I agree with most of what you say...apart from the blacksmith being included with phrenologist and horse-and-buggy repairman.

Blacksmith is still a viable industry (ok not as much as it was in "olden times") but the blacksmith I used to work at has expanded and had to open a second workshop in the nearby town to keep up with business. It's not just making horseshoes these days.

That's what I thought at first then I realised the first one is from 2004 about a man and a drinking binge. Whilst the second one is from 2002 about a Fascist future where all forms of feeling are illegal, and a man in charge of enforcing the law rises to overthrow the system and happens to be the correct film.

You hit the nail on the head there. I'm with Virgin (lack of any choice) and their service is so throttled that trying to use even a fraction of the bandwidth I've paid for results in my connection speed (both up and down-stream) being restricted by 75% for the rest of the day. From 3pm - midnight there is a 400 mb max limit before being throttled and this is on a 10 meg connection, 10 am to 3pm allowed 1Gb download then 75% throttled. Just downloading the Medal of Honour AA patch (1.3Gb) finished my connection for the day, so much for legitimate digital downloads of games(Sacred 2 - 13GB), films etc.

All this is going to do is slow your connection down to a complete crawl. It's going to take ages to download anything other that a few albums a day, unless you restrict your downloading to the middle of the night.

Virgin claim as ever that this is not due to over-selling of available bandwidth. They are more than happy to take your money for fast connection as long as you don't use it for anything more than browsing a static web page.

There was a short bit on BBC's Click (their "tech" news) a couple of weeks ago about a contact lens that is being built at the moment to give a visual overlay. So you could be nearer the mark than you think. It was not April the first either.

I don't mind paying tax for something that I use. What I really object to is the fact that BBC demand people pay them even if they never watch/use the BBC. Why should I pay the BBC to be able to watch ITV/channel 4 which are both funded by adverts, or Sky which is paid for by adverts and subscriptions and none of them receive any money from the BBC. Before you ask, no I don't pay for the license for this very reason.

The public might be footing the bill for the BBC over here, but there is no option as to whether to pay or not while watching any tv. As even if you only watch the advert funded independent channels and never watch a single moment of BBC you by law still have to pay the BBC £130 a year for the pleasure of not watching any BBC. The only way of not paying a TV license is to only use your TV to watch dvds, play games, etc and to have no means of picking up any tv channels on the TV.

This is something that has always really bugged me that if I want to watch Sky I have to still pay the BBC for doing it.

How about being able to use all of the ram instead of being limited to only 3gb and also being able to use the 64 bit processor instead of being stuck with only a 32 bit OS on a 64 bit pc. Both of these situations mean that Windows 7 is actually faster than XP in some situations as being able to use all the memory and processor power not just part of it

Just 2 thoughts that come to mind straight away.

Shame XP64 never got fully completed. Still if it had then I guess Vista would have had even more problems getting any users.

Red lights help with not destroying your night vision and regards photo labs red lights are used when developing/handling black and white photos as the paper and negatives are not affected by the red light, but when developing/handling colour film it has to be done with the paper/negatives kept in complete darkness.

Maybe because the insurance companies know that most of the time the elderly are travelling so damn slowly (just above walking speed it seems) on the roads that if they hit anything it's not going to cause as much damage as the rest of us drivers travelling at a normal speed.

While it's possibly true that having ads on a page help pay for and keep sites free, but as far as I know the site does not earn anything from you just looking at the ads, you need to click on them first.

I'm never going to click on the ads anyway, so what is the difference (for me) between me having to see ads that slow a page down that I'm not going to click on anyway and having no ads showing, apart from the fact that the pages are cleaner and faster to load.

There is no loss in revenue from myself as I don't click on ads in the first place.