I am horrified by the number of people who use its/it's, their/there etc interchangeably. I'm a lawyer, and such mispellings are common even in trainee solicitors these days. How on earth do you make it through 13 years of school, 3 years of undergraduate and 2 years of post-graduate education and still not know these basic rules?

It looks bad enough on a greengrocer's sign, but when these errors are in a letter from someone you're paying £109/hr it looks bloody awful IMO.

I'm not fanatical about it in general, but when words are your tool you should really have a grasp of the elementary rules governing them.

Yeah, I know it's /., where picking on MS is par for the course....but still, tech advertising generally is absolutely godawful. It doesn't seem to matter who the company is - MS, Apple, Cisco, Dell, Intel etc etc - their adverts fill me with a rage out of all proportion to that which a 20second TV spot should be capable of.

They're all suffused with a sense of bewildering smugness. The voiceovers always sound as though you're being faintly sneered at. And why do almost all of them have the same sort of whimsical music? Baffling.

Not sure about this. We've depleted a lot of the resources that we used to power our technological leaps; and most certainly the ones that are easily accessible. Without those, it'd be a lot harder to rebuild.

I'm sorry, but this is simply not true. Read your employment contract - if it doesn't say something along the lines of you having to return stuff to the employer after you leave employment I'd be amazed. There's plenty of continuing responsibilities that outlast an employment contract.

Case in point - when you leave a job, you'll probably want i) your final pay cheque, ii) any holiday pay accrued, iii) any bonuses you're entitled to and so on. Are you seriously arguing that there's no legal imperative on your former employer to provide those things? Or that an NDA suddenly ceases to exist? Or that an agreement not to badmouth the company (commonly inserted into compromise agreements) is worthless? Or an agreement to provide a specified reference?

The idea that any legal relationship or responsibilities between the parties cease the moment the employment does is quite simply a nonsense.

What you can *negotiate* in light of an unfair/constructive dismissal is irrelevant to what you're legally entitled to. The idea that you're legally empowered to keep the car/laptop certainly has no basis in English law, and I'd be amazed if it does have one in the US either.

And when did we start specifically talking about wrongful dismissals?

You have no obligations to your former employer from the moment you're fired? Really? So if I have a company car and laptop, and get fired I can then turn around and say "ha, I get to keep the car and laptop!"? I think not.

Your construction of what "stealing things" entails is woefully narrow. It doesn't just mean removal of physical items, but enjoyment/use thereof. If I steal & change your PIN, you still have your card and bank account. But they're not much use to you, are they? But as far as you're concerned, you've no legal comeback on that because it's all still there.

By "old school" do you mean "real"?

There's plenty of studies into accupuncture. They show that the better the methodology, the worse accupuncture performs, and that in well done studies it performs as well as placebo. In fact, the last big study I read of it actually showed sham accupuncture marginally outperformed "real".

"If the subject is unaware of the intended effect, how could it be placebo effect? Supposing it is the brandy, why the effect would continue after it was no longer administered?"

Who reported the improvment? The same people that gave the child the "remedy", presumably.

The placebo effect improvement doesn't just have to be reported by the patient. It's well known in parents/children and owners/animals as well.

"If it seemingly works for some people we shouldn't say "it doesn't work" just because we believe it is not supposed to work. We should ask ourselves why it works"

No, first we should ask "does it *actually* work?". You don't simply hear a couple of anecdotes and assume "well this obviously works".

So you set up a study to see whether the anecdotal experiences are replicated in the population at large. This has been done countless times with homeopathy. The better designed the study, the less likely that it is to show any effect. Properly conducted, double-blinded studies consistently show no effect whatsoever over placebo.

The line that sceptics reject homeopathy because "it's not supposed to work" is a claim frequently used by proponents. It's simply not true. People reject homeopathy because all the good evidence shows it doesn't work. There's no good evidence to show it does work, and reams of the stuff to show it doesn't. It fails before you even get to pondering the questions of the mechanism, the law of similars etc.

I don't really have a problem with this, subject to one caveat. One of the reasons given for high game prices is that they have only small period of time to recoup their costs - the second hand market effectively prevents stuff selling more than a few months. So the people who want it in the first 6 weeks or so of release pay a hefty premium.

Drop the release price (and absorb that yourself rather than passing it on to the retailer) and I've no problem with them getting a cut of the 2nd hand costs to make up for it.

There's no way that "at no cost to existing subscribers" means this is going to be free to use; why would Sky undercut themselves?

I think it means that you won't have to pay anything to access the service (unlike, say, PlayTV which requires an outlay for the kit). Same as the downloadable films; any Live user can browse the service without having to pay, but it costs to actually download them.

I suppose it's too much to ask that MS sort out the constant.......... pauses........... when......... trying.......... to........... navigate........... NXE menus.......... as well?

I expect you would. Civil procedure isn't (for the most part) particularly complicated.

But there's no way the average person is going to just *know* how to apply for directions, how to draft a witness statement, how to complete a claim form so that they can claim interest, which court they should be applying to, which statutes apply (and where to find them and to check they're in force still etc), what defences the other side may use etc etc. You're right - none of these things are particularly hard to find out (indeed courts tend to bend over backwards to help litigants in person) but add them all together and it's going to take someone who isn't legally trained far, far longer to put a case together than someone who is.

And the LiP screws it up, the ramifications can be huge.

Paying a good lawyer for an hour's work will save a LiP at least 10x that, as well as all the associated stress, worry and confusion.

And, just as importantly, they've got someone to sue if the case gets ballsed up ;-)

Yeah. I'm surprised more people haven't commented on that.

The example was used to show that clearly the US Govt think it works as a coercive technique, not to draw parallels between the actual usage. I'd have thought that was obvious. Especially given that it was stopped at the request of the Vatican rather than given up on as ineffective, thereby rendering the usage incomparable.

As for "people are supposed to die if they go without sleep for much more than 54 hours" - where on earth have you plucked that stat from?

Effort to move goalposts to "ah, but people say torture isn't effective" noted. But you're confusing two uses of the word effective. "Effective at getting people to admit anything to put an end to it", and "effective at getting to the truth". Good at the former, less so the latter.

Still, you managed on 3 hours sleep a night for 5 whole days with only visual distortions! So clearly it follows from that *no* sleep and being bombarded with loud noise over any period can't be a problem for anyone but a "whiny bitch". Best let all those organisations that use it repeatedly and find it effective know that they're wrong, eh?

Noriega was in an embassy with rooms to lock himself away in, and (more than likely) earplugs etc.

Not really the same as being in a cell effectively open on (at least) one side, is it?

Try going without deep sleep for a week and see how that affects your perception of serious. And ask yourself why, if it doesn't have severe mental effects on the victim i) it's so commonly used as a tool of interrogation, and ii) it's so effective.