I'm still running a ten year old Windows OS which gets free updates. DirectX11 was almost 5 years after Vista's launch.

Upgrades are not the issue, unpatched security vulnerabilities are.

This is a good example (warning, pdf). See table 2, which shows that handgun offences were at 2648 in 1997, the year they were banned, and had risen to 5874 by 2001/2.

There isn't any evidence to show that handgun crime fell or stayed the same after the ban, because it didn't, it more than doubled in 5 years.

They were restricted prior to the ban, in similar ways that the current guns are restricted now. I personally knew someone who I went airgun shooting with who had his guns in a normal house in a normal suburb.

You weren't allowed to carry, that was always a difference.

There were about the same number of deaths in the UK from handguns when they were legal to own 20 years ago. The estimated total number of guns, legal and illegal, held by civilians in the United Kingdom is over four million. That's one for every 15 people or so. The majority of these are legally owned.

Except that in the UK, the ban -- which they take very, very seriously -- actually DOES result in significantly less gun violence.

Handguns were banned in 1997, and the years following the ban saw an increase in violent crime involving handguns. The handgun crime rate now is about the same as before the ban.

Interestingly, there are some automatic rifles that are technically legal in the UK that are illegal in the US for private citizens. Good luck getting a license for them, though. High powered non-automatic rifles and shotguns are still very much legal in the UK, there are currently over half a million valid shotgun licenses alone in the UK. You can have been in prison for 3 years, and still get a shotgun license.

That's pretty easy - pink/brown gills. I'm far from experienced, but I do pick and eat Agaricus campestris and/or arvensis (the field and horse mushrooms). If it's got brown gills, and looks like a normal mushroom, I'll eat it. The only common mushroom that is slightly poisonous like this is the yellow stainer, but this will stain yellow when cut (some people do eat these too, though). There are others that are poisonous, but they're rare, also stain yellow and smell and taste bad. If it's got brown gills, it might make you sick, but it won't do you long term damage.

If it's got white gills, or is too immature to have gills, I leave it be. I wouldn't trust an app to identify mushrooms.

Ok... your lack of belief in your god defines you just as much as your lack of belief in invisible pink teapots defines you, is that better?

Me not believing in something is not a faith.

ps. I'm not a militant atheist, I was raised C of E, and still go to some services (I feel a little hypocritical praying, so I don't, but I do sing). I don't believe in any kind of christian god though. I don't believe in lots of things, god is just one of them.

Also... it was over 15 Celsius (60 Fahrenheit or so) just before Christmas in London. A couple of years ago it hardly got above freezing throughout December. We're used to odd weather because of where the UK is.

We all know this, but somehow this knowledge flies out the window when it comes to our intuitions about what a warming globe means.

No... it's perfect common sense. If the global temperature increases by one degree, the the local temperature will probably increase by about one degree.

If the local temperature decreased by one degree with one degree global warming (with the rest of the world warming by one degree) somewhere else equivalent in the world would have to increase by three degrees. I know this is possible, however I do believe it to be less likely.

Also, if you want to compare cities at similar latitudes, London is further north than Winnipeg, and both are a lot further north than Odessa in the Ukraine. It's common knowledge in the UK that the continent south of us is generally a lot colder in the winter. Denver's further south than Madrid and Istanbul...

From where I sit, I see the Atheists as having very little difference from the religious. They both want to believe adopting a set of beliefs will make them better people and allow them to shed guilt from being asshats.

My lack of belief in your god defines me just as much as your lack of belief in invisible pink teapots defines you.

Maybe I'm just showing my age (OK, downhill side of 50), but it seems to me that just about any whitegoods type of appliance these days is made to such shoddy standards, it would be pretty much impossible to attribute failure to vandalism on anyone's part.

They're that much cheaper and better at what they do that they're still better value for money, even if they have a quarter the lifespan. However, they don't have worse lifespans - you're looking back with rose tinted spectacles.

Repairing any kind of white good costs manpower, and is now almost always not worth it if it is anything more than a simple repair. Manpower used to be much cheaper, and white goods used to be much more expensive, so repairing them used to be economically viable.

It's not that they've got less reliable, it's that the cost of repairing stuff has gone up, and the cost of new stuff has gone down. It's no wonder more get scrapped quicker when this happens.

I was thinking this - I generally read at a little over 1 page per minute (obviously it depends on the typescript, and how challenging and convoluted the page is). 72 page is an hour.

It's actually a tragedy and missed opportunity, that Jackson has so little talent as a director, and so little discipline in telling a story.

Spoken by somebody who has never seen "Meet the Feebles".

Yes.... I know that. I also know that both London and Yorkshire have a higher population than Scotland. However, this doesn't explain why it is often cheaper to phone Australia than it is to phone anyone on a mobile.

The distance between England and Australia is close to as big as it gets on the earth.

Land line providers charge extra for long distance.

This is one of the biggest differences between the US and most other places in the world. I'm 36, from the UK, and remember long distance charges on landlines, but only just. Now just about all national calls from a landline are essentially free.

Calling mobiles from landlines used to be horrendously expensive (almost 50p a minute IIRC). This is how mobile companies made a whole load of their money - charging others to phone them. Now it's a little better, but the mobile companies still massively profit from calls from landlines.

International landline calls used to be expensive... now they're cheap. It's cheaper to call Australia from your landline than it is to call the mobile next to you in the UK in most cases.

Finding out the exact charges is difficult.