Recently at work we had a visitor from Tristan da Cunha (basically, our visitor was the Tristan da Cunha post office). If you don't know, Tristan is a British island in the south Atlantic. It has no airport and no scheduled boat service and a population of around 250. The nearest other inhabited place is South Africa, about 1600 miles away. To get there, you flag down a passing fishing boat and the journey is typically at least 2 weeks.

They get one mail delivery (which also hitches on a fishing boat) once every 6 weeks or so. They get a lot of misdelivered mail for Trinidad and Tobago. That mail when it gets returned for redelivery then has to take the 2 week journey back to South Africa and may have been delayed for 9 or 10 weeks by the time it gets to its proper destination.

When the mail arrives at Tristan, it's sorted by family at the post office but not actually delivered on from there - the post office rings a big gong and everyone comes to get their mail.

Well, better driver training probably has a bigger impact. The yellow phase in the UK is probably half what it is in Florida, yet the accident rate in the UK is well under half of what it is in the US despite the UK having a far greater population density and busier roads than Florida. What I've noticed in Florida is for traffic signals, green means go, yellow means go faster and red means the next six vehicles may pass through the intersection.

Drivers here are taught to observe well ahead, and also that if you see a signal ahead that's been green for a long time, anticipate that it may change very soon.

If you don't live in the US, just don't pay the fine.

Since when was Blizzard a French company? It never has been. Blizzard started out as Silicon and Synapse and is based in Irvine, California.

If the code for this thing is written in C, you can now really shoot yourself in the foot (very accurately) :-) http://m5p.com/~pravn/foot.html

Where has this plague of saying "reach out to" come from when people mean "speak to" or "contact"? It gives the impression of some kind of emo touching session.

You obviously have never driven in Houston.

But one of the least safe amongst developed countries. The US has a worse rate than Italy, and Italian drivers have one hell of a reputation for being bad. It's also worse than Spain which has a similar reputation to Italy, and double the accident rate per 100k cars than the UK and Germany (which has autobahns without speed limits).

It's entirely probable. There are already way more radio controlled models than this number in the US. Many drones are really just standard radio controlled models with a few extra bits added (for instance on one "Police will be using this drone" article on TV, it was quite clearly just a 600 class electric RC helicopter - airframe cost of about $300, probably total build cost for RC use around $900 with top of the range gear - with some extra stuff on it). Given the low potential cost of many things that will count as a drone, 30000 might be a low estimate.

But it's unpleasant and wastes a lot of time. If we were in a world where the price stuck to the windscreen was the price you paid and that was that, you could google the fair price and compare prices at several car lots without having to talk to a salesweasel. The haggling model means if I want to compare prices at several dealers it is a slow and highly unpleasant process.

There is a sweet spot (with that argument, we could say why not use 2.4). The thing is Debian is fantastic for certain things, such as servers or development workstaitons - things where you want to have something very dependable that's going to be solid. And Debian is solid, and their conservative approach means we run it on all our Linux servers.

It would have resulted in a *proportional* punishment. As a teenager I improvised something far more spectacular and got caught (it was kind of obvious who did it - enormous bang followed by four teenagers running away from the sound source just as a teacher left the chemistry block). I was shouted at and IIRC got a detention for it. No suspension. No life-ruining felony prosecution.

What this girl is getting is grossly and obscenely disproportionate. Even if she's acquitted of felony charges, it is grossly unjust that she was ever dragged through the court system for this.

A bit OT, but how are you supposed to pronounce Coursera? Course Ra or Cours Era?

The problem isn't really the quantity of oil that's still to be mined. It's the rate of mining and ease of getting at it. The real problem is that what's running out fast is the cheap and easy oil. Our economy at the moment absolutely relies on oil being both cheap and easy.

To contrast unconventional sources and conventional (cheap, easy) oil: Canada's proven reserves are something like 1,000 times larger than Mexico's Cantarell field. However, despite the size of this oil reserve, and despite decades of development, the rate of production from Canadian tar sands is still only about the rate that Cantarell was producing at its peak.

Whether oil is available or not isn't the question. We're still going to have to make enormous (and hopefully not too painful) changes to the way we use energy (and thus to how the economy works) to be able to cope with the shift from cheap, easy to extract oil to very much more expensive oil and it may well just be cheaper to use something other than oil well before it runs out. The cited Bakken shale isn't something you stick a pipe into and oil comes gushing out, rather it's more like rock that has to be mined and then has to go through an expensive process to get usable oil out of it. It will always be vastly more expensive and vastly more energy consuming (much lower energy return on investment) than, say, British North Sea oil or the stuff that comes from Libya or Saudi Arabia.

My Sinclair ZX Spectrum (a personal computer from 1982) can do this (or rather could: now twitter insist on SSL it's a bit beyond an 8 bit Z80 CPU). I built an ethernet board for it. Displayed it at the 2010 Vintage Computing Festival at Bletchley Park, and many people tweeted from it.