Or perhaps the people that package these things have the sense to put them in something rather safer than a cardboard box.

Chavs existed long before Maggie; they just had no visibility. Crime in the UK has declined since the implementation of the 1980s reforms. And I don't think anyone is talking about repealing the HSE; but the fact is that when a country becomes rich enough, people refuse to work in poor conditions. It happened in the UK, in the US, and it will happen in China.

Lolzypops. When you buy on the stock exchange, your money isn't going anywhere near the company. Do keep up.

*really?* I remember what industry used to look like - in the first world - back in the heyday of the trade union. Health and safety didn't exist. Good luck if you were black, or Jewish, or gay, or female. If you fell out with the union rep, you were on your own. And in the meantime, you were being tapped for union dues that went to fund a party espousing some of the most fucked-up economic policies the UK ever saw.

What creates better conditions for workers is economic progress, so that workers don't have to go and work in a paper mill where they lose fingers as a matter of routine, or a shipyard where workers fell from gantries every week.

And in the meantime the children of the third world can go die on a rubbish dump? Fuck you.

I don't know. I feel rather sentimental about this whole sorry affair, since I installed Linux for the first time around two weeks before it all kicked off. Happy times.

I seem to recall (it may have been here, actually) a study where people's driving skills were independently assessed alongside how they drove. Driving skill was very strongly correlated to their tendency to follow the rules of the road.

Idiot. What do you think a $5 bill is worth?

Point one, there are queries that can only be written using a sub-query (unusual, but they exist); point two, computers are supposed to help, not hinder. What's the point of having a declaritive language if I can't declare a query in the form I think of it in?

The problem is that mortality is strongly heteroskedastic and it's hard to make useful inferences at higher ages. The largest studies actually indicate that mortality hits a constant at high ages, but the effect is difficult to pick out.