I expect to see Slashdot announcing Facebook-only login next April 1st.

But surely such a large dataset would be needed for this, and have regional variations? At night you are most at risk from sleep but consequently check mirrors far less as any car will be visible through headlights. I remember doing the UK driving test and consciously moving your head every five seconds to check mirrors - hugely distracting and yet going for much longer than that without obviously glancing at a mirror gets a minor fault. As soon as the test is passed this behaviour is put to the side as it's not practical in everyday use.

This is one area where manufacturers are a bit ahead of the curve. If safety guidelines include lane departure warnings on all new cars and other similar technologies then eventually these driving errors will start to decrease (hopefully). Car structures are so safe now that the safety focus should be on the driver rather than adding more heavy bodywork.

I think driver retesting every 5-10 years is possibly the best way to go to try and keep driving standards high.

I think there was a niche generation that really really got into MD in a big way. Here in Europe there was a pretty sizeable take-up of it but it was largely word of mouth. I got a portable recorder in '96, within a year about half a dozen of my friends had similar machines. Far smaller than a portable CD or cassette player with great rechargeable battery life. The discs were small enough you could pocket dozens of them for sharing and swapping.

Over the years the portable players got smaller and smaller. After picking up a deck perfect album duplicates could be made, and with CD multichangers you could preprogram a 'mix tape' and let it run and record. My last portable player was my beloved Panasonic SJ-MJ70 which is one of the most beautiful electronic products ever put on this earth.

This was all reasonably affordable. My deck was £100 as were all the portables in the local Richer Sounds. The discs got to be really cheap - under £1 per disc as the format got more popular. I had shoeboxes full of discs, hundreds of them. Never had one fail. Cloning the TOC could get an 80m disc from any 74m disc!

Granted we were all into our music. When an album was £10 you didn't really want to carry it around or lend it out and MD was a great way to preserve the originals. The hardware costs are far more reasonable when you consider the lack of wear and tear on original media. I think the downfall of MD wasn't just the rise of the mp3 player but the movement away from the album format that came along with it. No longer would the MD be seen as one or two albums per disc, but more as a twenty song hard limit. When an mp3 player could take 100 albums and play anything in any order the argument for discrete chunks of music over different media was a losing one. Even though 128kbps mp3s didn't sound nearly as good as SD MD ATRAC it was mostly unnoticed.

But in the 90s the use of MD as data storage would have been a revolution. It would have undercut the cost of Zip and Jazz drives hugely and was durable and consumer friendly. Had Sony not been so beholden to their entertainment division they would have cornered the removable media market.

The format's lack of impact in the US tends to mute widespread online celebration of the format, but in some markets it did really well. In my class of '99 I would guess about 25% of people used it. Personally the death knell was when my new SACD player refused to do a digital output for me to make an MD copy. CDs were fine but not the few SACDs I'd invested in. Adios Sony and soon I was on a G2 iPod.

I haven't even touched on studio use. But I remember fondly the days of a player in one pocket, bunch of albums in another, and meeting someone at a prearranged time (no mobile phones!).

Jones from Police Academy is never going to pay for anything again once he hacks this.

OK but what is the chain of custody on these logs? If Tesla produces them two years after the fact that can hardly be introduced as evidence.

I remember reading about the Nürburgring trials after WW2.

Some are Catholics, and believe in intercessory prayer, where you can't pray directly to God, even though that contradicts the entire Bible. You are dependent wholly on the Church still. You get forgiveness through the Church (not God) and must confess sins to a priest.

Where do you get that idea? The primal Catholic prayer is Pater Noster, directed directly to God. Nothing stops you from praying directly to God if you so choose, or Jesus, or the Holy Spirit. Prayers of intercession are a personal choice.

In modern Protestantism the vast majority of prayers are directed only to Jesus, not the rest of the Trinity.

I've heard this about the UK cycle many times but in my experience is not true. I do 400-500 miles per week, in a mixture of urban and rural driving. My current car, a 2.0l 136 bhp diesel, is rated at 40/51/62 and I would regularly get 54 or 55 mpg on a week's driving. On a long rural drive between 55 to 60 mph the consumption is over 70 mpg. In my previous petrol car I would get about halfway between the combined and rural figure. I'm not a slow driver by any means! A torquey diesel is far more fun to drive than a petrol engine of the same power, and the midrange push is fantastic. I use about two thirds the fuel over a week as with the petrol. The downside will be the cost of repair for when the turbo or injectors go south, as I've replaced a whole petrol engine for less than the cost of fixing either of those.

On the UK website the Focus starts at £18k ($27k) but to compare like with like you have to take VAT off the UK price, so the dollar amount is around $23.5k. The Focus in the UK started at around £13k up until recently, when the collapse of the pound made this impractical - the Focus is built Saarlouis in the eurozone. I think over the history of the model the UK base price would work out around $20k. If the US next-gen Focus starts at the $12k range it's interesting and shows their pricing schemes to be regional and a bit arbitrary.

Unlike a road network though it's a relatively trivial matter for an ISP to increase their overall bandwidth. It wouldn't maximize profits but it is a matter of buying more servers and leasing more backbone.