I'm deaf. I despise "deaf culture". Deafness is a disability that we should strive to overcome and eradicate instead of retreating into a ghetto of our own making.

I'm backing up 8TB at home, by rsyncing to another 8TB of disk space. It's been working reliably for years, starting back when a TB was a lot and adding/replacing disks over time.

A 4TB hard disk is pretty cheap these days, so he just needs to get six of 'em and make another RAID array. Once you've done the initial rsync, I presume that subsequent changes will be relatively small, so transfer speed doesn't matter much, so he could hang them off a USB port in one of those USB-to-SATA dock things.

I was thinking that the absolute earliest the Germans could have got anything into production, assuming that everything went their way, was mid 43. Bomber Command had twice as many planes available at that point.

It would have been an electrical (or possibly mechanical if they could make it light enough) analogue computer. Analogue fire control computers were common on naval ships from WW1 onwards, and used in bomb sights and anti-aircraft guns in WW2. I presume that it would just be a moderately complex negative feedback system.

Mind you, the pictures make it look like it wouldn't really have been a useful military plane. Too small to carry any significant load, guns, or fuel. It was designed as a racer, not a military plane, and while companies like Supermarine could apply lessons from racing to mass-produced military machines, they still had to design the military machines from scratch and not just do quick adaptations to existing designs. The Spitfire, for example, has its origins in a 1931 design, and had two substantial re-designs before finally entering service in 1938. Even if the Germans get their hands on this unfinished prototype in mid 1940 when France falls, there's not a chance that they'd get anything related to it into production until they're already getting their heads kicked in by the Red Army and RAF Bomber Command.

I play Go. With real people, face-to-face, on a wooden board. I'm not interested in big flashy video games, and haven't been since Doom.

There are a few interesting games on iOS devices. They're mostly good because the very limited user interface - you don't have eleventy million keys, or joysticks - and limited CPU grunt, storage and memory means that game designers have to actually think about gameplay and come up with original ideas instead of just releasing yet another Doom clone with MOAR MEGGERPIKSELS. Harbour Master, Osmos, and Tower Bloxx are all a few years old but still great fun.

I'm posting this on my Macbook Pro, made of Chinese slaves' retinas. I love it.

I've never felt the urge to perform brain surgery on any of the laptops I've owned over the years. I bought each one pretty much maxed out, and ran it for four or five years. The one thing that irritates me about my latest Macbook is that I can't carry a spare battery with me. But on the other hand, its battery life is very good and it's very rare for me to spend so long between charging opportunities that it's a problem. And the one time it was, well, it's a price worth paying. Other laptops - and I looked at many when deciding which to buy - all found worse ways to suck.

I hope you always charge this nincompoop for helping him. After all, if you help him for free, there has to be a catch, there has to be a law being broken. And I don't mean just helping him with his computer. Charge him for helping him trim his garden hedge, for helping clear snow from his drive, for keeping an eye on his house when he's away, ...

The bit of the teacher's letter that is quoted doesn't even say that she's a member of a union, let alone that specific one.

Anyway, I know where *my* union's money comes from and what it's goals are. The money comes from members and a very little bit comes from adverts in our magazine.

I'm one of that group. And yes, my beard *is* going grey. I've not used Windows for over a decade. I have no idea how to set up and configure a current Windows to be secure and to have a reasonable development environment. Nor do I care to learn, as I have better things to do with my time, like making tasty booze and grumbling about The Youth Of Today with their ghetto blasters and hard core pornography.

But if this lets me test my code on Windows before releasing it, and spot and fix stupid errors, then that's a Big Win. I still won't bother fixing any major Windows-only bugs (like Adam says, it's too big a time investment from which I will get no benefit), but the vast majority of bugs are trivial little things and I *will* fix those.