Almost all good ones. So, so long and thanks.

Hey, how come my comment didn't post when I hit <return>?

I saw Tuesday's show, and while good (and so far this season is better than last's). It is now the second season (or season 1.5) and other than Phiimon getting killed, the bar room shoot-up was it. And still no guns for hands I say bring on Blood and Chrome

It was not the business model, it was the show. I haved watched all of Caprica so far, and for a show about killer robots, it's very low on the killer robot quotient. I know Moore said it was about a collapsing society, but I came for the killer robots. BSG: Blood and Chrome, which will replace Caprica, should be much better for that. While some of Caprica was intriguing, such as V-World, other story lines were blah. Too much of painting a society (in essence Moore's view of our society), and not enough boom-boom If I want to watch that kind of show, I will watch the History Channel. I want to see robots with guns for hands again... got that SyFy

"like it or not, they're already inside your enterprise" ? Not if you (a) care (some places ask themselves the question and decide, no, for they're quite happy for users to goof off on non-work sites) and (b) either have no clue, or no money. Otherwise, you're using your own firewall rules or you're using one of the many commercial web filtering products, in-the-cloud proxies, appliances etc, in which case... they're NOT already inside your enterprise.

From today's paper (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/09/us-soldiers-afghan-civilians-fingers):

US soldiers 'killed Afghan civilians for sport and collected fingers as trophies'

Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret "kill team" that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies. [...]

Considering that he maintained power for years by strangling information, that he is a student of this kind of open information is not at all surprising. Know your enemy! He wants others to have it so it might destabilize them, but in Cuba. not so much

As humans can't survive anywhere else in the solar system, and as travel outside the solar system is impossible, it's obvious that humans will eventually go extinct. So what? The wish-fulfillment of Trekkies notwithstanding, basic physics and engineering make it a practical impossibility. I find the level of debate on this very frustrating. For instance, I guarantee someone somewhere will post something like "If everyone had your attitude, we'd never have left the trees!" (which of course is a self-evidently vacuous and stupid response to my observation about physics and engineering.)

Not really, because this is never going to happen. The headline is completely wrong. A "written declaration by the EU Parliament" does not, in any way shape or form, translate to "EU to..." . It's like the school board in Texas passing a resolution to ban science teaching: it means nothing. Move along, please.

Of course there are solutions: three, in fact.

• Don't let the well blow out in the first place.
• The stuff BP's been trying; trigger the BOP by robot. Just because it hasn't worked here doesn't mean it's unreasonable to try.
• Drill a relief well.

This is a very unusual disaster - the first of it's kind. Plenty of other safe deep-water fields being safely operated around the world. My guess is that once all the wailing has died down, the great American public will basically accept the cost of one of these every 20 or 30 years in exchange for cheap petrol. (You know petrol's roughly $8 a gallon here in the UK? And look, no riots in the streets. Don't tell me -- that's because we let the Marxists take our guns away, right? )

Did you know that petrol here in the UK is about 122p/l == £5.50/gal == $7.95/gall at current sterling:dollar exchange rate?

Once the US population are happy to vote for gas prices that include some of the externalities that result from oil extraction, refining and consumption, this Brit might start taking the wailing about BP's incompetence and the corrupt regulators and Big Oil and all.