God bless Lili St. Cyr!

Serious? No. I don't seriously expect really safe speed limits to be set up by any democracy that has so many motorists in it. But I do think that's what we ought to do. As a civilisation, we are killing our own children at an appalling rate, just so that motorists can catch up to the back of the next long line of stationary traffic a few seconds faster. In town, slow down.

Look at the scenario you described. A car doing the speed limit towards a marked crosswalk... it's such a familiar scenario that we forget to be horrified. Think about what we're doing here. We have footpaths across the street specifically for people to walk across. And then we have motorists driving straight at those footpaths, at such speed that it would literally be a crime to go any faster at all, at such speed that they couldn't possibly stop should anyone suddenly walk out on the path. These motorists expect everyone else in the world to pay attention, to stay out of their way. God forbid they themselves should slow down! They're 'doing the limit' and that makes it OK.

That limit is obviously much too high. It should come down. Twenty is plenty.

Then let's redesign those footpaths. At the moment there are raised paths either side of the street, and when the path runs across the middle of the street it is lowered. For the convenience of motorists, of course; otherwise they might have to slow down. Well, let them slow down! The path across the street is a pedestrian walkway just like the paths either side, so let's have it at the same height, for the convenience of people using wheelchairs, people pushing infants in prams, people with mobility issues. We'll put a gentle slope to either side of the path so that it isn't a nasty bump for motor traffic. Well, I mean - so that it isn't a nasty bump if the motor traffic is moving at a safe speed.

Yeah, speed limits are definitely way too high, you're right about that. 20mph in cities is plenty. Then you have a lot longer in which to notice people walking across the road, your brakes have much less work to do in order to bring the vehicle safely to a stop, and if you still fail to respond in time you'll do much less bodily harm to somebody.

you would long for the good old days when the worst you could get linked to is the goatse.cx guy

'Would'? Where've you been for the last five years? hello.jpg is positively vanilla by modern standards. People nowadays link you to 2girls1cup, 3guys1hammer, SWAP.AVI, Pain Olympics, anythingatall.on.nimp.org, cp, beheadings, mutilations, massacres, cat burnings, witch burnings... If you're still thinking of good old goatse as the worst thing in the world, wow. Go and hang around on the Russian chans, you'll find what you describe has long since come to pass.

Well, clearly you've never had a run-in with the complaints department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

Please share and enjoy.

Eh? I thought we were talking about Radiohead here.

Well, if you have a problem with 'share and enjoy', I suppose you'll just have to go stick your head in a pig.

Well, look, we can analyse the details of the plot and deduce the necessity for off-screen time travel. I mean, we know full well the Doctor has all manner of adventures that don't get televised, he was only ~600 when we first met him and now he claims to be in his 900s and everyone knows he's fibbing about that (and by the way, Doctor, regenerating as a younger man every time is fooling nobody). So there's centuries of the Doctor's life we simply don't see happen.

Plotting only the time journeys that made it onto TV is more than enough of a job. Exploring the rest of the timey wimey ball... well, my monitor has only a two-dimensional display.

Seems to me that there's no need for the robots to meet to have sex. Obviously in deep space that's going to be a problem, what with distances and speeds. Instead, the robots could quite easily have sex by radio. Sex is, after all, just a way of exchanging genomic data. Let the robot broadcast excerpts from its own design data archive to anybody who cares to listen; let a robot hearing the broadcast patch the input data together with its own design data to produce hybrids.

Certainly this is unnecessary if we're postulating superintelligent machines perfectly capable of redesigning themselves on the fly to meet whatever situations they encounter. But the road to a Culture GSV is a long one. You might well begin with a swarm of rather dumb self-replicating probes with very limited capabilities - I mean, somewhere down the line there must have been an intelligent designer, and so the progenitor robot would have had to be incredibly basic. But if you give them the means to exchange design details with each other over long distances - this worked, this didn't - then eventually you might indeed have a horde of sexy, sexy von Neumann machines, all procreating and evolving their way to becoming a galaxy-spanning intelligent race in their own right.

And anyway, even if the robots do not exchange design data - if they don't have sex at all - well, most living things on Earth don't have sex either. Doesn't disqualify them from the 'life' category.

There might or might not be a $20 bill in my wallet; I won't know for certain until I look for it?

No, cash behaves fairly classically. It's the rest of the economy that's quantum. For example, your house might or might not be worth $200,000. You won't know for certain until you try to sell it.

Didn't a bunch of whackjobs a few years ago try and claim that Hurricane Katrina was the result of some Weather Control Device created by the Axis of Evil?

That was created by HAARP as well. As was the Haiti earthquake. And the Indian Ocean tsunami.

Bloody versatile device, all things considered.

Also, there was this one C64 game, where you nominally play a world peacekeeper, IIRC. However, despite being a small kid (or perhaps because of it), I quickly figured out how to provoke nuclear exchanges; much more entertaining.

There was Balance of Power which was a Cold War sim; you'd normally play that until you got sufficiently pissed off at the endless manufactured crises and then go and play Bravo Romeo Delta until the planet glowed. Myself I was quite fond of Central Intelligence where you were the guy in charge of organising a revolt in some banana republic or other; it had a wonderful simulated society and economy, you'd graduate from organising student leaflet campaigns to stealing explosives from quarries and using them in your freedom fighting to arming and training guerrillas in the woods. Lovely idea, shame about the dreadful interface.

The human brain is composed of one hundred billion or so neurons. Looks like it's pretty much finite to me. I have ten times as many bytes of information in my hard disk.

That doesn't mean your hard disk is anything approaching the complexity of a human brain. The amount of information encoded in a neural network is far, far more than the number of neurons in it! 100 billion neurons, each with something like seven thousand connections to other neurons. So more like 700 trillion connections. If each neuron is numbered using a 37-bit ID (enough for 100 billion) then to list a neuron's connections takes 7000 times 37 bits = ~32k. Multiply by 100 billion, that's three petabytes.

Then represent excitatory versus inhibitory (1 bit per neuron? Or do we have to allow grey areas?), activation potentials (continuous? What's the range, and how granular do we need it?), and any relevant hormones or drugs or other chemistry currently in operation on the neural network, and you're looking at some big numbers. Big, but not beyond contemplation: Google must be getting towards that size, the Internet probably got there years ago. We might be able to model the brain as a neural network before too long. That's probably where we find out that all that gooey chemistry stuff that computer scientists don't like to think too much about actually mattered more than we thought...

The "Windows Compatibility List" is pretty much every piece of hardware everywhere.

You would think so, wouldn't you? But it seems that drivers for my USB wireless adaptor are not to be had for anything later than Windows XP, though it's only a few years old. Manufacturer not supporting it any more. In Ubuntu it just works, just as I expected, but to get it working in Windows I had to find out the chipset it used and try a whole bunch of unsupported driver files downloaded from dubious websites until I found one that worked.

I consider myself a reasonably advanced computer user, but on this showing Windows isn't ready for the mainstream desktop. Can you imagine expecting Grandma to handle that sort of mess? No way. The mainstream will stay with Linux and leave Windows to the nerds, geeks and hobbyists who are into the whole 'closed-source' movement.

If we started finding fossils that suddenly changed from one type of animal to another in a single generation

That wouldn't falsify evolution. Consider the classic Just-So story of speciation. Let there be species X which lives throughout country C. Sea levels rise and the centre of country C is flooded, splitting it into countries A and B. In the new climate, life is easy in country A, but very hard in country B. So the lineage of species X in country A changes very little over the next few million years, while the lineage in country B adapts to its great hardship and changes into something we would call species Y, which we'll suppose is a badass tough variant.

Now let sea levels fall and country C be reunited. Species X and Y are now in competition with each other, and Y wins handily, driving X into extinction across the whole country in very short order.

Millions of years later we dig in what was once country A, and we find fossils of species X and Y. What do we see? Species X was replaced by Species Y - an obviously related successor - almost overnight!

dubious Sicilian consulting organisations

Is that the current name for them? I suppose it was only a matter of time before they moved into the consultancy racket...