Blue LEDs are ridiculously over-used. Presumably because they were last to the party manufacturers think they're terribly cool and stick unnecessary ones everywhere, and as you say they disrupt sleep.

Let's start a "Campaign for sensible LED usage" and press for the return of red and green ones (nicely dimmed).

Yes, you might very well be able to get your files back from a flash drive (as I said) but there is also a significant probability that you won't - hence why they're not suitable for the kind of backups you need to rely on.

A copy on a flash drive is not a backup (although it might just save your bacon). Flash drives are far too unreliable for any kind of serious backup strategy.

Unless a backup system is fully automatic, backups simply won't happen.

Well, it's how everywhere used to be - well, almost. There weren't time zones as such, certainly not stepped at 15 minute intervals or anything like it. Everywhere had its own local time, calculated by observation from when the sun was at its zenith, and set on sun dials. Mechanical clocks took their time from that. There was also far less dependence on clock time. To use, 6pm in the summer is the "same time" as 6pm in the winter (ignoring DST issues) but before the imposition of standardised time the view would have been far more that dusk in the summer was the same time as dusk in the winter. Dawn and dusk were just much further apart in the summer.

A bit of a misrepresentation. It would be well nigh impossible to create a timetable without a fixed frame of reference against which to create it. It wasn't that they didn't like it - it was kind of a necessity. True enough though that the railways drove the standardisation of time - at least on land. Standardisation of time at sea was also very important, and must have happened earlier because it's vital for accurate navigation.

And before anyone complains, yes I'm sorry I spelled licence in the English way rather than the American one. Apostrophes however work the same for both the English and the Americans.

Why does one Texas driver have 27.7 million licence records?

High demand caused a slow download? How very 1990s. Haven't Apple heard of BitTorrent?

Adrian Kennard - https://www.revk.uk/ - was that you?

Really? Who are these "most people"? What are they planning to do with this startling performance?

What most people really want is just a stable connection providing reliable performance. As with home broadband, anything above about 40 Mbps is not going to be noticed. For what one actually does with a phone, 10 Mbps is ample.

You mean there's a lot of gaming happens deep underground below Japan?

Surely this isn't a good reason for needing more than one vaccine? Whatever proves to be the best vaccine should be manufactured by all the capable companies. If someone then comes up with a better one, production should switch.

Now it might be that some vaccines turn out to be more effective than others in differing situations, and vice versa - now that's a good reason to need more than one.

Now who does that remind me of?

Several responses to my posting seem to have missed the point. The travel agent didn't say, "Sorry, did you say Brussels or Bristles or Bristol?" which would fit with the hypothesis that she just wanted to check that she'd heard correctly and wasn't booking tickets to a similar sounding place. The words used make it clear that, despite working in a travel agency, she wasn't familiar with Brussels as a destination, had done a bit of research, and wanted to make sure she'd found the right place. You have to be a bit special to live and work in Yorkshire and yet not know where Brussels is.

Of course, once you have to explain humour, it does rather cease to be funny.

Bill Bryson tells of an incident in one of his books where he was living in England and phoned his local travel agent to book a ticket to Brussels. The agent phoned him back a few minutes later to ask, "Would that be the Brussels in Belgium, Mr Bryson?".