A lawyer told me once 'No case is judge proof' - which was very true, as our 'iron clad' case was shot down by the judge because she thought we had been delaying proceedings, whereas it was the other side, and the judge got is mixed up.

TEN YEARS AGO!

This news is about as current as 9/11. Double pressed vinal records have been in my local music store for at least the last 10 years,and I first heard about them at least 15 years ago. Turntables have never stopped being manufactured and there have always been specialist high end audio shops selling them, along with valve amps.

"Christianity is the youngest religion on the block and certainly not the largest. What makes their version of the unexplainable the correct one?"

Except for Islam, which post dates Christianity by about 400 years. There are plenty of 'younger' religions than that too, even if you don't count sects of a main religion. Scientology for example is not even 50 years old.

Christianity is however the largest religion, with 1/3 of the worlds population, and has the largest single denomination - Roman Catholic - with 1 Billion people.

Nor are supernatural powers only attributed to ancient leaders. Today, most reigning monarchs are considered to be appointed, and anointed' by God. The King of Thailand is the Avatar of Vishnu. The Emperor of Japan is of divine descent. And anyone beatified is both the provider and receiver of supernatural miracles.

I suppose if a government wanted to go the way of Betamax, banning porn would do it.

So it has only taken 99 years to come up with an explanation for what was bleeding obvious since WWI. Shell shock is nothing new.

I expect something like a 30 year time from project start to launch. Which is good news - because it gives me time to save the $1,4bn. On the other hand, will septuagenarians be able to go?

I don't know about 'hidden codes' - a few years ago I took my family on an around the world trip, traveling west from Australia via Dubai and London. All our US boarding passes were stamped with big red 'SSS' letters, except for my wife, who has a British passport.

At every security gate my three kids and I got the full treatment of pat-downs and extra screening, even being pulled out of the normal line and taken aside in some cases.

The reason, I supposed, was because we came to the US from Dubai arriving on the east coast of the US, we clearly posed a 'high risk' in the view of US border protection. My wife, being on a British passport, posed no such risk, coming that way from London.

The ever alert US border security did prevent my 8yo son bringing a pair of paper scissors into the country.

my choice - be put in a Schrodinger cell, where I exists in a superposition of alive and dead, as long as no one looks.

Snoo snoo is also a good option.

A neatly overlooked flaw for time travel is that there are 4 dimensions of space/time, and time travel only accounts for moving though one. Say you travel 100 years into the future, relative to your present position in space. Meantime the earth, the solar system and the galaxy has moved on 100 along the other three space dimensions, leaving you alone in cold, deep space.

This makes the assumption that the time travel mechanism also removes inertia, which may not be the case. But is there any reason to think gravity, or any other external force, would be felt by the time traveler? Time travel would require a warp if space/time much greater than the feeble amount of the earths gravity, or the sum for that matter. So if inertia remains the same, then the time travel device is simply going to sail off at a tangent to the earth and the sun in their respective orbits.

For short time jaunts, this probably wont be too much of a problem, assuming there is some method the device can use to travel in space to the future or past location of the earth. But for very long trips, predicting the space location is going to be problematic to say the least. My guess is would require a number of shorter trips, stopping to re-orientate and realign along the way.

I am guessing a lot of the semi-sentience of a TARDIS goes into solving just this problem.

Hey, at least he has come to grips with the digital age.

He must have become progressively handy over the years, since he did it himself and no one gave him a hand. I wonder if we will hand off the project now? I guess if nothing else, he has become more handsome as a result of his efforts.

Many years ago I connected an Internet feed for a private girls school - a very conservative, christian, and very well respected one - in Sydney. During the setup I was talking to the Headmistress about if she had any concerns regarding the content the girls might access. I thought her response was particularly enlightened; her comment was something like 'Whatever you try to restrict will make them want to access it more, which they will do secretly and unguided. If we don't make any restrictions then it will never be a big deal, and anything they feel uncomfortable about they can discuss with their teacher. Good kids will know to do the right thing, and all our girls are good.'

If I had a daughter, I probably would have sent her to that school.

I don't know why it would be so difficult to put a spacecraft in orbit around Mars, or land on the place. I mean, it's not rocket science... hey, wait a minute...

Let's not forget the 'Hammer and the Cross' and the 'Stars and Stripes' series. Both well researched and great alternate history trilogies. Even if he does indulge in a bit of Britt bashing, Stars and Stripes is still one of my favorite Civil War alternate history novels, and as I recall HH was regarded as an authority on that era too.

Very sad to hear this news. He was too one of the authors I most read during my teens. It is clearly time to crack open the yellowing pages of my old paperbacks and give the SSR and Deathworld novels are re-read - possibly the last before they fall apart. Then probably off to Amazon to replace with whatever's available in hard cover. For some reason I would rather pay $50 for hard cover copy of the 'old classics' than $2.50 for the ebook edition.