I don't know... sounds like Socialism to me.

Why do you hate America?

Yes, but I read the article, and it says that the 42mpg target is for cars.

Light trucks would have a completely different target (26.2mpg, not much above the current 24mpg)

I suspect the 12mpg trucks would be exempt.

I hope you meant "bigger", you big bugger.

As a European (British, but I consider it a region of Europe), I find it strange that 42mpg seems so draconian.

For the last decade at least, the UK and the rest of Europe has had diesel cars the size of an Accord / Aura / Fusion which could average 42mpg (50mpg Imp.) in mixed driving - at least it was never a problem for me - urban driving reduces the mileage of course.

My Octavia (basically a Jetta liftback with a cheaper badge) averages 45-50mpg (55-60 Imp.) on my 30-mile runs to work; and there's enough room for a 6-footer to be comfortable (more head- and leg-room than a Freelander or a RAV4).

My wife's Renault Clio averages 60mpg (72mpg Imp.) when I drive it, and the driving position doesn't feel cramped.

These are not hybrids, by the way. Even the Freelander and RAV4 can achieve 35mpg with a diesel engine.

Since we're paying the equivalent of $8/gallon for fuel over here, cars like this make a lot of sense.

Have you met our desktop support guys?

Frankly, I'm not that desperate.

In the UK, you won't have the right to use lethal force, because that would be murder.

We have the concept of "reasonable force": shooting somebody in the back as he's running away is not reasonable force, and it's not "protecting yourself".

I think ipc0nfig has a fair point - you could run an date-adjusted infected machine in a VM, isolated inside a virtual network, and monitor any disk/network activity.

Of course, you might not know what'll really happen unless you let it phone home, and even then you might not see what will happen on April 1st; but it might give more clues about which external addresses to block.

will most likely only be used at newer development / building sites

I don't know what this means: my house is about 20 years old - is that new enough?

it warned that such products would initially be more expensive than existing ADSL based land-line broadband services.

Currently, combined broadband & phone packages cost about £25-£30 a month if you want to avoid download caps, so I assume higher bandwidth will cost £40+

At least it may push down the price of up-to-8Mbps services (and later up-to-24Mbps).

Not when you don't have local admin rights.

It's also a system-wide setting.
You can't have a per-user hosts file.

According to the UK site, a Mini with 2GB RAM and 320GB HD will cost £711 when I've added a keyboard + mouse. That's without a display of course.

So around £750-£800, for a machine with about the same spec as the Dell I bought nearly 2 years ago for less than £500.

And it's also getting a bit too close to the price of a 20" iMac (£949 with keyboard + mouse).

Yes, even for Apple, the Mini is erm, reassuringly expensive.

Tradition.

When you can't think of any other reason for doing something, at least you can say "But we've always done it like this."

I've seen this form (usually little-endian) quite a bit, and yes, it was probably to remove ambiguity. When you have underpaid and overworked staff trying to quickly parse the date on an invoice, that seemed to be the clearest way to convey the information without mistakes.

Yes, we do. But we usually write the ordinal form, e.g. "2nd February, 2009". And in speech, there's always an "of" in there: "2nd of February"

It is unlikely that web programmers would write very different versions of the same service to accommodate different browsers;