in her current fantasy series, the Bad Guys can use dark magic to inhabit the bodies of Good Guys (or, well, anyone). so maybe we _really_ need to barcode the soul!

Actually, some of her sf books are great. Hunting Party is one of the most terrible things ever written, though, so either skip it or slog your way through it. Serrano gets good from Winning Colors (book #3) onwards, the Vatta stuff is pretty good all the way through.

One little detail? The suit doesn't fit him, neither does the shirt, his top button's undone, and that tie is hideous. And you shouldn't wear a blue suit with a black tie for a wedding in the first place; if you're not going to wear a morning coat at _least_ wear the correct colors, i.e. light grey for the suit and grey/silver for the tie.

The guy's a freaking gazillionaire and he can't even be bothered to dress nice for his wedding? Yeesh. All he'd have to do is give a flunky a few thousand and tell him to take care of the details and leave it lying on his bed. At least she looks good.

Weather prediction
Political polling
E-voting
Advertising science-y parts
Sports statistics

Boy, the list is endless!

It meant something in BASIC. Which gives you an idea.

2: not just tourism, transits. I take great care never to connect through the U.S. any more.

So what you're saying is, we still have vaguely functional labour laws? Good.

A law which says 'you can shoot anyone you claim to feel threatened by, without being obliged to prove you made any attempt at all to avoid the situation in any other way' is reasonable?

Only an American.

"a penchant for fine cheese, cigars, and port"

Please provide details as to how I might subscribe to your newsletter.

is it just me, or is a patent champagne bottle opener a wonderful example of humanity at its most absurd?

Let's face it, the correct solution to the problem of 'making it possible to efficiently open a bottle of fizzy liquid' is 'put a bloody screw cap on the thing'.

but no, because it's only a proper bottle of champagne if it comes with a thoroughly impractical stopper covered in entirely pointless shiny foil, we have to invent and fight over the rights to the proceeds from a complex device for removing said entirely unnecessarily impractical stopper.

sigh...

You're doing it wrong.

Your home is a place for you to live, eat, sleep and relax in. You want to be able to keep doing all those things, especially #2 and #4, you are going to want to live within your budget.

An excellent way to avoid doing that is to dream up ridiculous goals that make no damn sense and then waste your money on them.

Technology is not and never should be confused for an end in yourself. It exists to help you reach other goals more effectively and efficiently. You don't start out by thinking 'how can I throw some miscellaneous kind of Cool Technology into this house thing I just bought'. You start out by thinking 'what do I need to do to keep myself and my family sheltered, fed, and healthy?' Then you do that, and once you've covered it, if you have any money left, ask yourself how you can most efficiently keep yourself and your family relaxed and entertained, and if the answer to that involves technology, well, fine, some kind of technology it is. Perhaps something incredible like a radio or a television. If you don't have the money to afford whatever shiny whizz-bang thing caught your eye, don't fucking buy it, and definitely don't buy some kind of pointless cheap imitation of it. Just leave it the hell alone already.

preach it, brother. Is there some sort of pressure group we can join? every time I go to CNN, see an interesting headline, click on it, and see the bloody video player load up, I reach for my revolver...

It's more like standing at the end of your driveway and demanding that the driver of any bus that passes by gives you the personal details of all his passengers - and the bus driver complying. Whatever his passengers want.

The airlines are not, as far as I can see, legally obliged to comply with the U.S.'s requests. But they can choose to, and apparently, they are. The only choice passengers get in the matter is not to book such flights. If you book such a flight, you are agreeing to let the airline pass your information to the U.S. government.

For the fifteenth time, the DHS is now demanding information on flights from Europe to Canada and on flights from Europe to Cuba, which never pass into US airspace. They've been demanding information on flights which pass through US airspace for years already.

It means 'quality newspaper' as opposed to 'tabloid newspaper'. In the U.K. they're referred to as a 'broadsheet' and 'tabloid'. The Independent is a broadsheet/quality newspaper, not a tabloid.