until the mark is alone) and economical as well (only use just the charge you need).

I know that there are some pretty exotic coatings in use today, but I can't help feeling, considering the number of disks likely to be sold, that this is not going to help conserve the already overstretched usage of noble metals (e.g catalytic converters etc). If Seagate bring this to market at a competitive price, then that will would be another reason to invest in noble metal mining shares (or even metal, if one can stomach the ride).

Toshiba have demonstrated fuel cells for laptops since at least 2006. They may not be pretty, but the principle should not be patentable (at least by Apple). http://www.pcworld.com/article/157606/toshibas_fuel_cell_laptop.html

After all, when one of these super volcanoes goes off, there will likely be some seismic consequences and if the other volcano is ready to pop, that might just provide enough omph to make it go too...