I scan the checkout cashiers. I then go for the brightest-looking one. I'm not sure how I do it, but this technique definitely works OK. Some cashiers just look more efficient. Here in the UK, cheques are no longer accepted in supermarkets, so no problem on that score.

Forget the holiday gift. You can't do genealogy quickly. (or do it for next year, or 20 years after that). Ancestry is very useful, but it's not genealogy software - they're much more useful for the information in their databases. But the info in their databases will cover your great grandfather, not your recent relatives.. If you want open source, then GRAMPS is pretty good, but falls flat on large files. It's rather complicated, too. If you want free, then PAF from familysearch.com is OK, but legacy free version is better. If you want to do genealogy seriously, then pay some money. Rootsmagic is way better than all the above, and only costs 30 dollars, worth every cent. Legacy paid version is pretty good too.

This sounds like a great idea for law enforcement. You get all the speeders in the state to self-identify by applying for a speeding licence. Having thus identified them, and forced them all to buy a transponder, you can then track them on those days when they haven't paid their licence fee. In a week, you'd have them all off the road. Sorted.

As the guys concerned say : 'Because we can'. It's the journey there, not the summit reached that they're interested in.

Five trillion = 5,000,000,000,000 The British billion and trillion are dead. They never made much sense anyway. The UK deficit is thankfully, only an 'American' trillion pounds :0) And I say that as a Brit.

The camera with long lens looks like a camera with a long lens. In the panic of war, it might look like an RPG to someone who wants to see an RPG. We know that they were civilians becase we can see what the gunner saw. We can see without a shadow of doubt that the 'ambulance' driver was unarmed. We can see that the wounded photographer was unarmed. We can see the time the bullets took to get to the target, which indicate that, at Gatling gun speeds, the helicopter is about 1km away. We can hear the guy desperate to kill the wounded photographer. We can hear the gunner lying to the base about the shots being fired, about there being more than 1 or 2 armed men, about the ambulance 'picking up bodies' It's not an offence to bear arms in Iraq- all sorts of bodyguards do it. (where have I heard that before?) We can read the lies that the US forces issued the next day. It's a bit more than 'some classified information' It shows that the US forces are a) over-brutalised b) incapable of performing a police action in a busy city.

At 1 pound, that's entirely possible. For a pound, you can buy the paper version. That price covers the raw materials, the printing and overheads, the distribution and the retailer's profit margin. I don't know what the profit margin on a physical paper is (5p?), but it has to be way less than a pound. An electronic version need only cover journalists and overheads. That might be, what, 10p? Making a very fat 90p gross profit. That could well be 20 times the gross profit on a paper version.

In Cusco, Peru, the cathedral has a picture of JC and his mates eating guinea pig for their last supper. Da Vinci obviously got it wrong.